Worlds of wonder
How today’s museums are reinventing traditional cabinets of curiosities for a modern audience
What is the definition of a museum? Is it a place of strange and wonderful objects drawn from a multitude of sources? Or should we think of it as somewhere that knowledge is systemised? Or as an institution devoted to the pleasure of learning and ideas about the world in which we live?
The debate about what a museum is, isn’t, or could be, has raged on for many years.
But many curators and artists have recently found it most fruitful to go back to basics, to what Samuel Quiccheberg (1529-1567), the 16th-century librarian to the Duke of Bavaria and author of Inscriptiones (1565), the first treatise on museums, theorised as “Wunderkammer” – meaning literally, a cabinet of curiosities.
Modern terminology has condensed the word “cabinet” to suggest a display box, typ- ical of some of the objects made by Joseph Cornell, the American artist whose surreal- ist-inflected works were recently featured in Wanderlust, an exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts this summer.
But the original 16th-century French-derived meaning of the word cabinet is a small, or private, room. Quiccheberg collected and carefully classified objects under many headings, ranging from the natural world to the man-made one.
For Quiccheberg, the objects collected in a Wunderkammer were, in themselves, a form of theatre. (The subtitle to his Inscriptiones is Titles of the Most Ample Theatre.)
The objects within one of these cabinets – organic specimens, paintings, armour, books, works of great craft, instru- ments, and much more besides – performed an encyclopedic function by displaying the wonders of the world, but also demon- strated the curiosity and interests of the patron sponsoring.
But precisely how useful is the concept of a Wunderkammer as an organising prin- ciple for today’s museum?
American artist Mark Dion has played with this notion of organisation as a way of drawing our attention to value and the classification of knowledge. Dion orchestrates excavations at sites, including those at a Venetian canal, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Tate’s two London locations, calling them his Rescue Archaeol- ogy Projects.
Generating a wealth of arte- facts – from keys and plastic bottles to bones and broken crockery – Dion’s projects con- stitute their own Wunderkammer, albeit with unusual items for such cabinets. Dion’s Systema Metropolis project at the Natural History Museum in London in 2007, held to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the birth of Carl Linnaeus, a founder of the study of zoology, was an explicit response to how we organise and classify objects.
London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) will include an area called the Cabi- net in its new Europe 1600-1815 galleries, which will see the complete redisplay of the 17th-and 18th-century European art and design collection. The seven galleries, sup- ported by a Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) grant of £4.75m, will open this month.
The Cabinet is the first of three themed activity areas (the other two are the Salon, with plenty of child-friendly activities, and the Masquerade, which includes an inter- active film) that intersect four larger galler- ies that focus on France, Europe and the rest of the world, commerce and luxury, liberty and power. This £12.5m redevelopment is part of the V&A’s FuturePlan project to revamp the museum.
A broader sense of collecting
“Cabinets of curiosity represent the beginnings of how museums organise things and this is our attempt to explain how we do this,” says Lesley Miller, the lead curator of the V&A’s Europe 1600-1815 galleries.
“One of the ways we do this is through an activity table, which charts the highs and lows of being a collector. With its pictures of animals and wonders of the natural world, we hope that people will leave the table to go to look at other objects in the room.”
“The Cabinet is quite a departure for us,” Miller says. Families are very much a target group. “Activity spaces have always tended to be in a separate part of the museum, rather than in the galleries, so this does rep- resent a change of pace,” she says.
Labels are written to engage younger visitors and there is a specially commissioned activity table, cast in bronze with a raised and tactile natural landscape, by artist Alexis Snell. The Cabinet is “chronologically driven”, says Miller, and its title plays on the dual meanings of the word as both a private chamber and an ornamental piece of furni- ture.
It is based on Quiccheberg’s historic text, with its objects following his categories: paintings, busts, rocks and exotica, arms and armour all feature in the room.
But the V&A’s idea to replicate a historical Wunderkammer is not just for the pure joy of putting something like that together, but also to engage with the idea of collecting in a broader sense.
“Collecting is something everyone does – stamps, cards, books, toys. Kids understand what collecting is,” Miller says. “We genuinely want to show how the world can be thought of in different ways and introduce that as an exciting prospect.”
