Serpents' teeth, nuns' girdles and the joy of random stuff
Christopher Howse
Published: 12:01AM GMT 04 Nov 2006
Objects for a Kunstkammer, or cabinet of curiosities, belonging to Georg Lave Christopher Howse celebrates the oddball collectors who, throughout history, have accumulated hoards of peculiar, idiosyncratic and fascinating artefacts
''A hat-band made of the sting-ray", reads a typical entry in the catalogue of the cabinet of curiosities collected by the Tradescants, father and son, in the mid 17th century.
Such baroque treasure-stores have been inspiring a top-drawerful of artists in the past three decades. The results of Damien Hirst's fascination with cabinets of curiosities we all know about – his preserved creatures in jars, or, from 1993, a display case filled, not with museum exhibits, but dozens of cigarette ends (entitled Dead Ends Died Out). But as early as the 1930s Joseph Cornell was assembling objects in vitrines – glass cases of the kind used in museums. In 1984, the Tate bought a work by Joseph Beuys, a vitrine containing beeswax, a jar of pork dripping, a pile of lard and a zinc box of mutton tallow.
Something more arresting came from Rosamond Purcell in the 1990s. She produced photographic artworks simply by picking up on such extraordinary exhibits as the teeth from the collection of Tsar Peter the Great arranged in an old display case. The title she chose, Teeth Drawn by Peter the Great, reflected a chilling aspect of his cruel reputation, but it was the image that startled. In 2003 she assembled in her Massachusetts studio two rooms of objects based on the Wunderkammer, or roomful of curiosities, made famous by Olaus Worm, the 17th-century Danish collector.
A successful English artist who at first seems to share much with the 17th-century collectors is Polly Morgan. Her work, made in her east London studio, features stuffed animals. "Kate Moss bought a blue tit lying asleep on a prayer book beneath a glass chandelier," she says. "People who buy from me are used to buying art, not taxidermy. My work might be a modern take on the cabinet of curiosities, but the juxtapositions are quite different."
The name "cabinet of curiosities" suggests a piece of furniture. John Bargrave, a 17th-century collector of everything from medieval seals to the chains of slaves he freed, did house his meticulously annotated hoard in two large, beautifully tailored cabinets, which he left to Canterbury Cathedral, where they can still be seen.
But a piece of furniture was too small for all the bright-plumaged birds, ancient carved gemstones, tropic shells, Roman coins, unicorns' horns and mummified crocodiles of the aristocratic collector. The cabinet became a room of wonders. I suspect these represent in part a secularised version of vast medieval collections of relics, as at St Ursula's, Cologne.
Anyway, from cabinets of curiosities grew more ordered museums. Yet perhaps there is something in human nature that prefers oddness, serendipity, the impact of juxtapositions to regimented display.
The polymath Athanasius Kircher (1602-80) said Noah's Ark was the first museum, and "The Ark" was the name given to the house in bosky South Lambeth where the piratically bearded and ear-ringed gardener John Tradescant and his son John built up an astonishing collection in the 1630s. This "Collection of Rarities" came to boast a grander name, Musaeum Tradescantianum, and formed the heart of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford. The Tradescants' collection was the largest in Europe. Its flavour comes through in their catalogue:
An Arabian vest.
Nunnes penitential Girdles of Haire.
A pair of Scotch gloves wrapt up like a ball.
A Bracelet made of the thighes of Indian flyes.
Edward the Confessors knit gloves.
Divers night-caps made of grasse.
A Sempitan or Trunck wherewith they execute men to death with poysoned Arrowes.
A Hat-band of glasse spun into fine threads.
A Turks travelling bucket.
A little Box with the 12 Apostles in it.
Cloath spun of the downe of yellow feathers.
Variety of Chains, made of the teeth of Serpents.
A Cherry-stone holding 10 dozens of Tortois-shell combs.
A book of all the Stories in the glasse-windowes of Sancta Sophia lim'd in vellum by a Jew.
Flea chains of silver and gold with 300 links a piece and yet but an inch long.
A glasse-horne for anointing kings.
A piece of the Stone of Sarrigo-Castle where Helen of Greece was born.
Blood that rained in the Isle of Wight, attested by Sir Jo: Oglander.
A Turkish tooth-brush.
Poisoned Daggers – 2 waved, 2 plain.
An Umbrella.
In the view of James Putnam of the British Museum, it is the "apparent lack of rational classification, with its bizarre sense of accumulation and juxtaposition" that makes cabinets of curiosities so appealing. This haphazardness led to their dismantling in an age when museums became more "scientific". Only at rare bristling temples of chaos such as the Pitt-Rivers Museum in Oxford can there still be found a coracle hanging on the back of a totem-pole, display cases full of trepanned skulls, and drawers full of charms or teething-coral or things made with hair. This is not a museum of art; it is one huge, complicated work of art.
