Hop the Sixteenth - Of Polymaths and Collectors

Nhora Lucia Serrano, Leonardo da Vinci - Collector and Curio

In 2006 Grande Exhibitions created a travelling exhibit focussed on Leonardo da Vinci, composed mostly of his paintings, anotomical drawing and notebooks, which continues to tour today. Using large images, and replicas of his famous inventions, this attempts to look back to the earlier form of the wunderkammer in which all can enjoy the power of this great mind. The focus on the artist is for the viewer's benefit, leaving the status of the artist in little doubt and using physical recreations, and presents the past in terms of the present moment, thus privileging the spectator.

But these models are recreations. What are the implications of this? They are created by Italian craftsmen, to scale, with the materials and techniques available to da Vinci at the time. Some are truely lifelike, some are smaller or larger than life, suggesting that the gaze is crucial to the success of this exhibition. It positions Grande Exhibitions as a curator of a personality, and the persona of da Vinci becomes the focus, making Leonardo himself the curio, rather than just his inventions.

His notebooks are scattered around the world, but some have suggested that they should not be fragemented for all this. They were never intended to have a linear narrative, but are expressions of a curiosity towards the world. They can be seen as a paper and textual cabinet of curiosities, and da Vinci seems a kind of collector. His juxtapositions are often haphazard, positioning anatomical drawings together with machines. He disects man along with machines, suggesting a comparison between the two.

Hence, the recreations of Grande Exhibitions do not need to be seen as loosing that 'aura,' which Benjamin considered a feature of the reproduction. Benjamin puts forward the idea of the 'sacred' aura of object, which is lost through mechanical, mass, reproduction. But can this reproduction be seen as a kind of curiosity itself? I suppose it all depends upon the way in which it is interpreted, presented and located in terms of its position with the other occupants of its space.

Grande Exhibitions also present other exhibitions, such as Planet Shark. Being fascinated by all these different subjects, are they unconsciously producing a cabinet themselves? How do we look at this - through Berger's concept of the specator's gaze, or Derrida's notion of the framing and framed. Any understanding of an object really is determined by the way in which it is presented, and we are always caught between the framer and the framed. What is within and without the frame, and the frame itself, are all equally important in the interpretation of the object. Thus, in this Derridian, Benjaminian cabinet which Grande Exhibitions creates, the viewer is overwhelmed by all these frames all at once. But it is all reconstruction - perhaps what they are suggesting is that there is already a sense of loss in the display of any artwork, genuine or not. Grande Exhibitions, through its reinforcing of interactivity, and the technology of the modern world, showcases that frame in a consciously ironic manner. Are their audience conscious of this irony, I wonder?

What, then, is genuine? This paper even questions what the nature of the museum actually is - for this is a museum exhibition which is not a museum exhibition. I suppose authenticity depends upon the definition of the word, how the objects are displayed, and the multiplicity of meaning which are ascribed to things. But perhaps there is no such thing as the 'genuine article' - perhaps everything becomes simply a trace of something already lost, perceived by a privileged viewer.

Hop the Eleventh - Of Theatres and Carbolic Soap

Stephanie Bowry, Bodies of Memory: The Use of Architectural Space in Understanding Medical History at the Old Operating Theatre, Museum and Herb Garret, London

St Thomas' Church in Southwark, a small Baroque church, houses a secret hidden for almost a century. In 1956, the remains of what is possibly the oldest operating theatre and herb garret in the country was unearthed, reconstructed and opened as a museum in 1962. It is an eccentric space, a space with Built in 1821, it was shut up in 1862. Now a museum, it represents the astonishing survival of an emergency room which existed prior to the emergency of antiseptic and aseptic medicine. But why build it in a Church?

The Hospital of St Thomas had assisted the poorest members of the community as a charitable institution since the twelfth century. It's appropriation of a church space created a private space in which pain could be hidden. Architecture, and its space, can be interpreted in a number of ways - semiotics and phenomenology, for instance, shows how it has a huge storytelling potential. How is this sense of the power of architectural space coveyed in the museum?

