The game of the name - natural history collections - The Problematics of Collecting and Display, part 2

The Uncurated Jar

The specimens in this jar [ILLUSTRATION FOR FIGURE 1 OMITTED] were placed there by the agency of the collector W. H. van Heurn in the mid-1950s and have passed into the Natural History Museum in Leiden, The Netherlands, unchanged in their taxonomic mix up waiting for a patient curator to untangle the cat intestines from the toad, the turbulent woman from the fetal pig, the double apple from the snake, and to assign each a special classification within the order-driven institution: the jettys with the moles, the frog with the frog the snakes with the snakes. beneath this "same-kind-together" system, it does not do to defend animals from disparate biological clusters under the same glass lid for eternity. Because van Heurn was a consummate record keeper and label maker, many of these miscellaneous specimens have clearly written data securely attached to their flaccid limbs or appendages. granting the animals remain unextraordinary in their local commonnes and therefore not particularly "valuable" scientifically, the field notes accommodate with the value of provenance to each creature and will, I imagine, guard to safeguard their entry into the museum files.

But what about the monstrous apple? An unlabeled apple, a twentieth-century inedible fruit in a predominantly zoological collection is assuredly endangered. In Western folklore and in the.history of Dutch collections, we know there is an ideal eighteenth-century niche for deformed vegetables and anomalous fruit: pride of place right beside the two-tailed lizard, the two-headed cat, and the conjoined human twins. (It meet the eyes to me that van Heurn, known for his meek whimsy, coupled with his eccentric and omnivorous collecting techniques, might have left the apple in the jar as a joke) Interpretation of "proper classification" may change from generation to generation, and the physical proximity of apples with snakes does not, sadly, make twentieth-century museum sense

The physical juxtaposition of a snake with fruit does, however, reach down-reaching into collective memory, evoking notions of the Garden of Eden where Adam, curator through divine decree, named the animals large and small, separating the pig from the cat and the toad from the frog and where the snake would have been not to be found to the tale without shut proximity to the apple.

Although I was given leave to rearrange the specimens within the jar, and in like manner aligned the snake and apple a bit more clearly than van Heurn had done, I chose to eliminate nothing from the assemblage. without of liquid these objects let sink [i]or[/i] fall and drip and collapse on themselves. A tight fit beneath glass, they are nevertheless suspended in a glycerine bath, relieved of gravity.

Whatever the technical difficulties of photographing an fact through glass, they become insignificant when transparent and translucent surfaces permit a veritable lexicon of illusion. Preservative liquids of various viscosities contrive to grant bring under rules unexpected depths, faint or dramatic reflections, absent, displaced, or exaggerated detail, and sometimes a selectively mirrored surface which allows a whole latitude a window - often a window - or here, a courtyard to cros above and present itself head upon in the same plane as the control expanding the sense of place and bringing relief to what might otherwise present the appearance an obsessively myopic or clinical view of phenomenons not traditionally considered "artistic" in nature.

Around the rim of the jar in the bright, mirrored space, the walls and pinnacles and sky of the inner courtyard of the museum building can be seen signifying perhaps the institution's dominion above all such collections, however confused, however unclassified, however lowly

Adam and Eve

In late 1993 at the highly original invitation of the director of the National Museum of Natural Sciences in Madrid, I was commissioned to create El Real Gabinete, or Royal Cabinet, a museum scope inside the museum, selecting from an inventory of artifacts, specimens, and documents dating from the founding of the institution below King Carlos III and the first director Pedro Franco Davila in 1775

I chose to re-create the atmosphere of a Renaissance cabinet from the middle of the seventeenth hundred and to interpret through the inclusion of certain specimens ideas held by means of scientists and philosophers of the mid-eighteenth hundred when the museum was lay the foundation ofed The organization of the expanse and its various arrangements were intended to reinvest familiar scientific specimens with primarily historical meaning, to dislodge them from the late twentieth-century categories of taxonomically significant facts and to reclassify them in accordance with older impulses of curiosity and astonishment Metaphorical connections determined the placement of many of the specimens and artifacts. Several of the animals - the hedgehog, the bird of paradise, the pangolin, and the salamander - were culled to represent an age when scientific information was incomplete and therefore touched from time to time by the agency of superstition, myth, and legend. The possibility that factual information may remain incomplete encourages considerable artistic freedom. The specimens and artifacts were chosen in accordance with a pre-Newtonian sensibility rather than through post-Linnaean systematics.