Assignment: Creating a Cabinet of Curiosity (Wunderkammer)

Cabinets of curiosities (also known as Kunstkabinett, Kunstkammer, Wunderkammer, Cabinets of Wonder, and wonder-rooms)

Wunderkammer or cabinets of curiosities, arose in mid-sixteenth-century Europe as repositories for all manner of wondrous and exotic objects. In essence these collections—combining object specimens, diagrams, and illustrations from many disciplines; marking the intersection of science and superstition; and drawing on natural, manmade, and artificial worlds—can be seen as the precursors to museums. Modern terminology would categorize the objects included as belonging to natural history (sometimes faked), geology, ethnography, archaeology, religious or historical relics, works of art (including cabinet paintings and antiquities. And "The Wunderkamer was regarded as a microcosm or theater of the world, and a memory theater. The Wunderkamer conveyed symbolically the patron's control of the world through its indoor, microscopic reproduction. "The Wunderkammer itself was a form of propaganda" Besides the most famous, best documented cabinets of rulers and aristocrats, members of the merchant class and early practitioners of science in Europe in formed collections that were precursors to museums.

Whether we collect fire trucks, civil war items, or Flemish moths, the act of collecting can be an artistic gesture in and of itself. Practices, such as collecting and creating museum narratives of collections and turning spaces into literal or conceptual cabinets of curiosities, into art work is seen with many Artists and projects.

Artists discussed:

John Sloan (architect),

 Herbert Distel's Museum of Drawers; The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles; The Salon De Fleurus in New York; and City Reliquary in Brooklyn; Damion Hirst; Mary Abma; Lyndal Osborne (look up her cabinet of curiosities); Mark Dion, Louise Bourgouis.

WORK:

To present a contemporary interpretation of the traditional cabinet of curiosities, bringing together a diverse unusual and extraordinary objects and phenomena. The works can be many, with subjects ranging from architectural marvels and blueprints for impossible machines to oddities from the animal, vegetable, and mineral worlds, and both include fact or fiction.

Critique Date:  Thursday, March 5