wunderkammer

J.G. Heinz Rariteiten kabinet

"Panosophia, identified with the secluded or sociable Renaissance architectural units such as the stanza, casa, casino, guardaroba, studiolo, tribuna, and galeria, also characterised the Janus aspect of eighteenth-century museums. Part alchemical chamber for the covert performance of hermetic rites and part memorial to overt didacticism, the museum was pulled between being a grottolike hideaway, tucked in a scholar's private quarters and a utilitarian and gregarious institution, like the public library. The analogies of these retreats and sanctuaries of the muses to treasury, microcosm, and theater was founded on their shared reliance on spectacle....it was the polymathic collector's three-dimensional encyclopedia of curiosities that catapulted museums into the realm of 'hypervisibility.'"
Pp. 223-225

"The analogy of a the world to a picture also governed the treasury of curiosities. Splashy arrangements turned the repository into a theatrum whose grotesque materials were accumulated in order to be looked at...Crumbling shells, clumps of madrepores, coral branches, miniature busts, Chinese porcelain teapots, small medals, intaglio gems, pottery shards, drawn and engraved portraits, masks, carved ivory, pickled monsters, religious utensils, and multicultural remains cacophonously 'chatted' among themselves and with the spectator. Like shapeless pigment stains or confusing blots, their manifest incompleteness precluded incorporation into a seamless narrative and controlling taxonomy. Delighting the amateur whilst defying the classifier, these collections were anamorphic..."
p.238

"In sum: bereft of labels and shapeless by any classical canon, de Pauli's lithic marginalia were doubly ruinous. Unmoored from a past context, this sea of fragments was incomprehensible and, so, grotesquely modern...Rubbish to systematic collectors of antiquities and natural history specimens, ambiguous curiosities resembled rumors. Being without discernible inscription, such barbaric bits and pieces were illiterate and could only whisper indistinct or garbled messages down the centuries."
p. 251, Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment entertainment and the Eclipse of visual education, MIT Press 1994

see surrealism

"Anyone who has ever read a description of a Wunderkammer, or a cabinet des curiosites, would recognise the folly of locating the origin of the museum there, the utter incompatibility of the Wunderkammer's selection of objects, its system of classification, with our own. This late Renaissance type of collection did not evolve into the modern museum. Rather it was dispersed; its sole relation to present-day collections is that certain of its 'rarities' eventually found their way into our museums (or museum departments) of natural history, of ethnography, of decorative arts, of arms and armor, of history...even in some cases our museums of art."
p. 225, Douglas Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins, MIT Press, 1993

" The control of nature was the goal of the early collecting practice, and was the driving force behind the ordering and cataloguing of objects and artifacts. This is an important consideration in that it makes clear the fact that the collections resulting from this process were founded on an organizational principle, which, although foreign to the modern collector, was dependent on philosophical considerations relevant at the time. In line with this principle, collectors of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries devised strategies which included the systematic categorization of the objects in their possession. In most cases, these objects were recorded and displayed in an organized manner, even if the criteria for organization were at times subjective; differing slightly from one collection to the next. Regardless of their potential variations, the strategies adopted by these collectors enabled them to impose an order on the natural world. ...Tradescant employed an organizational principle based on a classificatory system which differentiated between the wonders of nature, or naturalia, on the one hand, and the works of man, or artificialia, on the other. While this division was typical of the kind employed by his contemporaries, the further classification of objects was generally dependent on the individual intentions of the collector involved. In Tradescant's case, objects placed into the first category, that of naturalia, were further classified into sub-categories consisting of the three primary orders of nature (animal, plant, and mineral) as then defined. Objects placed into the second category, that of artificialia, were further classified by type, often loosely defined. Of particular interest to the modern historian is the fact that Tradescant made it clear that little priority was attached, by the collector himself, to one form of evidence over another, whether it be natural or artificial, real or imaginary. Within the encyclopaedic context, all forms of data held equal weight when considered as parts of the whole of knowledge, and, as the Tradescant catalogue illustrated, the bounds of the encyclopaedic enterprise could be extended to include objects both of myth and of reality."
The Tradescant Collection

