Professional Documents
Culture Documents
The Wunder and Kunstkammers, or ‘wonder’ and ‘art cabinets’ flourished in Europe
between the 16th and 18th century, representing the ordering principles of their
times and societies, the drive towards catagorization and what we recognize now as
pre-scientifism that is both familiar to us for what these collections would evolve
into, and faintly ridiculous, perhaps naive, for the assumptions, beliefs and doxa
they encode. Originally private collections of objects that, for a variety of reasons,
were considered significant for their literal and allegorical possibilities, the
kammern could be dedicated cabinets but their collections were as likely to fill
entire rooms, floors and, later, buildings with their extensive holdings, the better to
demonstrate the reach and power of the collection’s owner.
However, the kammern were more than merely passive receptacles of exotica: as a
broadly pan-European practice, they would come to stand for world-ordering
schemata and their evolution both drives and reflects concomitant changes in the
major scientific discourses during their period of activity.
These cabinets, from their conception, were designed to engage in two separate
discourses: the first, most obviously, concerned the kammern as a concrete example
of the power of the collector over the material world. In many cases, the larger
collections of royalty and nobility which would in turn become the foundations of
the major European museums, functioned as exhibitions of their owners’ wealth,
political power and military might evidenced in the wealth and range of goods on
display. The second discourse – more important for us today - concerned the ability
of the collector, and thus the collection, to catalogue nature and the natural world.
As attempts to gather as diverse a collection of representative objects as possible,
these examples of “… innate human curiosity represented a bridge in time leading
back to, or beyond, the blissful state of knowledge that had existed prior to the Fall
of humanity’s primeval ancestors” (Bredkamp, 40). By placing diverse collections of
objects together in order for them to be encountered in this, often overwhelming,
fashion, “there is a ‘staging’ that occurs that transforms them from the accidental to
the intentional” (Cleary, 122) and it was this which made possible an observation of
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links between objects, the better for humanity to reacquire its lost prelapsarian
wisdom.
Changes in concepts of history necessarily led to changes in the manner with which
the natural world would be collected, catalogued and understood.
The second purpose of the kammern was to demonstrate visibly the power of the
collector over the visible and invisible world. “For emperors and nobility, active
participation in research and the processing of materials […] meant clear evidence
of their absolute rule, emphasizing not only their representative dignity but also –
and in particular – their active control of the outside world”. (Bredkamp, 53)
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The kammern therefore represent the articulation of power over knowledge, both in
the manner with which individual sovereignty is confirmed by owning a kammern
with objects from one’s terrestrial holdings, but also because the evolving structures
of categorization enacted by collectors within their kammern would govern the
manner with which the sciences, in particular, would emerge in their contemporary
forms.
The first kammern were loose collections of objects gathered and held with no
attempt at an organizational logic beyond the demonstration of the power of the
collector to have obtained them. Indeed, the prehistory of the kammern reaches
back to collections of exotic objects held by wealthy Romans, Greeks and
Babylonians, amongst others.
Yet, by the mid-18th century, shifts in discourse as evidenced above with reference
to Kant and Linneaus were replicated in the manner with which collectors began to
organize, standardize and catalogue their collections. No longer could the unicorn’s
horn sit comfortably against the fossil, the unpolished precious stone against the
exotic pottery. Instead, the focus became on the ways in which the collection might
be utilized to demonstrate the historicization of nature and of humanity as a part of
this wider historical scope. Indeed, this desire had been a part of the kammern
collections for some time – although for different ends. Thus ancient sculpture –
which were, in the 16th century, often categorized as fossils because, like fossils,
they were usually extracted from the earth, were equally considered to be the
products of human agency and of nature. This would allow them to be compared to
contemporary sculpture, either to show that modern work is the superior of the
ancients or to demonstrate the opposite, depending on the view of the collector.
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The development of historicizing discourses over the period, reaching their zenith in
the mid-18th century, is similarly replicated in the general trend to organize these
collections into categories whose logic
The Kunstkammern of Francesco I de’Medici, which grew and size and status
between 1540 and 1740, and the guide to collecting written by Samuel Quiccheberg,
published in 1565, both functioned as models of how the division of the collection
into categories might serve multiple ends. Together they offered the following
divisions:
The ruler and his realm, which linked God’s plan for human salvation with the
actions of the kammern’s owner and benefactor.
Arts and crafts, moving from ancient to modern, local to exotic.
The three kingdoms of nature; animal, vegetable and mineral
Technology and anthropology, including toys, surgical, musical and writing
instruments, costumes and jewellery.
A final section dedicated to panel painting, including oils, watercolours,
engravings and tapestries.
Bredkamp notes that these divisions are, to contemporary eyes, unbalanced in that
the divide attention between sections that celebrate the ruler and his holdings and
those which place humanity in a wider spiritual context, descriptions of current
practices and those which seek to explore the evolution of practices, the description
of nature and moments where an attempt to demonstrate change within nature is
evidenced. Their function is split between competing discourses and ideologies,
which is what makes them so useful as a way of marking the transition from the
earlier kammern towards the singular focus of the modern museum.
Later kammern would start to apply different hierarchies in their ordering. The
collection of Archduke Ferdinand of the Tyrol, started in 1573, included a series of
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buildings whose holdings worked to demonstrate the myriad ways in which natural
objects might be transformed via art and technology, with the wider collection
organized roughly around the contemporary understanding of the historical periods
from which the objects came, in order to better demonstrate the superiority of the
more modern works. The Prague kunstkammer of Emperor Rudolf II, started in the
early 17th century, rearranged the order of earlier collections to place naturalia first,
followed by artificialia (or arts and crafts) next, with scientifica (instruments of the
sciences) last. Exotica, previously a category of its own, was now woven through the
other categories so that where, once, this category might have demonstrated the
wish or ability to subjugate those others to the European ideal, the integration of
this category demonstrates the early signs of a form of ethnology and anthropology
that was more humane in its desire to understand the breadth of the human
species.
