Museum and gallery curators reopen the cabinet of curiosities concept

Stuffed pelicans, bell-jarred oddities and unicorn horns: the wunderkammer – or 'cabinet of curiosities' – is a macabre, colonial throwback. So why is it back in vogue?You can barely walk into a museum these days without being confronted by an eerie-eyed raven or a monkey's shrunken head. From Margate to Nottingham, from Hackney to Bradford, exhibition spaces are filling up with a macabre menagerie of dead things – from bones and beasts to stuffed birds. Indeed, next week the Milton Keynes Gallery will join the trend, opening a modern "cabinet of curiosities" that will set paintings by Gainsborough, Millais, Warhol and David Bowie next to taxidermied pelicans, medieval maps, and even an Aston Martin DB4, much like the one driven by James Bond in the 1960s.Some might blame this wilfully digressive trend on over-active curatorial imaginations and the legacy of Damien Hirst's death-obsessed exploitation of natural-history specimens. Others might point to rising star Polly Morgan's reinvention of taxidermy as a fine art. But such eclectic tastes are in fact nothing new. From the Renaissance to the 18th century, the cabinet of curiosities celebrated the act of collection for its own sake, in an almost haphazard accumulation of natural-history specimens and other bizarre objects. Crocodiles were hung from rafters, skulls (animal and human) vied for shelf space with toads supposedly found alive in rocks – and then there were the "mermaids", composed of monkey torsos sewn to ...

Source: Guardian Unlimited Science - January 13, 2014 Category: Science Authors: Philip Hoare Tags: The Guardian Museums Art Culture Art and design Exhibitions Features Zoology Source Type: news