An Inventory of Loss
Francis McKee
Item 1: The
Cabinet of Curiosities or the Wunderkammer - even the names seem quaint. Their
air of novelty and amateurism owes everything to the two hundred hundred years
of scorn and condescension poured on them by classification-led curators in
scientifically ordered museums.
In recent years, the wunderkammer has experienced a revival
of fortunes (more in theory than in practice) as art historians and theorists
absorb the influence of Michel Foucault’s The
Order of Things. The book - a best
seller on its initial publication in 1966 - was a key text in the widespread
deconstruction of western power structures in the late sixties. Just as
definitive fractures in the rational, ordered societies of America and Europe
were beginning to appear, Foucault’s analysis of that social order exposed the
foundations and forms that had held it together. The Order of Things was a tombstone for that culture.
In a key passage in the preface to this work, Foucault
recalls the description of a fictional Chinese encyclopedia by Jorge Luis
Borges. In it, animals are divided into categories such as ‘(a) belonging to
the emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f)
fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i)
frenzied,’ etc. For art historians this
passage immediately recalled the incongruities and surreal juxtapositions of
the wunderkammer. In this light, the cabinet of curiosity appeared to offer a
creative model for arranging objects that evaded the rational classificatory
nature of the enlightenment museum.
Item 2: Jonathan
Swift: Gulliver’s Travels: A Scheme for entirely abolishing all Words whatsoever...
For it is plain, that every Word we speak is in some Degree a Diminution of our
Lungs by Corrosion, and consequently contributes to the shortening of our
Lives. An Expedient was therefore offered, that since Words are only Names for Things, it would be more convenient for
all Men to carry about them, such Things
as were necessary to express the particular Business they are to discourse on.
...
invent or lose
Item 1: There is a darker side to the revival of the wunderkammer.
While Foucault admitted to his enjoyment of the exotic Chinese encyclopedia he
also confessed to ‘a certain uneasiness that [he] found hard to shake off’. The
taxonomic process in Borge’s fictions had the power, he argued, ‘to secretly
undermine language...make it impossible to name this and that, because they shatter or tangle common names, because they
destroy...not only the syntax with which we construct sentences but also that
less apparent syntax which causes words and things...to ‘hold together’.’
Item 2: Barbara
M. Stafford: Artful Science: The magical
display cabinet dominating the sanctuary of the back room was organized
according to the principle that, while material phenomena might be made to
correspond, they could not be translated into one another.
Item 3: There is a stubbornness in objects, a resistance to our
need to classify and order. The wunderkammer highlights this quality of
objects, playing off their differences rather than their similarities. Oddly,
while this approach to the arrangement of objects often produces a greater
energy in the display of a collection - a kinetic overload of the senses - it
can also generate a sensation of loss. The very uniqueness of each object
underscores its isolation and categorical distance from other things and from
ourselves. The wunderkammer highlights a dazzling world of strange objects,
each trapped in its’ own dimension, communicating imperfectly with the viewer
of such curiosities.
Item 4: Imagine replacing the precious objects of the 17th-century
wunderkammer with ornaments and souvenirs collected from charity shops. The
substitution of curios for curiosities. Potentially these new objects could
short-circuit the working of the wunderkammer, representing the essential
nature of mass-produced commodities - emblems of similarity. The cheap
second-hand ornaments could also remind us of the universal availability of industrially
produced materials as opposed to the exotic, unique and ultimately expensive
nature of the typical 17th-century curiosity.
Ironically, the nature of these souvenirs works against
them. Each object - often a simplified copy of a more exotic artefact - already
documents a series of losses. The simplification process loses much of the
detail that gave the original its’ power. Equally, the transformation of the
object removes it from its’ original context and the ornament enters the realm
of kitsch, a phenomenon highlighting novelty at the expense of genuine emotion.
Like the wunderkammer, kitsch implies the impossibility of sincere
communication, embodying this loneliness in the object’s design.
Item 5: SeaJay -
From Rocks to Avatars: The Phenomenology of Virtual Objects: The dictionary
defines phenomenology as being the study of phenomena. Phenomena are things as they appear to our experience.
Now, whether you are in a virtual or a material world, you are experiencing the objects around you -
looking at them, picking them up, or otherwise interacting with them.
Interaction with objects, in any world, depends on the
nature of the object. One factor that is significant in what we experience when
interacting with an object, is the object's degree of autonomy.
Item 6: Spencer
Brown - Laws Of Form: The world as we know
it is constructed in order (and this in such a way as to be able) to see
itself. But in order to do so, evidently, it must first cut itself into at
least one state which sees, and at least one other state which is seen. In this
severed and mutilated condition, whatever it sees is only partially itself. We
may take it that the world undoubtedly is itself (i.e. is indistinct from
itself), but, in any attempt to see itself as an object, it must, equally
undoubtedly, act so as to make itself distinct from, and therefore false to,
itself. In this condition it will always partially elude itself.
Item 7: Jonathan
Swift: Gulliver’s Travels: ...many of the
most Learned and Wise adhere to the New Scheme of expressing themselves by Things, which hath only this
Inconvenience attending it, that if a Man's Business be very great, and of
various kinds, he must be obliged in Proportion to carry a greater bundle of Things upon his Back, unless he can
afford one or two strong Servants to attend him. I have often beheld two of
those Sages almost sinking under the Weight of their Packs, like Pedlars among
us; who, when they met in the Streets, would lay down their Loads, open their
Sacks, and hold Conversation for an Hour together; then put up their
Implements, help each other to resume their Burthens, and take their Leave.
vent loss
Item 1: If, as in Tony
Kemplen’s Encyclopaedia Mundi, the
charity shop ornaments are positioned in a new wunderkammer, surveyed by cctv
cameras and the image passed through a series of aging software programmes,
then it is possible to discern one of the shadier sides of the cabinet of
curiosities.
