The impossibility of knowing everything.

Grasshopper Monologue

by Mark Dion

“We insects were at least as curious about Jean Henri Faber, as he was about us. We considered the old man utterly mad. [...]

Perhaps I should explain. I am the descendent of the locust that the entomologist Jean Henri Faber so carefully studied in his laboratory at the edge of the village of Serignan. It was my great, great, great grandmother, some 90 generations distant, who the entomologist witnessed molt her exoskeleton and which he wrote about in his book The life of the Grasshopper. [...]

Mark Dion, Grasshopper Monologue, 1997.

It was a stony, sun-scorched, thistle-ridden speck of land, unfit for agriculture or even grazing, yet for him it was a garden of Eden. The locals thought he was a tramp, a potential poultry thief or at the very least insane. He constructed a wall around his plot transforming it into the open-air laboratory where he would remain devoted to entomology for the rest of his life. While other naturalists were off exploring the mighty Amazon or crossing endless deserts or sailing the oceans in search of the answers to life’s great mysteries, Faber’s journey took him into the microcosm of his walled in garden. It was in this exotic new world that he encountered the peacock moth, the thistle weevil and the mason bee. [...]

The naturalists of Faber’s day were largely museum men, cloistered in dark vaults smelling of formalin and camphor, where dry bird skins lie in rows in drawers, and fish and reptiles float immobile in liquid preservatives and us insects, stabbed through with pins wait in boxes for classification. The study of life proceeded through the ordering of death. Faber’s studies burst out of the dusty glass cabinets and into the brilliant sunlight of the country side. He had learned the simple fact that a living specimen will give away more secrets than a thousand dead ones. [...]

Jean-Henri Fabre in his laboratory in July 1907.

His pursuit of knowledge was indefatigable. We teased him often; intentionally frustrating him or leading him down the wrong path. From time to time an insect would allow him a glimpse of the truth, a tiny piece of the vast puzzle. These tidbits of knowledge would often just be enough to make clear the grand scale of his ignorance. Humans need to be humbled every now and again. Faber was never discouraged by the fact that he would never know everything. [...]“

Quoted from Mark Dion: The Natural History of the Museum, exh. cat. (Nîmes/Helsingborg/Pfäffikon SZ), Paris: Archibooks, 2007, 38-39.

Some Surrealist fauna and flora.

André Breton, to Charles Henri Ford’s question What do you think of the countryside around New York?

I like enormously what I have seen of the Hudson and its green islets – the Floating Island – which doubtless remains something secret and menacing from the books of my childhood. I was extremely pleased to become acquainted for the first time with that unique light of ‘apparition’ which appears over the grass about five o’clock in the afternoon and which bathes, to the exclusion of all others, certain poems of Poe, such as ‘Ulalume’.

At André Masson’s, in the heart of a little wood, it was a wonderful surprise to discover the little ‘Indian pipe‘, so timorous, so ambiguous, which more than any other plant is part of that light. With him, too, I admired, freely inflecting all the shades of leafage, the scarlet tanager. Truly surrealist flora has been enriched, as far as I am concerned, with a new species shown me by Kay and Yves Tanguy: a staghorn fern suspended in its superb turtleshell.

But, above all, I have begun my initiation into the mysteries of American butterflies. The lunar moth – what splendour, how enigmatic! Don’t you find it inadmissible that one cares so little for the butterfly? Ought the description of a plant omit that of the caterpillar (the magnificent caterpillar of the samia cecropia which I found here seems one of the sources of that uncertain opaline bluish light to which I referred above) or the larva which, more or less electively, lives upon it? The affinity of an animal organism with such a species – is it not as significant as its type of inflorescence, for instance? But the mania for classification tends to get the upper hand over all real methods of knowledge. I’m really afraid that natural philosophy has not advanced a step since Hegel.

From an interview in View magazine, no. 7-8, Oct-Nov 1941.

I’ll turn the ocean upside down.

