Wonder in Contemporary Artistic Practice

Christian Mieves, Irene Brown

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317517924
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: History of Contemporary Art

Wonder has an established link to the history and philosophy of science. However, there is little acknowledgement of the relationship between the visual arts and wonder. This book presents a new perspective on this overlooked connection, allowing a unique insight into the role of wonder in contemporary visual practice. Artists, curators and art theorists give accounts of their approach to wonder through the use of materials, objects and ways of exhibiting. These accounts not only raise issues of a particular relevance to the way in which we encounter our reality today but ask to what extent artists utilize the function of wonder purposely in their work.

PART I
Taxonomy, Structures and Identities

1 Archives of Wonder

Collecting the Liminal in Contemporary Art

Tiffany Shafran

In his essay for the 2002 Biennale of Sydney catalogue, curator Richard Grayson asserts, “Our idea of an objective world is a shared hypothesis”.¹ This statement encapsulates the underlying tension that lies at the heart of this chapter: the collective desire for a given order that governs and explains the world in which we live (which is knowable, factual and consistent) and the reality that such a structure is an imposed proposition and is therefore subjective, contingent and constructed. It is in essence a fiction.² However, the fact that this structure is a fiction is not to be lamented. Instead it opens up a discursive space in which a personal and collective relationship to the world can be explored. The collection is one such platform³ in which the discursive relationships between things, ideas, images and objects (natural and man-made, found and constructed) are examined. As a modality of knowledge-making shared by institutions and individuals, science and art, the collection represents a world in miniature. In this microcosm, taxonomy is applied and narrative is constructed, in part to satisfy the desire for order and control, and ultimately as a mirror that defines the subject who is collecting.⁴

Conventionally, our sense of shared identity, that is, an individual’s sense of connection with a cultural or societal group mediated by beliefs and traditions, is reflected through the predominant and familiar ontologies constructed by the classification structures of public institutions, such as museums, libraries and bureaucracies.⁵ These institutions simultaneously exist as collections of and for the peoples and societies in which they are positioned. Such organizations selectively preserve and interpret cultural and natural materials within an authoritative system of history and memory that effectively shapes what becomes public knowledge. Material that sits outside of the canon of knowledge or the specific story the institution is telling is hidden in deep storage. Through omission, a unified hegemonic narrative as knowledge is reinforced.

But knowledge in the Digital Age has been democratized through technological advancements such as the computer and the Internet.⁶ Digitized archival documents, translations of obscure texts and out-of-print books are disseminated freely online. Search engines such as Google provide access to information previously difficult to find, while social media creates a network in which individuals can narrate their own histories and manufacture personas within a public sphere.

Ironically, such a multiplicity of voices simultaneously increases the diversity of knowledge available, making it harder to discern what is important. ‘The more we know, the less we wonder’.⁷ If this assumption is true, as Lorraine Daston examines in her article, ‘Wonder and the Ends of Inquiry’, then what is the relevance of wonder in our age of transitional and temporal technological experiences? In what ways is wonder articulated and investigated in contemporary art? Finally, why is wonder important to a particular group of artists who undertake an archive-based practice?

This chapter will discuss the artworks of three twenty-first-century artists who create archives that bring to light what is arbitrary, hidden and overlooked within the contemporary world: Taryn Simon, Tacita Dean and Susan Hiller. To do so, they use the structures and modalities of knowledge-making (the photograph as evidence, the document as data and the archive as organizational logic) to investigate those things that exist outside the canon of history and science. These works open up, as Charles Merewether puts it in his introduction to the book, The Archive: Documents of Contemporary Art, a ‘world beyond empirical, or manifest order of knowledge’.⁸ They explore alternative knowledge, counter memory and liminal encounters. I suggest that these artists do not set out to reference the Wunderkammer. Instead, each of their practices reflects a systematic approach to collecting and archiving that references the language and methodology of scientific inquiry. However, owing to the hidden and marginal things they include in their individual artworks, I posit that these artists do evoke a sense of wonder through similarities with the Wunderkammer’s material and organizational methodologies.

In order to reposition works by Simon, Dean and Hiller within the sphere of wonder, the shifting condition and site of wonder must first be discussed and key traits identified, so that an understanding of how the archive can convey a sense of wonder may be established. In this chapter, the idea of wonder will be discussed in three sections. In the first, Wonder as Passion, Wonder as Material, the emotive and material aspects of wonder, both historically and within contemporary culture, will be discussed providing the basis for unpacking the practices of Simon, Dean and Hiller. The second section will examine archives within contemporary practice as Sites of Wonder, focusing on specific strategies that highlight affinities with the early modern and postmodern Wunderkammer, while also examining departures from such practices. These strategies of wonder will then be compared to the archival practices of Simon, Dean and Hiller, in the third section Resonant Wonders.