"A Norway house, built of beams without mortar or stone; shoes and sandals from Russia, Siam and Egypt; the skin of a man dressed as parchment; a drinking cup of the skull of a Moor killed in the beleaguering of Haerlem; warlike arms used in China; Chinese Songs, Chinese paper, Chinese books, and a great many other articles from China; Egyptian mummies and Egyptian idols; several Roman coins; a Roman lamp which burns always under ground and another which burned eternally; an hand of a Meermaide presented by Prince Mauritz; a mushroom above 100 years old, which grew on the banks of the Haerlemer river; a petrified toad-stool; a box of very large amber presented by Daniel Beckler; a thunderbolt given by Melchior de Moncheson and a mallet or hammer that the savages in New Yorke kill with, (...). In the 17th century, this bizarre collection made up part of the Chiefest Rarities in the Publick Theater and Anatomie-Hall of the University of Leyden, according to Museums, a brilliant study written in 1904 by the Englishman David Murray. There was also the skeleton of an ass upon which sat a woman that killed her daughter; the ske-leton of a man, sitting upon an ox, executed for stealing cattle; a young thief hanged, being the Bridegroom whose Bride stood under the gallows, very curiously set up in his ligaments." (quoted in David Murray, Daniel J Sherman & Iri Trogoff "Museums / Museum Culture")

The medieval philosopher Hugh of St. Victor (1096-1141) reminded his readers that the significance of things will always be more important than significance of words; "The philosopher knows only the significance of words, but the significance of things is is far more excellent than that of words, because the latter was established by usage, but Nature dictated the former. The latter is the voice of man, the former the voice of God speaking to man. The latter, once uttered, perishes; the former, once created, subsists." (quoted p. 88, Albert Borgmann, Holding on to Reality: The nature of information at the turn of the millenium

" Most important. they [mirror worlds or virtual worlds] are microcosms -- intricate worlds come alive in small packages. Whether in the shape of a Victorian winter garden, an electric train layout, a Josepth Cornell shadow-box or a mere three-inch plastic dome with snowflakes softly settling inside, microcosms are intriguing. They show you patterns and help you make discoveries that you'd never have come across otherwise. ...they are thought-tools of great power and evocativeness."
Gelernter, David, Mirror Worlds (see all 181-184)

"In contrast to the souvenir, the collection offers example rather than sample, metaphor rathe than metonymy. The collection does not displace attention to the past; rather, the past is at the service of the collection, for whereas the souvenirs lends authenticity to the past, the past lends authenticity to the collection. The collection seeks a form of self-enclosure which is possible because of its ahistoricism. The collection replaces history with clasification, with order beyond the realm of temporality. In the collection, time is not something to be restored to an origin; rather, all time is made similtaneous or synchronous within the collection's world."
Susan Stwart, On Longing, p. 151

Walczak, Marek and Martin Wattenberg, 'WonderWalker (A Global Online Wunderkammer)' 2000
http://www.walkerart.org/gallery9/wunderkammer/ -- WonderWalker, a project commissioned by Gallery 9/Walker Art Center, is an open-ended, self-oganizing collection of the Internet.

An 1833 entry in Ralph Waldo Emerson's journal records one nineteenth-century viewer's reaction to a natural history exhibit. Still known as a "cabinet," the Jardin des Plantes in Paris elicited this from an American tourist in Europe: I carried my ticket . . . to the Cabinet of Natural History in the Garden of Plants. How much finer things are in composition than alone. 'Tis wise in man to make Cabinets. When I was come into the Ornithological Chambers, I wished I had come only there. The fancy-coloured vests of these elegant beings make me as pensive as the hues & forms of a cabinet of shells, formerly. It is a beautiful collection & makes the visitor as calm & genial as a bridegroom. The limits of the possible are enlarged, & the real is stranger than the imaginary. . . . Ah said I this is philanthropy, wisdom, taste--to form a Cabinet of natural history. Many students were there with grammar & note book & a class of boys with their tutor from some school. Here we are impressed with the inexhaustible riches of nature. The Universe is a more amazing puzzle than ever as you glance along this bewildering series of animated forms--the hazy butterflies, the carved shells, the birds, beasts, fishes, insects, snakes--& the upheaving principle of life everywhere. . . . I am moved by strange sympathies, I say continually "I will be a naturalist."
THE NATURALIZED HISTORY MUSEUM, Tim Lenoir & Cheri Ross