For the Garden Museum in south Lon- don, the concept of a Wunderkammer offers a chance to explore new ways of curating and an opportunity to think about how previous generations understood objects.
“We want to communicate to our visitors what it was that a typical 17th-century visitor found fascinating or mysterious about an object in a Wunderkammer,” says Emily Fuggle, the museum’s collections and pro- ject curator. “It is a chance to get into the mindset of a previous age.”
The museum, in the former church and grounds of St Mary-at-Lambeth, is to under- go a £6.6m redevelopment being financed by the HLF (£3.5m), the Wolfson Foundation and others. The project, due for completion in February 2017, will see the museum create the UK’s first garden archive, two learning rooms and facilities, and a gallery devoted to telling the story of the Tradescants, a father and son who were gardeners, travellers, plant collectors and horticultural experts employed by various patrons in the 17th-century.
The Tradescants built the first public museum in England – which they referred to as an ark – and are buried in the garden of St Mary’s. The epitaph on their tombstone, “A world of wonders in one closet shut,” is a neat summing up of what a Wunderkammer is and was.
A major part of the new gallery will be a partial recreation of the Tradescants’ Ark, the artefacts that 17th-century collector and politician Elias Ashmole (who is also buried at the church) inherited from the Trades- cants and gave to the University of Oxford to found the Ashmolean Museum.
Fuggle says that the Garden Museum is working with the Ashmolean to finalise the 30 or so objects that the London museum will borrow from the Oxford institution. It is likely that carvings, gems, intaglios and a cradle, said to have belonged to the infant Henry VI, will be among the loan items.
“Although the cabinet of curiosities is a popular mode of curating now, what we hope to do is to explain why the objects col- lected and displayed were so interesting in the first place,” Fuggle says.
One such object from the Garden Museum’s collection is the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary. It sounds odd but “it’s a fern from south-east Asia”, Fuggle says. “In the 17th century it was believed to be half-animal, half-vegetable, a creature that grew on a stalk.”
Because its shape is vaguely lamb- like, it was infused with associations with the Garden of Eden and Christian heritage that describes Christ as the Lamb of God.
For Janice Hayes, the collections, heritage and archives manager at the Warrington Museum and Art Gallery, cabinets of curi- osities can resurrect the mysteriousness of objects. She feels that objects are often stripped of their wonder by rigid displays.
Warrington Museum and Art Gallery, which has always had a broad and eclectic collection, reshaped an old natural history gallery to create a cabinet of curiosities in 2014. In it, avian specimens are redisplayed with hand-written labels, as if to indicate the close presence of a curator or collector.
Objects from the collection, such as its 18th-century orrery – a mechanical model of the solar system – sit alongside a newly com- missioned artwork from taxidermic-artist Polly Morgan.
The museum has also revived the Victo- rian practice of honorary curators by bring- ing in small groups from the community to create cabinets from the museum’s collec- tion. Hayes says that next year the museum hopes to work with some young curators from a local college.
These initiatives have had an invigorating effect at Warrington, exemplified by the popularity of the new gallery. Hayes traces the way interpretation has changed over the years, and pinpoints why the Wunderkammer has become such a big attraction in con- temporary curatorship.
“It’s co-curation,” she explains. “Every object invites a personal response – and this is what we do.”
Louise Gray is freelance journalist
The Cabinet section in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s (V&A) Europe 1600-1815 galleries, opening this month, is a departure from the museum’s previous ways of working, according to curator Lesley Miller.
The aim of the Cabinet is to draw in families, independent learners and younger viewers. Simple labels, games, handling objects and an attractive cast-bronze activity table are designed to help this audience think about what collecting and ordering means.
The Cabinet is meant to give a sense of the diversity of the V&A’s collection and the practice of collecting. One display case will feature automata, while others will have small sculptures and portraits.
Another case will display a beautifully carved nautilus shell. The displays have provided opportunities to spotlight items that used to be hidden away.
“One of the key objects that highlights the strangeness of the natural world is a marble and glass ox’s head mounted on a wooden tree trunk,” Miller says.
“Inside the head’s cavity there is an organic mass. It could be a petrified brain or an abnormal growth. We are working with scientists from the Natural History Museum to find out exactly what it is.”
The head was tucked away in the previous V&A display because some of Miller’s colleagues thought it too gruesome to look at. But “we did some road-testing of items with focus groups and the children were very keen on it,” Miller says. “It has great presence.”