In it's almost Soanian, tactile displays, archaic cabinets, it creates a feeling of time arrested, which make you want to linger. They are a stark contrast to the modern 'space age charnel house' of the Huntarian and Wellcome collections. Rather than these spaces, which display bodies and objects, the Old Operating Theatre evokes through absence, through lacunae, and it's task is not to create a narrative or follow an overall display 'strategy,' but to create a sense of place. Objects may be labelled, or not at all. Micro narratives, therefore, can operate in an almost encylopeadic manner. There is a small collection of human remains - they are displayed centrally, but respectfully, as objects of reverence. Traumatic instruments of obstetrics are displayed in darkness, and they would have been as disturbing to their original perceivers and users as they are to us today. This situated knowledge, then comes from a multitude of paths.

The positioning of the museum is also crucial, and in Bachelardian terms its hidden, attic location emphasises its fragility and ephemerality. When the museum was temporarily moved to the crypt in 2006, the meaning of the space changed significantly. In the operating theatre itself, a great contrast is drawn between its restored starkness and the object heavy character of the Herb Garret. But human traces can be found - sometimes within the fabric of the building itself. The blood which seeped from the operations into the floor insulation, and the marks of human teeth the the physician's stick...all these speak of a life now lost. And the space is also used today, for theatrical performances and contemporary art are able to give it a life, albeit one somewhat different from that which it originally had. Sometimes, as Eric Fong's installation showed in 2001, these can create interpretation through absence.

The real skill of this museum lies in its ability of the objects to speak to the senses themselves, an ideosyncratic display which speaks to memory and embodiment? What is the old operating theatre - a skeleton in the closet, a psychological attic...but it is also so much more. Spaces are powerful - they can create worlds for us, worlds which are present, worlds which are present only as trace, worlds not present at all. The Old Operating Theatre is ambiguous - a physical artefact which speaks to us of the past, in its very presentness, evoking through a strange kind of physicality, things which are not there.

Hop the Tenth - In which we open a box of marvels

David Berry, 'A Purse Made of Pins by a Lunatic': Curiosities in the Ashmolean Museum

In the Ashmolean Museum, there lie the remains of a real collection of curiosities - 'A purse made of pins by a lunatic', the 'Robe of the King of Virginia' and a mermaid's hand amongst others. Displayed in the 'Exploring the Past' gallery of the new redevelopment, these objects speak of a museum and mode of collection long gone - or so it would seem. For the very fact of their presentation in the museum of today accords them a particular relevance. What is this relevance? How do these objects, strange, marginal and dubious as they are, speak to the visitor today? And what is their position in the newly redisplayed galleries?

The Ark of the Tradescants, a collection opened to the public, displayed items collected from all over the world to all walks of life. Threatened by the deaths of the men of the Tradescant family, the collection passed to the lawyer Elias Ashmole, who entered into negotiations with the University of Oxford. The Ashmolean Museum, a space also of scientific investigation, which approached the idea of Bacon's New Atlantis, opened in the presence of the king in the April of 1683. Though it contained a laboratory and a School of Natural History, it's educative value was heavily debated at the time - those members of the university who followed the tennet that text was all denigrated it as a 'knick-knackery.'

Yet this knick-knackery has created particular kinds of objects. One of the most iconic figures is, of course, the Oxford Dodo, the most complete surviving example of such a bird in existence, but which was destroyed bar its foot and head when it became too degraded to retain. This object has been used for scientific research, but also as poetic inspiration for Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. And this object, of course, was transfered to the University Museum of Natural History - so why is its story still relevant, and told, in the Ashmolean of the present?

Curious artefacts have a particular way of speaking. Trying to lay them out in a preset way often becomes a problem when we begin to deal with the speaking qualities of these objects. They demand their own kind of presence. But of course, our interaction with, and interpretation of, these items has changed over time. No longer seen as scientific specimens as much as objects which tell a story of an institution, its changes and its histories, illustrations of mutating understandings of objects and modes of display, old and strange curiosities occupy a very special, and powerful place within the museum, particularly in the odd, palimpsestual, old-new creature which is the Ashmolean.