'what, then, to make of objects?'

What, then, to make of objects? In a culture being redefined by the way it consumes, what to make of people who collect things, who keep things? What to make of the personal archives, the private universes, the physical stabs at permanence and immortality that collectors create? ... Why do we keep? 

William L. Hamilton, "Object Lessons: The New Museum Explores Why We Keep Things." NYT 7/14/2016.

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“The Keeper” is an exhibition dedicated to the act of preserving objects, artworks, and images, and to the passions that inspire this undertaking. A reflection on the impulse to save both the most precious and the apparently valueless, it brings together a variety of imaginary museums, personal collections, and unusual assemblages, revealing the devotion with which artists, collectors, scholars, and hoarders have created sanctuaries for endangered images and artifacts. In surveying varied techniques of display, the exhibition also reflects on the function and responsibility of museums within multiple economies of desire.

The New Museum 

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Collections vary in their intentionality; many of us have hundreds of plastic bags stuffed beneath the sink; thousands of casual snapshots dormant in overfull hard-drives. We look happily upon such cached keepsakes even as we consign them to oblivion, sure that someday we will be grateful that we were prepared, that we haven’t forgotten. Museums and archives bear more purposeful gatherings, charting the suppositions that we call science and the mythologies that we dub history in reliquary records and documentary artifacts. Such are the gestures of archives: holding on, making infinite, and striving beyond material mass to reach for answers to the perennial questions of how to remember and how to know.

Nicole Kaack,  "Adding One to Infinity: The Keeper at The New Museum." SFAQ 8/10/2016.

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Truly sad I am not getting to see this exhibit in person; I've been devouring online images and the catalog is on my birthday list.

a paper museum

The Paper Museum of Cassiano del Pozzo:

Cassiano dal Pozzo (1583-1657) was secretary to Cardinal Francesco Barberini, the nephew of Pope Urban VIII, and he played an important role in the cultural life of Baroque Rome. He was a member of one of the earliest scientific academies in Europe, the Accademia dei Lincei, which emphasized direct visual observation as the key to unravelling the mysteries of nature. Over many years Cassiano assembled thousands of drawings and prints recording the natural world as part of his Paper Museum, alongside drawings of antiquities and architecture.

Cassiano did not produce the drawings himself; instead he commissioned artists to make meticulous studies of geological specimens, plants, fruit and vegetables, fungi, birds, fish and other animals, some of which were made with the newly-invented microscope.

Abbey told me about this over lunch yesterday, and I was captivated. Collecting images of actual things isn't so new, after all - the platform has just evolved.

alternative forms of display

 

 

Top: Jane Hammond, Scrapbook. 2003.  © 2010 Jane Hammond.

Bottom: Oeuf hand-crocheted butterflies.

wunderkammer

 

Cabinets of curiosities: kunstkammer, wunderkammer, cabinets of wonder, wonder-rooms. 

I think blogs are digital versions of the same collecting impulse.

From top to bottom:

Domenico Remps, Credenza Curiosa. Mid 1600s.

Domenico Remps, Scarabattolo. Mid 1600s.
Frans Francken, Kuriositatenkabinett. 1636.

Joseph Arnold, Kunstkammer der Regensburger Familie Dimpfel. 1668.

All found here, which is worth a look - the 'museen' section especially.  

mrs. delany

 

 

 

Mary Delany's 'paper mosaicks' - highly accurate botanical portraits in paper collage. She started making them when she was 72, and made nearly a thousand before her eyesight failed ten years later. According to reports, she worked with live specimens as models, and built the images piece by piece, without any preliminary sketches.

From top:

Pancratium maritinum: Sea Daffodil. 1775. Paper collage.

Passiflora laurifolia: bay leaved. 1777. Collage with over 230 paper petals in the bloom. 

Physalis (Winter Cherry). c. 1772 - 1782. Paper collage with skeleton of a physalis pod case.

Crinum Zeylanicum: Asphodel Lily. 1778. Paper collage.

All at the British Museum.

promiscuous assemblage

Promiscuous Assemblage, Friendship and The Order of Things: site specific installations by Jane Wildgoose at the Yale Center for British Art and Sir John Soane's Museum. From the Soane Museum:

 (The installation) is a celebration of the enduring and productive friendship between Mrs. Delany and Margaret Cavendish, second Duchess of Portland. Wildgoose's extravagant cabinet of curiosities evokes the "Promiscuous Assemblage" described in the catalogue that accompanied the sale of the Duchess's "Portland Museum" compiled by the botanist John Lightfoot and published in 1786. This magnificent collection of natural history specimens, fine and decorative arts, as well as curiosities, with which Mary Delany was familiar, was sold in the year following the Duchess's death at a 38-day auction comprising over four thousand lots.

You can flip through the catalog for the Portland Museum sale here.

Margaret Cavendish is completely fascinating - she had an insatiable appetite for knowledge and for collecting. From Wikipedia:

Her home in Buckinghamshire, Bulstrode Hall, provided space to house the results, and her independent fortune meant that cost was no object (on her mother’s death in 1755 she also inherited the estates of Welbeck in Nottinghamshire). Bulstrode was known in court circles as "The Hive" for the intense work done there on the collections by the Duchess and her crack team of botanists, entomologists and ornithologists, headed by herself, Daniel Solander (1736-82, specialising in shells and insects) and The Revd John Lightfoot (1735-88, her librarian and chaplain) - her collection was, unlike many similar contemporary ones, well-curated. 

'The Portland Museum' at Bulstrode, also including a zoo, an aviary and a vast botanic garden, was open to visitors. Many came, scholars, philosophers, scientists and even Royalty, and the collection became a cause celebre. Her fellow collector Horace Walpole commented on it:

Few men have rivalled Margaret Cavendish in the mania of collecting, and perhaps no woman. In an age of great collectors she rivalled the greatest.”

Photo from here.

to split

Onward Into The Future Infinite Friendship necklace. The pendant can be split to be shared by cutting the red thread.

Available here and here.

diatoms

 

    

  

  

 

More from Howard Lynk's Cabinet of Curiosities. The last images are artful arrangements of different diatom species carefully mounted on slides.

specimens

I've spent the better part of the weekend looking through Howard Lynk's collection of Victorian microscope slides.  It is wonderful.

Found through Seed magazine via Erie Basin.

for looking closely

 

 

Microscopes from The Golub Collection. 

From top:

All brass compound microscope. Likely made in northern Italy, c. 1675. 

Turned ivory microscope. Probably made in Italy, c. 1690 - 1700.

Wooden simple microscope. Likely made in Italy, c. 1700 -1725.

Culpeper double-reflecting microscope. Made in England, c. 1735 -1738. Maker: George Culpeper. 

Compound microscope. Made in England,  c. 1785, made by George Adams, Jr., the maker of the famous George III microscope (currently on view at the Yale Center for British Art).

Chevalier Universal Microscope. Made in France, c. 1840. Maker: Charles Chevalier.
White metal compound microscope. Possibly made in France, c. 1900.