Mixed Forms of Visual Culture

From the Cabinet of Curiosities to Digital Diversity

Mary Anne Francis

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350211391
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Kunst
• Subtopic: Kunst Allgemein

This book celebrates and seeks to understand the overlooked appearances of hybrid forms in visual culture; artefacts and practices that meld or interweave incongruous elements in innovative ways. And with an emphasis on the material aspects of such entities, the book adopts the term 'mixed form' for them. Focusing on key phenomena in the last half millennium such as the cabinet of curiosities, the broadside ballad and the chapbook as early forms of image-text, the scrapbook, assemblage, and, in digital times, so-called 'mixed reality, ' the book argues that while the quality of inconsistency is traditionally dismissed, its expression nevertheless plays a vital role in social life. Crucially, Mixed Forms of Visual Culture relates its phenomena to the emergence of the division of labour under capitalism and addresses the shifting relationships between art and life, when singularity and uniformity are variously valued and dismissed in the two arenas, and at different points in history. Two of the book's chapters take the form of visual essays, with one comprising an anthology of found scrapbook pages and the other offering an analysis of artists' scrapbooks. The book is richly illustrated throughout.

1

The Cabinet of Curiosities as Mixed Form: Depictions and Desire

Words and things

At the start of this address to the history of mixed forms stands – strikingly – the cabinet of curiosities. And if that needs a definition, notwithstanding recently revived interest in the form (Lasser 2014; Moore 2013), it may be described as a Renaissance, curatorial structure that comprises a display of dizzyingly diverse objects. But then again, this history is headed by competing terminology and related phenomena. The cabinet of curiosities was also known by its German name, (the) Wunderkammer, as too, if far less frequently, the Dutch term, rariteitenkabinet. And while these terms function as synonyms, if in different languages, they also point to different aspects of their object, which is thereby variously the site of curiosity, of wonder and of rarities. (When the latter is a qualitative description of the form’s components, it is perhaps one cause of ‘curiosity’ and ‘wonder’, as the form’s declared affects.) So, appropriately enough, at the origin of mixed form as represented by the Wunderkammer, is a mixture. This is not just lexical. The cabinet of curiosities – especially in its German form – was also identified with seemingly more specialized forms such as the Schatzkammer (treasure chamber), and the Kunstkammer/Kunstschrank. And if, in the latter case, the ‘art chamber’ would seem to point to a specialist collection, then that is both confirmed and disputed by the phenomena so-named. Many a Kunstkammer is a cabinet of curiosities or Wunderkammer in all but name, as the Habsburg’s collection in Vienna demonstrates today. So this story of mixed form is, at source, associated with a mixture, or a mix-up in relationships between words and things.

Three kinds of curiosity

This mixture of meanings is at work, too, when it comes to defining what constitutes a curiosity for the cabinet. First, the cabinet’s artefacts are ‘curious’ (and also ‘rare’) for their audience when they derive from exotic, unknown lands; those of the ‘New World’ beyond Western Europe, that were being prospected from the mid-fifteenth century onwards by explorers such as Amerigo Vespucci and Christopher Columbus, and which furnished cabinet staples such as the crocodile, the flying fish and the tortoise-shell. Second, the cabinet’s components are otherwise ‘exotic’ and hence curious, in presenting the edges of the everyday; extremities of kind or type. Here, examples include ‘giant’s’ bones, and in the cabinet of Ferdinando Cospi (Figure 1.9) a living dwarf who acted as a guardian (Bertucci 2016: 150); deformities (‘a man with only two fingers on each hand’ (Carrier 1987: 83)); and oddities such as the mandible of a horse embedded in a tree-root (Nicholls 2013). And third: there are improbabilities as curiosities – such as mechanical ‘devils’ that heckle the viewer,¹ and of course, the unicorn, for which a narwhal’s tusk often did metonymic if mendacious service.² I am proposing that the first kind of rarity comprises the cabinet’s conceptual core; that the second follows as its domestic extension, and the third is a legacy from earlier, religious culture in which the marvellous, and indeed, relics, also had a role.