"Panosophia, identified with the secluded or sociable Renaissance architectural units such as the stanza, casa, casino, guardaroba, studiolo, tribuna, and galeria, also characterised the Janus aspect of eighteenth-century museums. Part alchemical chamber for the covert performance of hermetic rites and part memorial to overt didacticism, the museum was pulled between being a grottolike hideaway, tucked in a scholar's private quarters and a utilitarian and gregarious institution, like the public library. The analogies of these retreats and sanctuaries of the muses to treasury, microcosm, and theater was founded on their shared reliance on spectacle....it was the polymathic collector's three-dimensional encyclopedia of curiosities that catapulted museums into the realm of 'hypervisibility.'"
Pp. 223-225

"The analogy of a the world to a picture also governed the treasury of curiosities. Splashy arrangements turned the repository into a theatrum whose grotesque materials were accumulated in order to be looked at...Crumbling shells, clumps of madrepores, coral branches, miniature busts, Chinese porcelain teapots, small medals, intaglio gems, pottery shards, drawn and engraved portraits, masks, carved ivory, pickled monsters, religious utensils, and multicultural remains cacophonously 'chatted' among themselves and with the spectator. Like shapeless pigment stains or confusing blots, their manifest incompleteness precluded incorporation into a seamless narrative and controlling taxonomy. Delighting the amateur whilst defying the classifier, these collections were anamorphic..."
p.238

"In sum: bereft of labels and shapeless by any classical canon, de Pauli's lithic marginalia were doubly ruinous. Unmoored from a past context, this sea of fragments was incomprehensible and, so, grotesquely modern...Rubbish to systematic collectors of antiquities and natural history specimens, ambiguous curiosities resembled rumors. Being without discernible inscription, such barbaric bits and pieces were illiterate and could only whisper indistinct or garbled messages down the centuries."
p. 251, Barbara Maria Stafford, Artful Science: Enlightenment entertainment and the Eclipse of visual education, MIT Press 1994

see surrealism

also:

"Anyone who has ever read a description of a Wunderkammer, or a cabinet des curiosites, would recognise the folly of locating the origin of the museum there, the utter incompatibility of the Wunderkammer's selection of objects, its system of classification, with our own. This late Renaissance type of collection did not evolve into the modern museum. Rather it was dispersed; its sole relation to present-day collections is that certain of its 'rarities' eventually found their way into our museums (or museum departments) of natural history, of ethnography, of decorative arts, of arms and armor, of history...even in some cases our museums of art."
p. 225, Douglas Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins, MIT Press, 1993

"There is, however, a less complex way but far more effective means by which MOMA imposes a partisan view of the objects in its possession. This is the rigid division of modern art practices into separate departments within the institution. By distributing the work of the avant-garde to various departments -- Painting and Sculpture, Drawings, Prints and Illustrated Books, Architecture and Design, Photography, and Film -- that is, by stringently enforcing what appears to a natural parceling of objects according to medium, MOMA automatically constructs a formalist history of modernism. Because of this simple and seemingly neutral fact, the museum goer can have no sense of the significance of, to give just one example, Rodchenko's abandonment of painting in favor of photography...this history cannot be articulated because of the consignment of Rodchenko's various works to different fiefdoms within the museum."
p. 265, Douglas Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins

"The word 'museum' designated, among the ancients, an establishment where scholars of different fields lived together at leisure and in common communication to cultivate the sciences. Such as institute was that of Ptolemy of Alexandria, the model of today's learned societies and academies. Along with the king's residence and a great library there was an extensive apartment building for the learned society's members, a large assembly hall, colonnades and gardens."
p. 277 Wolzgen, Aus Shinkels Nachless quoted in Douglas Crimp, On the Museum's Ruins, p. 323