Robert Desnos and Kiki de Montparnasse, still from Man Ray’s L’étoile de mer, 1928. Watch the whole film here.

‘There Is a Star in the Sea’
(Pliny, Natural History, Book IX)

by Dan Chiasson

‘There is a star in the sea, and it burns up everything
it touches. Though men who walk on land deny it,

one night a star fell from the sky and landed in the sea.
It had the good sense to become a fish, but the wit

to keep its shape. It sleeps on the bottom of the sea,
but one day I’ll play a trick on it - I’ll turn the ocean

upside down! Then it will shine again, coral bluff,
rusted galleon in the night sky, and I will pray to it.’

From Dan Chiasson, Natural History and Other Poems.

Bananas are red.

I’d seen The Blue Planet before I moved to England and was amazed by it, but since my friend A. made me aware of Sir David Attenborough, I’ve been the most faithful fan. I haven’t missed a single episode of Planet Earth, Life in the Undergrowth and Life in Cold Blood.

To watch him kneel or lie in the sand, windswept, donning khakis and a light blue shirt, whispering and pointing to explain to us even the creepiest, crawliest, slimiest creatures with genuine enthusiasm and passion, is simply awe-inspiring. He reminds me that ‘curiosity’, etymologically, is associated with ‘care’.

For two weeks in autumn, I purchased every issue of the Daily Mail (with a slight feeling of guilt, because it’s an appalling newspaper) - and if I couldn’t, for whichever reason, I terrorised E. to do so - to collect single episodes of all the Attenborough series on DVD.

And then, last Wednesday, I had the opportunity, between two meetings in London, to squeeze in a visit to The Queen’s Gallery next to Buckingham Palace to see Amazing Rare Things, the current exhibition of natural drawings from the Royal Collection co-curated by Sir David. Get past the airport-style security and don’t be unnerved by the muffled, repressed atmosphere (I had to sneeze at some point and felt like a terrorist) - and it is quite amazing.

The deep, saturated, velvety red of Maria Sibylla Merian’s Branch of banana tree (Musa paradisiaca) with caterpillar and moth (Automeris liberia), c. 1701-5, still haunts me.

Animal spirits and movement.

“Out of the strong came forth sweetness”
Swarm of bees generated from a lion’s carcass on a tin of Lyle’s Golden Syrup.

What I remember most vividly from Matthew Cobb’s lecture Life Before Linnaeus, given last May at the Manchester Museum to accompany the exhibition A Place for Everything celebrating the Linnaeus Tercentenary, are the examples of spontaneous generation he presented - mice generated from grain, lion carcasses giving birth to bees, and the like (he actually mentioned the wonderfully out-of-date Golden Syrup tins with their biblical symbolism as well).

I came across his work again when reading his article on seventeenth-century Dutch naturalist and microscopist Jan Swammerdam in the latest issue of TLS last weekend, and I think I can already predict what will stay stuck in my mind this time: Swammerdam was the first to demonstrate that movement - the contraction of muscles - was not, as Descartes had claimed, caused by the influx of animal spirits into the muscle.

More on Swammerdam’s experiment (which consisted of placing a frog heart in an air-tight syringe) here.

I loved that damn museum.

Gemsbok diorama, Akeley Hall of African Mammals,
American Museum of Natural History, NY.

Water Hole diorama, Akeley Hall of African Mammals.

The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody’d move. You could go there a hundred thousand times, and that Eskimo would still be just finished catching those two fish, the birds would still be on their way south, the deers would still be drinking out of that water hole, with their pretty antlers and their pretty, skinny legs, and that squaw with the naked bosom would still be weaving that same blanket. Nobody’d be different. The only thing that would be different would be you.

Quoted from J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, chapter 16.

Alaska Brown Bear diorama, Hall of North American Mammals.

Australian diorama (detail: crimson rosellas), Birds of the World Hall.

All pictures from the AMNH website.