The debate about what a museum is, isn’t, or could be, has raged on for many years.
But many curators and artists have recently found it most fruitful to go back to basics, to what Samuel Quiccheberg (1529-1567), the 16th-century librarian to the Duke of Bavaria and author of Inscriptiones (1565), the first treatise on museums, theorised as “Wunderkammer” – meaning literally, a cabinet of curiosities.
Modern terminology has condensed the word “cabinet” to suggest a display box, typ- ical of some of the objects made by Joseph Cornell, the American artist whose surreal- ist-inflected works were recently featured in Wanderlust, an exhibition at London’s Royal Academy of Arts this summer.
But the original 16th-century French-derived meaning of the word cabinet is a small, or private, room. Quiccheberg collected and carefully classified objects under many headings, ranging from the natural world to the man-made one.
For Quiccheberg, the objects collected in a Wunderkammer were, in themselves, a form of theatre. (The subtitle to his Inscriptiones is Titles of the Most Ample Theatre.)
The objects within one of these cabinets – organic specimens, paintings, armour, books, works of great craft, instru- ments, and much more besides – performed an encyclopedic function by displaying the wonders of the world, but also demon- strated the curiosity and interests of the patron sponsoring.
But precisely how useful is the concept of a Wunderkammer as an organising prin- ciple for today’s museum?
American artist Mark Dion has played with this notion of organisation as a way of drawing our attention to value and the classification of knowledge. Dion orchestrates excavations at sites, including those at a Venetian canal, the Museum of Modern Art in New York and Tate’s two London locations, calling them his Rescue Archaeol- ogy Projects.
Generating a wealth of arte- facts – from keys and plastic bottles to bones and broken crockery – Dion’s projects con- stitute their own Wunderkammer, albeit with unusual items for such cabinets. Dion’s Systema Metropolis project at the Natural History Museum in London in 2007, held to celebrate the 300th anniversary of the birth of Carl Linnaeus, a founder of the study of zoology, was an explicit response to how we organise and classify objects.
London’s Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) will include an area called the Cabi- net in its new Europe 1600-1815 galleries, which will see the complete redisplay of the 17th-and 18th-century European art and design collection. The seven galleries, sup- ported by a Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) grant of £4.75m, will open this month.
The Cabinet is the first of three themed activity areas (the other two are the Salon, with plenty of child-friendly activities, and the Masquerade, which includes an inter- active film) that intersect four larger galler- ies that focus on France, Europe and the rest of the world, commerce and luxury, liberty and power. This £12.5m redevelopment is part of the V&A’s FuturePlan project to revamp the museum.
A broader sense of collecting
“Cabinets of curiosity represent the beginnings of how museums organise things and this is our attempt to explain how we do this,” says Lesley Miller, the lead curator of the V&A’s Europe 1600-1815 galleries.
“One of the ways we do this is through an activity table, which charts the highs and lows of being a collector. With its pictures of animals and wonders of the natural world, we hope that people will leave the table to go to look at other objects in the room.”
“The Cabinet is quite a departure for us,” Miller says. Families are very much a target group. “Activity spaces have always tended to be in a separate part of the museum, rather than in the galleries, so this does rep- resent a change of pace,” she says.
Labels are written to engage younger visitors and there is a specially commissioned activity table, cast in bronze with a raised and tactile natural landscape, by artist Alexis Snell. The Cabinet is “chronologically driven”, says Miller, and its title plays on the dual meanings of the word as both a private chamber and an ornamental piece of furni- ture.
It is based on Quiccheberg’s historic text, with its objects following his categories: paintings, busts, rocks and exotica, arms and armour all feature in the room.
But the V&A’s idea to replicate a historical Wunderkammer is not just for the pure joy of putting something like that together, but also to engage with the idea of collecting in a broader sense.
“Collecting is something everyone does – stamps, cards, books, toys. Kids understand what collecting is,” Miller says. “We genuinely want to show how the world can be thought of in different ways and introduce that as an exciting prospect.”
For the Garden Museum in south Lon- don, the concept of a Wunderkammer offers a chance to explore new ways of curating and an opportunity to think about how previous generations understood objects.
