Creative Process Journal: The Cabinet of Curiosities for Fashion

The Cabinet of Curiosities at the Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty Exhibition at the Met
(Photo by Ingrid Mida 2011)

Most museums today offer an aesthetic of pristine perfection. This connoisseurship bias rejects anything showing signs of use (the sweat or stains of life on a dress for example) or items that are broken or damaged. Order, perfection and education seem to be the guiding principles of museum presentations today, leaving little room for imagination and wonder.

This is quite unlike the idea of the Wunderkammer or Cabinet of Curiosities that were popular in the 15th to 19th centuries (see my previous post). These rooms or cabinets were packed full of objects meant to inspire delight and wonder at the juxtaposition of rare and unusual objects. The aesthetic of dense accumulation of objects is rarely seen anymore although I can think of one museum where it still exists (The Redpath Museum on the campus of McGill University in Montreal).

The Concise Dictionary of Dress, Blythe House 2010
Photo by Julian Abrams

Artists and designers often accumulate a range of objects in their studio for use in the background of their still-life works or as a source of inspiration. Some have used such objects in their artworks and the idea of the cabinet of curiosities has been used as a concept of presentation within a number of exhibitions of fashion and art. The ones that come to mind include: The Viktor and Rolf Retrospective at the Barbican Gallery in London (2008), The Enchanted Palace at Kensington Palace in London (2010), The Concise Dictionary of Dress at Blythe House in London (2010), and Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York (2011). In each case,  objects of fashion, such as dolls or accessories, were presented in a type of cabinet or room and inspired a sense of surreal delight. Using the concept of the cabinet of curiosities, I intend to create a museum in a box so to speak for this creative project.

Creative Process Journal: Doll Houses and Wunderkammer

The Doll's House of Peronella Oortman c. 1686-1710
Inspiration for Viktor and Rolf's doll house

Another interesting aspect of the Viktor and Rolf 2008 retrospective at the Barbican Gallery was a 6-metre high doll's house which could be viewed from three different levels of the gallery. The giant Viktor and Rolf doll house references the seventeenth century cabinet houses or doll's houses from the collection of  the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, where Viktor and Rolf live and work. Designed by Siebe Tettero, the Viktor and Rolf dollhouse, was three storeys, with each room containing one or more dolls dressed in a Viktor and Rolf creation.

The concept of Viktor and Rolf's doll house reminds me of a cabinet of curiosities, or what was once known as the Wunderkammer.

Wunderkammer of Ferrante Imperato, Naples 1599

As a predecessor to the contemporary museum, the Wunderkammer differed widely from the clinical, purist aesthetic common in museums today. Celebrating curiosity and wonder, the Wunderkammer was popular during the 16th to 18th centuries.  Based on the idea that "an entire cosmos could be controlled within the confines of a room", an individual would present their collection of rare and unusual objects therein. The intent was to invoke a sense of wonder and stimulate creative thought. Objects were arranged to highlight aesthetic pleasure and sometimes optical illusions were created through mirrors and special lenses as a way of further distorting reality. The notion of the bizarre, the rare and the precious was celebrated with a sense of capricious lack of rational classification.

The Cabinet of Curiosities played with the same concept but on a smaller scale, generally confined to a cabinet which revealed the collection as drawers and panels were opened. According to Walter Benjamin, the notion of collecting is a form of memory in that "Every passion borders on the chaotic, but the collector's passion borders on the chaos of memories." (from Das Passagen-Werk, Volume 1 quoted in Putnam 12).

Museum by Joseph Cornell c1944-48

Many artists have also been inspired by the idea of Wunderkammer, using assemblage and bricolage to create collections of objects that provoke or inspire through their dialectical juxtaposition. In 1944-48, Joseph Cornell created an assemblage of objects called Museum which was presented in a red velvet lined box which emphasized the delicate contents of the glass specimen bottles contained therein.  More recently, artists like Andy Warhol (Raid the Icebox 1970), Jeffrey Vallance (The Travelling Nixon Museum 1991) Damien Hirst (Dead Ends Died Out, Explored, 1993), Fred Wilson (The Museum Mixed Metaphors, 1993), Sophie Calle (The Wedding Dress, 1999), and others have explored the concept of the museum as a medium of artistic expression.

Raid the Icebox by Andy Warhol, Museum of Art, Rode Island School of Design, 1970

I want to play with the concept of the curiosity cabinet or the more contemporary version of a museum in a box fascinating and use this form in some way as part of my creative project. How that will come together at this point, I'm not sure, but the concept  of containing memory in a box fills me with wonder.

References:

Evans, Caroline. The House of Viktor & Rolf. Ed. Susannah Frankel, et al. New York: Merrell, 2008.

Putnam, James.  Art and Artifact, The Museum as Medium. London: Thames and Hudson, 2009.