Alistair McAlpine, one of the greatest omnivorous collectors (who once possessed 900 truncheons), is credited with having revived the notion of cabinets of curiosities as the antithesis of minimalism. This week he is enthusing about marionettes from Mali. In 1981 there was an exhibition at the Bond Street Old Master dealers Colnaghi called Objects for a Wunderkammer, after which Lord McAlpine fuelled interest through his shop in Cork Street in London – and again in 1996 at the auction when he sold it. The skeletons flew like butterflies.
"A cabinet of curiosities is a microcosm," he tells me. "The Tradescants would have something like a Chinese sandal, an ordinary sandal. So now you'd have a Nike trainer. Or, if you were very competitive, a piece of Concorde, or a bit of the moon. There used to be a small piece of the moon in the waiting room at Downing Street. Perhaps someone's nicked it."
To Lord McAlpine, the influence of the cabinet of curiosities today is clear. "Hans Sloane, whose collection formed the nucleus of the British Museum, used to have a newt with two tails in a jar on his desk. Well, that's Damien Hirst."
The man who has bought a lot of curiosities for Damien Hirst is Danny Moynihan, son of the painter Rodrigo. "Those preserved specimens have been incorporated into his work," he tells me. "But he will have a few rooms devoted to these things – skulls, foetuses, body parts – at Toddington." Toddington is the astonishing Gothic pile Hirst has bought, built by an ironmaster's heir, to his own design, in the reign of George IV.
Moynihan, an energetic exhibition curator, can't help buying for himself too. "I'm not trying to simulate 17th-century cabinets, but I do like the eclectic. I buy things in jars, but also African objects and Chinese scholar stones." Those are the interestingly shaped stones regarded as metaphors for landscapes and focuses of meditation.
In his opinion the collectors building up their own cabinets remain few – "odd-ball people like me". But Lord McAlpine sees it as something anyone can do. "You don't have to spend thousands. Art is where you find it. You can pick up an interesting nut from the ground or a piece of branch in a park. You can collect anything. Prisoners collect pubic hairs."
The Edinburgh dealer Emma Hawkins is spoken of by collectors with admiration; her website includes a remarkable wax model of a Hottentot woman. In London a dealer with prosperous customers is Finch & Co. Their aim is "to create the greatest of 21st-century cabinets of curiosities". They offer a 16th-century mummified cat found in a wattle-and-daub wall; the iron floor of a Victorian paper factory cast in a hexagonal maze pattern; a preserved flying-fish; and a 19th-century table made from an elephant's ear.
The possibility of actually living in a cabinet of curiosities was demonstrated by the quirky architect Sir John Soane (1753-1837). From any room in his London house, now a museum, the eye is led through thickets of ancient architectural fragments, culminating in a three-storey fantasia, with an open sarcophagus in the basement and rising tiers of urns, busts, casts and mirrors.
The dealer Christopher Hodsoll turned his own house in Notting Hill into a cabinet of curiosities. He mixed small stuffed animals, old tortoiseshells, large pieces of patinaed minerals, nautical instruments, South Sea shells and walrus tusks with some gargantuan 19th-century furniture. It is no sterile show-space. "He would include broken furniture, and things that were worn," says Lord McAlpine. "He was the first to do the crashed look."
Crashed or not, cabinets of curiosities possess the lasting appeal of depending more on discrimination than money. Collecting can be a fierce lust, and to those of us not converted to a minimalist décor, the notion of a cabinet of curiosities lends a more kindly eye to the jumble amid which we prefer to live.
Curious desirables
The mummified crocodile was the must-have object of a truly princely cabinet of curiosities. Coming from Egypt in their papyrus bandages, they suggested not only the secrets of the pharaohs, but, to baroque neo-Platonists, also the esoteric teachings of the mythic Hermes Trismegistus.
The pleasantly named 17th-century Dane, Olaus Worm, even managed to accommodate a polar bear in the rafters of his Wunderkammer. But the collectors he visited in Naples were just as jealous of the Greenland kayak suspended from his ceiling as he was of their crocodiles. And either would have been bowled over by a Mexican idol.
Ethnological items from around the globe, such as spears or fabulously decorated tunics, capes and waistcoats, made the cabinet a microcosm of mankind’s variousness.
The ancient world was represented by coins, scarabs, fragments of statuary, oil-lamps, incised gemstone seals, urns and votive objects.
From the natural world, anomalous objects were particularly sought. These might lie on the boundaries between animal, mineral and vegetable, as with fossils, corals and fly-trapping amber. Or they could be composite creatures such as mermen or basilisks, or else freaks of nature – animals or even human foetuses, dried or preserved in jars.
No comments:
Post a Comment