“We want to communicate to our visitors what it was that a typical 17th-century visitor found fascinating or mysterious about an object in a Wunderkammer,” says Emily Fuggle, the museum’s collections and pro- ject curator. “It is a chance to get into the mindset of a previous age.”
The museum, in the former church and grounds of St Mary-at-Lambeth, is to under- go a £6.6m redevelopment being financed by the HLF (£3.5m), the Wolfson Foundation and others. The project, due for completion in February 2017, will see the museum create the UK’s first garden archive, two learning rooms and facilities, and a gallery devoted to telling the story of the Tradescants, a father and son who were gardeners, travellers, plant collectors and horticultural experts employed by various patrons in the 17th-century.
The Tradescants built the first public museum in England – which they referred to as an ark – and are buried in the garden of St Mary’s. The epitaph on their tombstone, “A world of wonders in one closet shut,” is a neat summing up of what a Wunderkammer is and was.
A major part of the new gallery will be a partial recreation of the Tradescants’ Ark, the artefacts that 17th-century collector and politician Elias Ashmole (who is also buried at the church) inherited from the Trades- cants and gave to the University of Oxford to found the Ashmolean Museum.
Fuggle says that the Garden Museum is working with the Ashmolean to finalise the 30 or so objects that the London museum will borrow from the Oxford institution. It is likely that carvings, gems, intaglios and a cradle, said to have belonged to the infant Henry VI, will be among the loan items.
“Although the cabinet of curiosities is a popular mode of curating now, what we hope to do is to explain why the objects col- lected and displayed were so interesting in the first place,” Fuggle says.
One such object from the Garden Museum’s collection is the Vegetable Lamb of Tartary. It sounds odd but “it’s a fern from south-east Asia”, Fuggle says. “In the 17th century it was believed to be half-animal, half-vegetable, a creature that grew on a stalk.”
Because its shape is vaguely lamb- like, it was infused with associations with the Garden of Eden and Christian heritage that describes Christ as the Lamb of God.
For Janice Hayes, the collections, heritage and archives manager at the Warrington Museum and Art Gallery, cabinets of curi- osities can resurrect the mysteriousness of objects. She feels that objects are often stripped of their wonder by rigid displays.
Warrington Museum and Art Gallery, which has always had a broad and eclectic collection, reshaped an old natural history gallery to create a cabinet of curiosities in 2014. In it, avian specimens are redisplayed with hand-written labels, as if to indicate the close presence of a curator or collector.
Objects from the collection, such as its 18th-century orrery – a mechanical model of the solar system – sit alongside a newly com- missioned artwork from taxidermic-artist Polly Morgan.
The museum has also revived the Victo- rian practice of honorary curators by bring- ing in small groups from the community to create cabinets from the museum’s collec- tion. Hayes says that next year the museum hopes to work with some young curators from a local college.
These initiatives have had an invigorating effect at Warrington, exemplified by the popularity of the new gallery. Hayes traces the way interpretation has changed over the years, and pinpoints why the Wunderkammer has become such a big attraction in con- temporary curatorship.
“It’s co-curation,” she explains. “Every object invites a personal response – and this is what we do.”
Louise Gray is freelance journalist
Family friendly
The Cabinet section in the Victoria and Albert Museum’s (V&A) Europe 1600-1815 galleries, opening this month, is a departure from the museum’s previous ways of working, according to curator Lesley Miller.
The aim of the Cabinet is to draw in families, independent learners and younger viewers. Simple labels, games, handling objects and an attractive cast-bronze activity table are designed to help this audience think about what collecting and ordering means.
The Cabinet is meant to give a sense of the diversity of the V&A’s collection and the practice of collecting. One display case will feature automata, while others will have small sculptures and portraits.
Another case will display a beautifully carved nautilus shell. The displays have provided opportunities to spotlight items that used to be hidden away.
“One of the key objects that highlights the strangeness of the natural world is a marble and glass ox’s head mounted on a wooden tree trunk,” Miller says.
“Inside the head’s cavity there is an organic mass. It could be a petrified brain or an abnormal growth. We are working with scientists from the Natural History Museum to find out exactly what it is.”
The head was tucked away in the previous V&A display because some of Miller’s colleagues thought it too gruesome to look at. But “we did some road-testing of items with focus groups and the children were very keen on it,” Miller says. “It has great presence.”