The origin of the cabinet in the Age of Discovery

‘The story of the Wunderkammer, as narrated by cultural historians, takes the shape of a bell curve – a period of emergence and effervescence from the mid-sixteenth century to the late seventeenth century, followed by a gradual decline at the dawn of the “Age of Enlightenment” ’ – so writes the Latin American scholar Jerónimo Arellano (Arellano 2010: 377). One such historian would be Eliza West, who specifies the narrower period 1560 to 1660 when ‘collecting was in vogue amongst respected European men’ (West 2014: 76). And here is Marx referring, in Capital, to ‘the great revolutions, which took place in commerce with the geographical discoveries’ of ‘world-markets’, which ‘speeded up the development of merchant’s capital’. Marx notes in particular ‘the competitive zeal of the European nations to possess themselves of the products of Asia and the treasures of America’ and proposes that the ‘great revolutions’ constituted ‘one of the principal elements in furthering the transition from feudal to capitalist mode of production’ in ‘the 16th and 17th centuries’ (Marx [1894] 1999d). As Arellano also remarks ‘[t]he collection and display of particular objects as wonders or marvels, then, remains intrinsically linked to forms of colonial expropriation and appropriation’ (Arellano 2010: 372). But the quote from Marx proposes that the ‘link’ that Arellano mentions can be understood in starker terms, producing the Wunderkammer as a symptom of mercantile capital.

Certainly, the latter shapes the Wunderkammer in a range of ways. Most basically, it furnishes the Wunderkammer’s contents: ‘beads, tusks, coins, feathers, archaeological artifacts … gathered from across the Americas, as well as objects arriving from the East’ – this is Arellano quoting Silvia Spitta (Arellano 2010: 372). At the time, this was a wealth of things. More diffusely, and profoundly, a ‘capitalist mode of production’ valorizes the Wunderkammer’s interest in worldly goods, and vice versa. The Wunderkammer speaks of a relation to the world in which stuff matters, and does so variously. First: objects confer status on their owners, who accrue social and cultural capital; second: things enable knowledge (of the physical world) when knowledge is another kind of power. For as much as the Wunderkammer’s items were collected for effect – to impress, and to be marvelled at – they also formed the basis of enquiry, often in the service of new knowledge that would enable further exploitation of the object-world; the capitalist project. (One such instance of a scholar’s Wunderkammer is Ole Worm’s – discussed below.)

So much for the Wunderkammer’s origins – or some of them – as issues of political economy. Next, I consider the way in which the cabinet serves as a starting point for this account of mixed form culture.

A history of mixed form: the cabinet of curiosities as origin

Arguably the first demonstrative example of ‘mixed form’ in Western secular culture, the cabinet nevertheless has a sacred precursor of sorts in the ‘reliquary chest’ which displayed collections of religious relics (MacGregor 2007: 3). Beyond the sacred, it also had a kind of precedent in the early Renaissance scrittorio which refers to a room, rather than a piece of furniture, which in one example, comprised ‘astrolabes, and musical instruments, books and writing materials, as well as arms and armour’ (MacGregor 2007: 13). But in the breadth of its contents, the cabinet of curiosities was unparalleled. Further, the cabinet of curiosities is also visibly significant because it was recorded in pictorial – print – form. Developed in the fifteenth century, the copper engraving process enabled images of cabinets to circulate beyond the latter’s immediate audiences, permitting records to survive when the referents had long since disappeared.

Diversity of contents – and in curating

But so far, I have emphasized the cabinet as a set of contents, and in doing so, am cued by many commentators both present-day and contemporaneous. Take for instance, the following description from 1638 of the first cabinet open to the public in the UK, which was known as the ‘Ark’, by a German visitor, Georg Christoph Stirn:

In the museum of Mr. John Trade...