In fits and starts, as the discourses surrounding the ways in which the Europeans
might understand the world and their place within it evolved towards their modern
forms, so too did the categorization of natural and artificial objects in the kunst and
wunderkammern evolve to reflect this shifting understanding. In the same way, as
these collections became gradually available to wider populations, through
invitation, then public exhibition, so too did they contribute to revisions of thought
and understanding. Kant’s expansion of Pliny occurs because the discourses around
the relationship of time to nature are changing, and these changes are visible in the
ways in which the arbiters of these great collections of objects begin to adjust their
categories and orderings. Thus these discursive shifts are not without precedent;
they demonstrate the ways in which the relationship between the emerging fields of
scientific, anthropological and museological practice both reflect and influence the
wider engagements with thought. The earliest kammern might have served as mere
spectacles of power and influence, but the later collections would become, in many
cases, the foundations of the great museums and the bedrock upon which
contemporary thinking might evolve.
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For the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the infant, prior to the acquisition of
language, moves towards subjectivity as it encounters its specular image, either in a
mirror or reflected in the actions of its caregivers. As he explains in his 1949 essay
***, this image, always more coherent and cohesive than the infant feels internally,
is the site of aggressive identification, from which a sense of self emerges in the act
of self-recognition and against which the infant will, forever more, assess itself. The
specular image is the fantasy of the subject-yet-to-be; however the infant is not free
to decide upon the constitution of its own imaginary. The imaginary, central to our
subjectivities, is structured and governed by the manner with which it overlaps and
intersects the symbolic. Lacan writes that:
Symbols in fact envelop the life of man in a network so total that they join
together, before he comes into the world, those who are going to engender
him … (Ecrits, 68)
It’s only from the moment of entrance of the subject into an order which preexists
to all that happens to him [sic], events, satisfactions, disappointments, that all in
which he approaches his experience […] falls into an order, is articulated, takes its
meaning, and can be analyzed. (Le Seminar IV, 102)
We can therefore see that Lacan’s “symbolic order […] denotes the domain where
symbols are used, or, to put it more strongly, the fact that one can only express
oneself symbolically. (Silhol, ‘But What is the Symbolic Order’).
Thus the child is born into the social setting which will provide the template for its
development and subjectivity and, within these pre-existing networks, come to an
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identity that it believes is singular and unique but which emerges as a result of the
interaction of those elements that surround and prefigure it. This then is the
paradox of Lacan’s model of subjectivity insofar as it renders teleology moot with
the notion that the imaginary register - the site of the secular image of primary
identification - is structured prior to the advent of the infant by the symbolic, which
the infant will not access until it surrenders the possibilities of the imaginary before
the paternal metaphor and gains, as a result, both language and entry into the
symbolic fold. Yet there is a logic at work here: the imaginary is structured,
governed and contained by the symbolic and it is through the imaginary that the
infant reaches the possibilities of exteriority (communication with others, for
example) made possible by the symbolic.
The interrelationship of the imaginary and the symbolic is clear at this moment,
once the infant is inserted into the circuit in order to illustrate it. But what is also
clear is that the image the infant encounters is the one that will best reflect it,
according to the requirements of the symbolic that surrounds and renders the
imaginary possible. So the imaginary both precedes and prefigures the symbolic
and the possibilities of the imaginary will be those that are most in accord with the
requirements of the symbolic register at that place and time. This enormously
intricate, inter-connected field, within which the individual comes to subjectivity
and through which it is connected, via language, to other individuals, pre-exists our
entry into it and might therefore seem natural, immutable, inevitable. Yet it is both
more accurate to consider the existence of multiple symbolic registers and to
equally consider the manner with which any given symbolic register will alter over
time, rendering possible and adjusting to shifts in desire and satisfaction.
The truth of the Museum is part of the contemporary symbolic register with,
perhaps, the concept of the museum as the master signifier that anchors this
particular chain of signification. Yet the truth of the museum, as we recognize it
today, had to emerge over time to become the stable location of meaning that it
currently is. And we might equally acknowledge the return of the kammern as an
organizing principle for a wide range of contemporary exhibitions and collections,
from organizations as diverse as the Museum of Modern Art with their 2008
exhibition ‘Wunderkammer: A Century of Curiosities’ and the University of North
Carolina’s 2014 exhibition ‘From Wunderkammer to Museum: 1565–1865’, itself
organized as a wunderkammer. Mark Dion’s Tate Museum exhibition, ‘Digging the
Thames’ (1999) was an exhibition of material dug from the banks of the Thames and
arranged in a non-linear, ahistorical fashion within a large wooden cabinet and a
series of wooden chests. The exhibition’s catalogue notes that “The lack of historical
categorisation suggests a subversion of standard museological practice. Viewers are
free to create their own associations, to trace histories across time, not necessarily
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Bredkamp, H. (1995). The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine: The
Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology (A. Brown, Trans).
Markus Wiener Publishers, Princeton.
Cleary, S. (2014). The Nature of Things: Reinterpreting the Still Life Genre in the
Twenty First Century (unpublished doctoral dissertation). RMIT University,
Melbourne, Australia.
Putnam, J. (2001). Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium. Thames & Hudson,
London.
Sax, B. (2013). Imaginary Animals: The Monstrous, the Wondrous and the Human.
Reaktion Books, London.
Tate. (2017, July 31) ‘Digging the Thames with Mark Dion’. Retrieved from
http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/dion-tate-thames-dig-t07669/digging-thames-
mark-dion