Wonder as Passion, Wonder as Material

Wonder is both a passion and an object, a verb and a noun: wonder and wonders. In his work of 1642, The Passions of the Soul, René Descartes defined wonder as ‘a sudden surprise of the soul which makes it tend to consider attentively those objects which seem to it rare and extraordinary’.⁹ For Descartes, the personal experience of wonder was a shock revelation, an emotional response in the face of a singularity, piquing the senses and a desire for careful study. Inhabiting the liminal and shifting boundary between what is known and unknown, what is objective and subjective, wonder is aroused by both visual and textual experiences. It heightens an ability to feel as well as think.

Daston and Park argue that during the medieval and early modern period wonder was recognized as, ‘a cognitive passion, as much about knowing as about feeling. To register wonder was to register a breached boundary, a classification subverted’.¹⁰ As such, the boundaries and classifications observed within the form and function of ‘typical’ natural phenomena created a narrative ‘order of nature’ constructed by Divine will. Marvels ruptured this order, highlighting the diversity and capriciousness of Creation. Wondrous tales of monstrous births and accounts of exotic lands evoked collective terror, curiosity and ecstatic revelation about the world. Conversely, wondrous objects such as unicorn’s horns, carved cherrystones depicting hosts of angels, and marvels from the New World¹¹ when collected and displayed en masse within the Wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities, created a spectacle in which terror, curiosity and revelation could be relived through the discovery of new items and the relationships between them.

The material manifestation of wonder, which began as primarily textual in the medieval period, developed a distinct romantic style in accounts such as Marco Polo’s Book of Marvels of the World (c1300) and John Mandeville’s The Travels of Sir John Mandeville (c1356), which portray the world-as-wonder. The poetic aesthetic of these travelogues, constructed through the incongruous descriptions of marvels, metaphorically and allegorically blurred conventional boundaries.¹² Such language created a heightened sense of wonder and pleasure, an aesthetic that was adopted by the visual language of the Wunderkammer.¹³

By containing the world within architectural spaces, these collections represented a ‘[M]icrocosm or Compendium of all rare strange things’.¹⁴ This phrase, inscribed above the door of French physician Pierre Borel’s (1620–1671) cabinet of curiosities, encapsulates the specific project of the early modern cabinet. Such cabinets were actual rooms filled with marvels. Within such an environment, the spectacle of display surrounded the viewer; wonders adorned all surfaces, what couldn’t be placed on shelves was suspended from ceilings. This strategy of visual poetics was designed to enhance the heterogeneity of collected objects, contrasting the rare and unusual ‘singularities’, both natural (naturalia) and man-made (artificialia), through juxtaposition. The organizational logic of the cabinet avoided hierarchy, favouring instead aesthetic and associative connections that gave primacy to the marvelousness of the visual experience. Within the theatrum mundi¹⁵ of the Wunderkammer, this experience could be perpetually relived through the pleasure of looking at the multiple relationships created by the ‘play’ between copious and disparate objects presented to the wandering gaze of the viewer. As a result, the marvels collected within the early modern cabinet became a symbol, not of what was ‘discovered’, but of the revelation of ‘discovery’, an ecstatic experience that transformed the world-as-wonder into a collection-as-wonder. These collections were spectacular, not only through their methods of display, which presented objects for contemplation, whether it was admiration (silver wrought Seychelles nut) or derision (paintings of people with deformities), but as a marker of prestige in which rare naturalia and expensive artificialia became commodities that symbolized the power and celebrity of the collector. Indeed this commodification of the natural world that began in the Middle Ages can be viewed as a precursor to modernity’s ‘society of the spectacle’.¹⁶

The emotional affect of wonder has diminished since the early modern period while its association with spectacle and entertainment has increased. No longer accompanied by the palpable emotions of terror and ecstasy in the face of the unknown (these too have diminished in import), its use in the contemporary vernacular now describes popular spectacle as entertainment and, in the language of advertising, appeals to the ‘child in all of us’.¹⁷ In one respect, wonder reflects a desire to be amazed and distracted from the routine of everyday life. In another respect, it reflects a nostalgic return to a state of innocence (and ignorance), where the world still holds marvels waiting to be discovered. And while an excess of wonder in adults is frowned upon, edifying wonder is used as a marketing tool within children’s encyclopaedias to inspire an interest in the seemingly less than glamorous realm of science. When viewed in this light, the pleasure of wonder has devolved into novelty, entertainment and consumerism. Contemporary artificialia is re-imagined as new technologies designed to improve our lives and anticipate our needs, such as ‘smart’ appliances. At the same time, naturalia has become associated with the ‘freak show’,¹⁸ genetically modified...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Plates
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• PART I Taxonomy, Structures and Identities
• PART II Contemporary Curatorial Practices
• PART III Contemporary Artistic Practice and the Function of Wonder
• List of Contributors
• Index