I dream of a new age of curiosity.

Rosamond Purcell, Goliath beetles.
From Illuminations: A Bestiary, 1986.

Curiosity is a vice that has been stigmatized in turn by Christianity, by philosophy, and even by a certain conception of science. Curiosity is seen as futility. However, I like the word; it suggests something quite different to me. It evokes “care”; it evokes the care one takes of what exists and what might exist; a sharpened sense of reality, but one that is never immobilized before it; a readiness to find what surrounds us strange and odd; a certain determination to throw off familiar ways of thought and to look at the same things in a different way; a passion for seizing what is happening now and what is disappearing; a lack of respect for the traditional hierarchies of what is important and fundamental. I dream of a new age of curiosity.

Michel Foucault in an interview with Christian Delacampagne, Le Monde, 6./7. April 1980.

Alien Invaders

Threats to biodiversity and causes for the extinction of ecosystems and species are often summarised with the acronym HIPPO: habitat destruction, invasive species, pollution, overpopulation and overexploitation. Two recent artist’s projects are concerned with the i in HIPPO: Jacob Cartwright’s and Nick Jordan’s Alien Invaders: A Guide to Non-Native Species of the Britisher Isles and 2005 Turner Prize winner Simon Starling’s Henry Moore/Zebra Mussel project commissioned by the Power Plant Contemporary Art Gallery in Toronto.

The former, a small artist’s book published by BookWorks, takes the form of an illustrated natural history guide listing invasive species introduced to the British Isles, such as the American Bullfrog, the Chinese Mitten Crab, the Giant Hogweed, the Grey Squirrel, the Pharaoh Ant, the Ring-necked Parakeet, the Ruddy Duck and the Wels Catfish. In the manner of a scientific guidebook, each entry gives information on the category and origins of introduction, problems caused by the introduction and efforts of control or eradication. It is only upon closer examination that one begins to doubt the scientific objectivity and reliability of the entries, which appear to be interspersed with rather obscure references and bizarre cultural anecdotes. The artists intervene by providing us with highly selective and sometimes dubious information. Thus we read under the heading ‘Origins of Introduction of the Grey Squirrel‘:

In ‘Dixieland‘, Gray Squirrels have long been desirable table fare, enriching the poor rural diet (Metzger, 1953). Skinned and simmered in broth until the meat falls off the bone, this traditional dish (called ‘limb chicken‘) was said to be a favourite of the young Elvis, and is typically served with jalapeno fritters and deep-fried grits.

(The reference ‘Metzger, 1953‘ isn’t traceable, since the book lacks both footnotes and bibliography; and do I need to mention that, quite fittingly, ‘Metzger‘ translates into ‘butcher‘…)

Simon Starling’s Toronto project involves sinking a replica of Henry Moore’s bronze statue Warrior with Shield into Lake Ontario, where it will become encrusted with Zebra Mussels, one of the most aggressive invasive species introduced to North America (for a synopsis of how English sculptor Henry Moore is linked with the city of Toronto, see here).

While Cartwright’s and Jordan’s book, sort of a cross-pollination of fact and fiction, of science and art, raises questions of authenticity and the impossibility of scientific objectivity and detachment, the Zebra Mussel project is concerned with issues of transformation and cultural colonialism. Both projects, which by far exceed instances of more ‘conservationist‘ environmental art from the 1960s onwards, are examples of how artists use processes of nature to reflect on broader cultural issues.

The Marvel of Minuteness

“Billet d’autobus roulé “symétriquement”, forme très rare d’automatisme morphologique avec germes évidents de stéréotypie.”
Brassaï, detail from Sculptures Involontaires, 1933.

