Marion Endt-Jones: Beyond institutional critique: Mark Dion’s surrealist wunderkammer at the Manchester Museum

Fig. 4. M. Dion, Bureau of the Centre for the Study of Surrealism
and its Legacy, 2005. Freak plant specimens.

"Cabinets of curiosities served various purposes – scholars used them as teaching aids, apothecaries as resources of research material and rulers as vectors of power and influence – but what at any rate emerges as one of their overriding themes is the encyclopaedic drive to create an image of the universe in miniature. Against the background of the supposed microcosm-macrocosm-correspondence, the juxtaposition of objects in a room or cabinet generated meaningful associations, the objects functioning as vessels in which diverse connotations converged. As the seventeenth-century Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher put it in his 1667 study on magnetism, Magneticum Naturae Regnum, ‘the world was bound with secret knots’ (Krümmel 2002: 41), and in this universal network, curiosities acted as points of intersection between different realms. Since it was furthermore believed that nature shines best through her cracks, the objects and specimens most highly treasured were those showing irregularities or crossing boundaries between different fields of knowledge and taxonomic categories: anomalies of nature, freaks and monsters, specimens resisting classification and objects oscillating between the spheres of art and nature as well as art and science." [source]