The Problem

First, the collecting of a most perfect and general library, wherein whosoever the wit of man hath heretofore committed to books of worth… may be made contributory to your wisdom. Next, a specious, wonderful garden, wherein whatsoever plant the sun of divers climate, or the earth out of divers moulds, either by wild or by the culture of man brought forth, may be … set and cherished: this garden to be built about with rooms to stable in all rare beasts and to cage in all rare birds; with two lakes adjoining, the one of fresh water the other of salt, for like variety of fishes. And so you may have in small compass a model of the universal nature made private. The third, a goodly, huge cabinet, wherein whatsoever the hand of man by exquisite art or engine has made rare in stuff, form or motion; whatsoever singularity, chance, and the shuffle of things hath produced; whatsoever Nature has wrought in things that want life and may be kept; shall be sorted and concluded. The fourth such a still-house, so furnished with mills, instruments, furnaces, and vessels as may be a place fit for a philosopher’s stone.

Francis Bacon, Gesta Grayorum (1594)

What exactly belongs in a kunstkammer? Directly translated, it means “Cabinet of Art,” but what distinguishes it from the “Cabinet of Wonder,” the wunderkammer? How about from the theatrum sapientiae, the Schatzenkammer, the Raritätenkammer or even the museum (note 1)? Countless studies have attempted to analyze kunstkammer objects and their inhabited spaces in hopes of finding common organizational structures amongst collections – whether pragmatic, symbolic, or philosophical – which may provide hint of an entelechy. And though individual collections may exhibit – or at least proclaim to follow – a guiding principle, their actual components were no less ambiguous. For instance, though Samuel Quicchelberg’s treatise Inscriptiones (1565) details in a painstaking manner how artifacts should be grouped, Quicchelberg advocates near the end that “objects should, in accordance with their nature, be most broadly accessible by being most extensively distributed into these divisions” (note 2).

Objects themselves often transgressed the borders between various categories, defying absolute interpretation; what may belong in the naturalia section of one collection may very well be in the artificialia of another. As scholar Martin Kemp has pointed out, any discrete categorization rarely typifies the true value of each object (note 3). How, then, are we to read these objects?

Daston and Park offer that these objects should be read as complex and ambiguous investigations between art and nature (note 4), and Kemp elaborates that "The motive power behind these plural migrations is the conscious and continual redrawing of the boundary between the artifice of nature and the artifice of the human agent" (note 5).

Yet there are so many juxtapositions at play within each object that it would be foolish to view them vis-à-vis the lens of art versus nature. Instead, this exhibition seeks to demonstrate that each object traverses along the spectra of a variety of "plural migrations” (note 6). The multitude of readings elicited by the objects and the captive exchanges – within and without – truly exemplify “play, with its tension, its mirth, and its fun” (note 7).

Notes:

note 1. See Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park. Wonders and the Order of Nature, 1150-1750. (New York: Zone Books, 1998), 265.

note 2. Samuel Quicchelberg, The First Treatise on Museums Samuel Quiccheberg’s Inscriptiones, 1565, trans. Mark A. Meadow and Bruce Robertson. (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2014), 30.

note 3. Martin Kemp, “‘Wrought by No Artist’s Hand’: The Natural, the Artificial, the Exotic, and the Scientific in Some Artifacts from the Renaissance,” in Art, science, and witchcraft in early modern Holland: Jacques de Gheyn II (1565-1629), ed. Claudia Swan, (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 179-180.

note 4. Daston and Park, Wonders and the Order of Nature, 255-301.

note 5. Kemp, "Wrought by No Artist’s Hand," 181.

note 6. For Kemp’s enumeration of these “poles,” see "Wrought by No Artist’s Hand," 181.

note 7. Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture, (New York: Roy Publishers, 1950), 3.