Mark Dion's installations

 

 

What distinguished cabinets of curiosity, the precursors of today's museums, was the juxtaposition of disparate specimens to show their variety. American artist Mark Dion achieves just that in his installations. The New York Times speaks of "the curious mix of obsession and emotion on display." Sometimes Dion centers on an individual, like American naturalists William Bartram (1739-1823) or Alexander Wilson (1766–1813). He has the enviable privilege of combing through the specimens in storage (1st image) and assembling them into triumphant visual displays of natural history objects in hand-built cabinets. "Appropriating archaeological and other scientific methods of collecting, ordering, and exhibiting objects, Dion creates works that question the distinctions between 'objective' ('rational') scientific methods and 'subjective' ('irrational') influences. The artist’s spectacular and often fantastical curiosity cabinets, modeled on Wunderkabinetts of the sixteenth century, exalt atypical orderings of objects and specimens," reads his bio from the Art 21 series on PBS. While his work has graced art museums and galleries (2nd image, a preparatory drawing for his 1999 piece at the Museum of Modern Art) around the world in group and solo exhibitions, it is his assemblages specific to individual science and natural history museums* - some of them installed permanently - that I find particularly compelling. Sibella Court comments that the process is as important as the finished piece. Dion himself writes: "By critically analyzing the master narratives and techniques of display employed by the institution, I can discern the ideology embedded in them. Being critical may also be just another way to love these museums." Mark Dion has delivered many lectures and received numerous awards. Read more about his work here.

*Here is a partial list:

Musée Océanographique, Monaco
Springhornhof Institute of Neolithic Archeology, Germany 
Natural History Museum, England (3rd image)
Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature,France
Historisches Museum, Germany
Fabric Workshop and Museum, United States
Musée Gassendi and la Reserve Geologique de Haute Provence, France
University of Tokyo Museum, Japan
National Railway Museum, England 

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Previous posts about museums:

Darwin's drawers

The museum that wasn't

Stringsavers

"Through the Weeping Glass"

Mütter movie

Wet specimens

Science center weddings

Library of Human Imagination

Adventurers Club

Museum behind the Scenes

Madame Tussaud

Kunstkammer

Funeral museums

My museum

The Museum of Osteology

Worm and Wallace

I am far from the only one to be inspired by the idea of the cabinet of curiosities. Photographer Rosamond Purcell works out of a studio of curiosities and artist Lisa Wood beckons you in to see hers. In artist James G. Mundie's Cabinet of Curiosities, he displays his drawings of the wondrous specimens in the world's medical museums. Entrepreneur and inventor Jay Walker has filled his Library of Human Imagination with treasures as I have surrounded myself in a small way in my own "museum." In fact, the cabinet of curiosity was a precursor of the museum and brought together in an eclectic collection the wonders of the world. It was first a room in which these natural history specimens were arranged and later a cupboard in which they were stored, exhibited, and organized. In introducing his travelogue of 11 historic cabinets still in existence, antiques dealer G. Keith Funston, Jr., enumerates the guidelines that the collectors of earlier centuries followed: 1) Be broad in your collecting, 2) Use symmetry where you can in your display, and 3) Heighten the magic of your presentation by juxtaposing unlike objects for dramatic effect. The most familiar example of the walk-in cabinet is the array of everything from Old World fossils to New World artifacts that appeared as the engraved frontispiece (1st image) of a posthumously published catalog. The collector was a Danish physician and scholar with the memorable name of Ole Worm (1588-1655), which is not pronounced [Olə Vorm] like it looks, and which he often substituted with the Latinized form Olaus Wormius. Worm (2nd image) listed the assembled objects and mused about their meanings in his Museum Wormianum.

