The idea came to me after I realized I was being drawn to specific physical objects in the world, most commonly encountered while in museums. I looked back to my time in Europe, when I encountered "Treasure Rooms" at the British Museum and the Wunderkammer--one of the best of its kind--at the Kunsthistorische Museum in Vienna. These rooms were filled with old clocks and mechanisms, astronomical devices, figurines and statues, carved stone and rare jewels, taxidermied animals, alchemical bottles, ancient texts, and so on.
More recently, I've encountered displays on curios cabinets at the Art Institute of Chicago, and once I started looking for them-- like all things we're drawn to--they were everywhere. I found a wunderkammer in a woman's bedroom in the shotgun house where we stayed in New Orleans, this one featuring voodoo and the occult. I found carefully curated shelves at Uncommon Objects, a thrift store in Austin Texas. Nathan handed me the free magazine that comes with the newspaper, and curios cabinets had become en vogue, used for the selling of fine jewellery and perfume. On tumblr, in the art boxes of Joseph Cornell which I encountered in St. Louis, and in contemporary curios pieces by Mark Dion and other artists, the Wunderkammer came to life.
What drew me to the curios cabinet? I think back to a line from Rilke's Ninth Elegy where he talks about what to show the angels:
“So show him some simple thing, refashioned by age after age, till it lives in our hands and eyes as a part of ourselves. Tell him things. He'll stand more astonished: as you did beside the roper in Rome or the potter in Egypt.”
What is the power of physical things? Not just souvenirs that we are drawn to due to some memory or sentimental value of the gift giver imbued into them. I am talking about things we are drawn to for no discernible reason: a coin we pick up off the street, a painting salvaged from a dumpster, seashells we pick out of an entire beach, pictures ripped out of magazines, what is in these physical things we collect and keep?
I thought of the encyclopaedic, the desire to gain knowledge by containing the multiplicities of this world in some way. Perhaps by collecting physical things, we are able to represent the boundaries of our knowledge. But the encyclopaedic is always shadowed by failure: grasping the pieces only points out the whole that we have missed, that is impossible to contain. Still, this drive remains.
Wolfram Koeppe at the Metropolitan Museum of art traces the source of curios rooms to Homer’s description of Achilles shield. He quotes: "It had embossed on its surface the entire history of the world and mankind. Its wondrousness derived from the cumulative effect of diverse subjects and details and from the bringing together in one space apparently dissimilar things."
How might this sense of the Wunderkammer, of this encyclopaedic but fragmentary desire, arise in poetry?
No comments:
Post a Comment