The Nature of Curiosity
Reading between the lines, readers of this blog may have guessed that I am a bit of a hoarder. I love odd objects, and collections of objects, and I am always intrigued by the ways in which people arrange their groups of possessions. This partly comes from my childhood home, where every surface is covered with things – manmade or collected – and is probably what first drew me to the history of collecting and ‘cabinets of curiosity.’
It is no surprise, then, that I love the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford – a huge nineteenth-century cabinet that has stayed gloriously untouched except for recent improvements to access and expansion of the displays. In some ways the PRM is like a permanent ‘Twilight’ event (about which I have posted before), where you can get a wind-up torch from the gallery assistant and poke about amongst the cases to your heart’s content. I think it is also a collection which lends itself particularly well to thoughtful artistic intervention. I have always remembered the brilliant Trace display in 2008, in which artist Les Biggs made small ceramic 'filing' boxes featuring invented objects, which were interspersed in the cases and given their own ‘cabinet’ in one of the galleries.
I was excited, therefore, to hear of Sue Johnson’s new show, The Nature of Curious Objects, which has come out of the Re-thinking Pitt-Rivers project. Sue has taken the wonderful illustrations from the manuscript catalogues of Pitt-Rivers’ second ‘lost’ catalogue and re-imagined them in new combinations. Her striking watercolour paintings combine these objects with botanical and zoological ones on a generic ‘shelf’ imagined as the basis for each collection. This is a stimulating response to the project and the manuscript record of the collection, and is accompanied by a short catalogue with a thought-provoking essay by Joint Head of Collections, Jeremy Coote.
I was disappointed, however, by the staging of the exhibition. The introductory text panel is so tightly worded that it is not clear how closely Sue is responding to the catalogues – using, in fact, illustrations directly from them – and a reproduction of one of the illustrations, which makes this beautifully clear, is half-way down the display rather than at the beginning. More importantly, I wondered why the paintings are not incorporated among the permanent displays? Here they would sing with meaning in relation to the physical objects, arrangements, and shelves. I feel, by contrast, that in the blank space of their white corridor display, they, unfairly to the paintings, first strike the viewer as curious in the odd rather than the captivating sense of the word.