British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) was collecting his own specimens in the U.K., Brazil, and Indonesia 200 years later and curating them in wooden cabinets. The dramatic effect as the drawers were opened was in the repetition of the beetles and butterflies, in addition to the variety of creatures and organic curios - which also included moths, shells, flies, bees, praying mantises, tarantulas, seedpods, a hornet's nest, and a small bird. It was the good luck of Washington, D.C., attorney Robert Heggestad to have come into possession of Wallace's only known personal collection still in its original housing - though neither he nor the antiques dealer knew this in 1979 when the rosewood cabinet changed hands for a negotiated price of $600. It was only 5 years ago that Heggestad began researching the provenance of the 1,700-item collection contained within the 26 drawers. He painstakingly referenced the exotic specimens to Wallace's expeditions and the handwriting to Wallace's letters. Heggestad's work was authenticated, and he has loaned the cabinet of curiosity to New York's American Museum of Natural History and the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. I told this story in July 2010 in 2 parts: when I 1st read about it (Cabinet of Alfred Russel Wallace) and again when Mr. Heggestad got in touch with me (A second look at Wallace's cabinet). Happily, he has contacted me again to inform me of a recent short video by the National Science Foundation (click here, scroll down), which explains the importance of the cabinet and its collector - and the man who made the connection!

Library of Human Imagination

Being a lover of books, I was oohing and aahing over the libraries in this list of the 20 most beautiful on Oddee.com. All of the libraries but one are institutional: the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; Trinity College Library, Dublin; Rijkmuseum Library, Amsterdam. But one pair of photos was captioned "Jay Walker's Private Library." Who was this Jay Walker?, I wondered. He is, as it turns out, a man who values ideas and has had many of his own. He holds more than 200 patents and founded and chairs Walker Digital, which dreams up new ways for businesses to operate and serve customers, including the innovations behind Priceline.com. This has made him a billionaire and given him the resources to build his Library of Human Imagination at his home in Ridgefield, Connecticut. It is not an accumulation of rare first editions, but instead his own 3-story, 3,600-square-foot cabinet of curiosities. His treasures - which he likes to juxtapose to make mind-expanding connections (like a 16th c. map with a modern map that was carried to the moon and back) - include:

• A trilobite, a clutch of dinosaur eggs, and a raptor skeleton
  
• A box of prosthetic eyeballs
• An original Sputnik 1 satellite
• The first English translation of the Bible and the first book to include illustrations of surgery on humans
• Part of a meteorite
• A globe of the moon signed by 9 of the 12 astronauts who walked on it
• A 1943 napkin on which Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882-1945) outlined his plan to win World War II

The library was built in 2002 and is open to groups and guests by special invitation. It features Escher-styled wood tiling, bridges panelled with glass etched by Clyde Lynds, and a custom soundtrack. "It's an engagement space," says Walker, who gets excited about things that changed the way people think. Here is a video of him illustrating the concept. Members of his own think tank often meet there. Lucky!

Rosamond Purcell

Rosamond Purcell is one of my favorite photographers. She does much of her work in museums, including the Mutter Museum and the Kunstkammer and has collaborated on books with F. Gonzalez-Crussi and Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002). She is drawn to desiccated objects, as she explains in an interview on NPR, and her studio is her own cabinet of curiosities.

Big book, little book

A few years ago, when I was researching anthropodermic books for a course called "Technologies of the Text," I dreamt of a book that I asked to see at a used bookstore. It took two men to position it on a low table and turn the pages for me, because it was about 7' tall. I had no idea such a thing really existed! But soon afterward I happened upon a photograph of a man standing next to a book that was taller than he was. The image has not surfaced on the web, but photos of the similarly-sized Bhutan serve the purpose. And being a girl of extremes, I then went in search of the smallest book in the world and chose among the many candidates. The largest book I own is Albertus Seba's Cabinet of Natural Curiosities, which is sometimes heavier than I can lift and lives periodically on my dictionary stand (since I can consult the OED online). In fact, I'm resigned to reading books on stands any more - they try to fall out of my hands no matter their size, and the pages get harder and harder to turn without wrinkling...