While many of the objects in these collections were rare
and strange, some went beyond the bounds of natural science and fully entered
into the world of art. Given the raw amazement that could still be induced by
the dried body of a crocodile, an ostrich egg or an image of a rhinoceros, it
was not such an imaginative leap to the purchase of a griffin’s claw, a hydra,
dragon or basilisk.
As the charity shop ornaments undergo their own series of
metamorphic transformations it is possible to see the contemporary digital
equivalent of this process. Mutations breed from their source images or objects
and, in the virtual world, new objects take shape, twisting at last into
language - the broken syntax predicted
by Foucault.
Item 2: Ulisse
Aldrovandi: ms, 1579: It is no wonder that
in our age some have been deceived by the miraculous artifice with which these
hydras are faked from other bodies and put together, as they have also done
with the flying dragon - which however does exist in nature - trying to imitate
it by using a species of marine ray, as one can see in my study.
Item 3: It is not enough to point to the sense of loss in this
process of imitation and transformation. The tailoring of monsters or the
breeding of digital mutants may be rooted in a desire to fashion the creatures
in between, the forms that combine all the elements of nature and complete the
collection. They are also, however, rooted in the sheer pleasure of making and
fantasizing such things - the play on evolution and the play on nonsense
language. Even in the 17th century, many of the wunderkammer owners recognised
these creatures as fakes and continued to pay high prices to possess them. It
wasn’t merely because of their novelty value. The creatures celebrate
metamorphosis and that, in the end, is the underlying principle of the cabinet
of curiosity and of nature itself.
Item 4: Paula
Findlen: Inventing Nature: Pierre Belon
described the passion of many people for dragons “made for pleasure such as
those that we see counterfeited with rays disguised in the manner of a flying
serpent.” Conrad Gestner’s complaint in 1558 about fraudulent apothecaries came
in the midst of a lengthy discussion of dragon-making in his History of Animals. In a chapter on
rays, he described in great detail how such monsters were made. “They bend the
body, distort the head and mouth, and cut into and cut away other parts, they
raise up the parts that remain and simulate wings, and invent other parts at
will.”
Item 5: Jonathan
Swift: Gulliver’s Travels: But for short
Conversations a Man may carry Implements in his Pockets and under his Arms,
enough to supply him, and in his House he cannot be at a loss: Therefore the
Room where Company meet who practise this Art, is full of all Things ready at
Hand, requisite to furnish Matter for this kind of artificial Converse.
net
loss
Item 1: Neal
Stephenson: Snowcrash: “Computers speak
machine language,” Hiro says. “It’s written in ones and zeroes - binary code.
At the lowest level, all computers are programmed with strings of ones and
zeroes. When you program in machine language, you are controlling the computer
at its brainstem, the root of its existence. It’s the tongue of Eden. But it’s
very difficult to work in machine language because you go crazy after a while,
working at such a minute level. So a whole Babel of computer languages has been
created for programmers: FORTRAN, BASIC, COBOL, LISP, Pascal, C, PROLOG, FORTH.
You talk to the computer in one of these languages, and a piece of software
called a compiler converts it into machine language. But you never can tell
exactly what the compiler is doing. It doesn’t always come out the way you
want.
Item 3: Words promise to define things but their failure to do so
is inevitable. It is also their saving grace. As objects (ambiguous things in
themselves) evade the possibility of accurate description, misunderstandings
and misapprehensions arise and open up new possibilities. Computers too promise
accurate collection and transcription and fail with equal glory. The world wide
web may be today’s greatest cabinet of curiosities, breeding and mutating
objects, words and ideas on a monstrous scale. Many of its’ artefacts are not
to be trusted but the final lesson of the wunderkammer may be that universal
communication is a much desired impossibility.
Item 3: Jonathan
Swift: Gulliver’s Travels: Another great
Advantage proposed by this Invention, was that it would serve as a Universal
Language to be understood in all civilized Nations, whose Goods and Utensils
are generally of the same kind, or nearly resembling, so that their Uses might
easily be comprehended. And thus Embassadors would be qualified to treat with
foreign Princes or Ministers of State to whose Tongues they were utter
Strangers.
References
Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s
Travels, London: Benjamin Motte, 1726.
Michel Foucault, The
Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, London: Tavistock
Publications, 1970.
Jorge Luis Borges, "The Analytical Language of John
Wilkins”, La Nación, 8 February 1942.
Barbara M. Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment
Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
1994.
SeaJay, ‘From Rocks to Avatars: The Phenomenology of
Virtual Objects’,
http://ourworld.compuserve.com/homepages/charles_langley/771210.htm.
Spencer Brown - Laws
Of Form, citd in http://psycho-ontology.net/phenomenology/.
Ulisse Aldrovandi, ms,
1579, Biblioteca Universitaria, Bologna.
Paula Findlen, ‘Inventing Nature: Commerce, Art, and
Science in the Early Modern Cabinet of Curiosities’, in Merchants & Marvels: Commerce, Science, and Art in Early Modern
Europe, London: Routledge, 2002.
Neal Stephenson, Snowcrash,
London: ROC, 1993.
Francis McKee is a writer and curator working in Glasgow. He is Head of Digital Art and New Media at CCA in Glasgow and is a research lecturer at Glasgow School of Art.