I’m thinking about changes in scale as an instance of the marvellous at the moment, so here are some (patchy) notes:

• In 1936, the English collector and art patron Edward James wrote an essay entitled The Marvel of Minuteness, published in the Surrealist journal Minotaure. He analyses portraits by Lucas Cranach the Elder and Hans Holbein, focussing on their attention to detail, their “almost maniac precision,” which, according to James, gives them a surreal, hallucinatory quality. The opening paragraph is worth quoting:
  

  [...] there is something miraculous about minuteness and precise intricacy, something mysterious about a spider-like wealth of detail, something awe-inspiring which overwhelms us with the simultaneous conception of our own greatness and our own littleness. So felt King David of Israel when he looked at the stars, and so again do we when we lie in the long grass as children to observe the insect world where, even before hearing of Fabre, we know with intrigue and presentiment how intensely complex must be the lives and customs of that diversity of peoples, from the ants and ladybirds down to those curious flies and rare beetles whose names even adult persons seem to be specialists to have learned.

  (This might finally explain my fascination with Sir David Attenboroughs 2005 BBC natural history series Life in the Undergrowth, exploring the lives of invertebrates. Of all his programmes, it’s by far my favourite…)

• Two weeks ago, I picked up a copy of Harry G. Frankfurt’s On Bullshit in a book shop in Toronto. I had come across it earlier this year and made a vague mental note to read it some time soon, but I think what eventually convinced me to buy it was its small size, its compactness.
• Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century collectors of curiosities were attracted to minuscule objects: see for example the famous cherry stone in Dresden’s Green Vault which, when viewed through a magnifying glass, reveals 185 carved faces.
• There’s also a 11 x 13 mm fruit stone on display at David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology: “the front is carved with a Flemish landscape in which is seated a bearded man wearing a biretta, a long tunic of classical character, and thick-soled shoes; he is seated with a viol held between his knees while he tunes one of the strings. In the distance are representations of animals, including a lion, a bear, an elephant ridden by a monkey, a boar, a dog, a donkey, a stag, a camel, a horse, a bull, a bird, a goat a lynx, and a group of rabbits: the latter under a branch on which sit an owl, another bird and a squirrel. On the back is shown an unusually grim Crucifixion, with a soldier on horseback, Longinus piercing Christ’s side with a lance, the cross is surmounted by a titulus inscribed INRI.” (see MJT website)
• The Surrealists’ interest in Karl Blossfeldt photographs of magnified plant parts.
• Went to see an interesting little exhibition at Cube Manchester with R. last week: The World is my Imagination. Media-Model-Miniature. It’s about shifts in scale and “model worlds which replicate physical and imaginary spaces, while reflecting existences and habitats, personal memories and longing.”
• See Susan Stewart’s fabulous book On Longing. Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection.

Calke Abbey

The owners of Calke Abbey in Derbyshire (visited with A. and I. yesterday) were hoarders. The male members of the Harpur Crewe family, who moved into the country house in 1622 and stayed for nearly 350 years before donating it to the National Trust, were avid collectors who obviously loathed throwing anything away. The National Trust decided to preserve the property and the collection of curiosites it houses in its original state, thus allowing fascinating insights into both life in the Victorian period and a collector’s mindset.

It might have been the rain and cold intensifying the sombre atmosphere of an era, a house and a family in decline, but if you’ve got a penchant for places soaked with melancholy and nostalgia, you should definitely visit.

Royal Worcester figure of a pug dog in the Entrance Hall, its broken leg propped up with a matchbox.

Bird display in the Drawing Room.

Sir Vauncey Harpur Crewe’s Bedroom, left in the state in which it was found by the National Trust in 1985, complete with hunting trophies and collections of shells and fossils.

The Saloon served as a private museum of souvenirs and natural curiosities such as a crocodile’s skull (brought back from Egypt in 1870) and display cases crammed with stones, fossils, sea shells and stuffed animals.

Dome of taxidermied mice.

Ostrich egg, silver-mounted and decorated with boar’s tusks, given to Richard Fynderne Harpur Crewe by his Great Uncle Richard as a christening present in 1880 - instead of the traditional silver spoon or teething ring.