The division between the Sciences and the Humanities is completely artificial and one that is extremely recent.  Until 100 years ago, it was the arts and sciences… Michelangelo and Leonardo were scientists as much as artists…

- Lawrence Weschler, Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder

 

The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.  It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.                                         

- Albert Einstein

 

Some artists take on the toughest job, prompting viewers to reevaluate the way they think.   Gary Nickard and Reinhard Reitzenstein present installations and performances that lead their audiences to reconsider the certainty of their beliefs.  It is precisely this spirit that animates Wunderkammern, an eclectic display of Nickard’s and Reitzenstein’s own photographs and sculptures placed in conjunction with an array of antique scientific instrumentation, found and borrowed artifacts, and other artwork.    All are arranged in accordance with a seeming absence of organizational logic.  In the words of the artists:

 

The installation is intended to raise questions about the respective boundaries of art and science, sources of artistic inspiration, conventional notions of authorship and creativity, as well as to challenge common-sense assumptions about how the world is supposed to work, with the hopeful intention of evoking new understanding. 

 

 

Wunderkammern brings together two artists whose collaborative endeavors have consistently employed the language of what might be called the “contemporary surreal.” For example, in their 2008 installation, Vegetable Rites: Birds InThe Moon, at Stewart Hall Gallery, in Montreal, they challenged the viewer’s “common sense” understanding of how the world is supposed to work. This project, undertaken along with the painter Patty Wallace, faithfully reconstructed a seventeenth century plan by the Jacobean scientist (and founder of England’s Royal Society) Dr. John Wilkins, to travel to the moon in a space ship powered by geese. The intention was not to poke fun at Wilkins, but instead to present the viewer with a Weltanschauung that, while seeming alien to today’s scientific methodology, was actually quite consistent with it—all in an effort to suggest how radically different the perspective might be three hundred years hence. Wilkins was a colleague and mentor of the founder of modern physics, Isaac Newton.  Wilkins’s ideas, however odd they may seem today, were actually based upon a systematic assessment of all available empirical evidence at the time.

This charmingly dissonant experience of the objective certainties of the past proceeds from the artists’ understanding of Immanuel Kant’s Transcendental Aesthetic, which was articulated in Vegetable Rights by venturing into the liminal areas of noumenal experience.  Nickard and Reitzenstein are keenly aware of Niels Bohr’s observation that all human perceptions of nature remain “suspended in language.” Most importantly though, these artists are deeply motivated by the Kantian aesthetic category of the sublime in all of its manifestations and implications, not only as it applies to visual art and literature, but also to the natural sciences as well.  They also firmly believe that art does not arise in a vacuum—instead, they see it as always socially situated.  In other words, art is not some neutral exercise in formal cognition as mid-twentieth century Modernists would have it.

 

In accordance with this perspective, Wunderkammern presents viewers with a collection of wonders selected by the artists.  Fascinated by the late  Renaissance phenomenon of Wunderkammern—collections of a wide array of disparate artifacts and curiosities that were housed in special rooms or cabinets during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—Nickard and Reitzenstein construct a situation in which a sense of wonder provides the connective tissue between a diverse and otherwise discordant cluster of objects. Historical collections of this nature avoided any pretense to rigid taxonomy, and instead let the free play of imaginative associations guide the viewer’s understanding.  It was not until the nineteenth century and the rise of deterministic positivism that these collections were broken up into separate natural history and art museums—organized,  respectively, around the systematic principles of Carl Linnaeus and Johann Winkelmann.  Inspired by historical Wunderkammern, the artist’s room-sized assemblage of scientific, natural and artistic materials suggests what E.O. Wilson called a consilience—a coming together of disparate, even aporiac systems of knowledge.

 

Accordingly, in Wunderkammern the artists deploy this “age of discovery” trope as a means to re-instate a sense of wonder and the marvelous as guiding principles in both contemporary art and science. Nickard and Reitzenstein see these ideas not as quaint emotive categories, but as vital ingredients for visual arts practice that go largely unacknowledged in the contemporary academy. Their perspective is based upon a central premise of the current debate framed by Graeme Sullivan in his book Art Practice as Research.  Graeme holds that the conventional academic definition of knowledge is irreconcilable with contemporary artistic practice, a situation that needs urgent redress. The crux of this matter is that traditionally speaking, the academy holds knowledge to be objective, utilitarian and based upon closed systems of method and orthodoxy.  At the same time, art remains conversely subjective, ludic and open to any idea, however heterodox.

As Weschler points out in Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder, the late Renaissance voyages of discovery were great explorations of hitherto unknown regions “which revealed a sprawling world, infinitely stranger than previously imagined.” The curiosities that came back from these voyages were the very stuff of Wunderkammern.  Taken together, they challenged long-cherished notions of the world and how it was supposed to work, generating the very intellectual unease with medieval orthodoxy that ultimately led to the Enlightenment and its greatest thinker Immanuel Kant. This was a fantastic influx of curiosities that had a profoundly unsettling effect upon pedestrian and pious minds, persuaded that the finite world was created reasonably to suit the measure of man, and to function as a stage for the allegorical drama of his salvation. The absence of any explanatory context in such collections was quite deliberate, because in the late Renaissance such objects were seen to challenge decisively the prevailing medieval Order of Things.

 

The first written description of a Wunderkammer is found in the book, Chronics, by Froben Christoph von Zimmern, published in 1564-1566. This collection featured such rare natural objects as corals, mandrakes, minerals, animal skulls, outgrown antlers, ornate exotic weapons, fossils and a wide range of other curiosities. In contrast to the treasure-rooms of rulers, where as the result of ascendancy, gifts or coincidental acquisitions were exhibited, Wunderkammern were formed out of a more universal intellectual and political motivation.  Wonder rooms, or cabinets of curiosity, were intended to display a new vision of the world in miniature through all of its strange and wonderful objects.

 

Nickard and Reitzenstein formed their first creative partnership with the 2002 installation, Let the Work Begin: Theatrum Chemicum. This installation was an  investigation into the visual aesthetic of the hermetic art of Alchemy and its dramatic claim to reveal the hidden workings of the universe. The installation was not an argument for the contemporary credence of Alchemy, but rather an acknowledgement that, as the matter theory of its day, Alchemy resulted from what Michel Foucault would call the episteme of the medieval world. Thus, that installation explored the symbolic system of Alchemical representation and the “textural feeling” of this antique doctrine.  The result was a direct encounter with both an alien logic and a mystifying aesthetic. In the preface to The Order of Things, Foucault invoked a passage from the Argentine novelist Jorge Louis Borges, supposedly quoting a “certain Chinese encyclopedia,” whose taxonomic logic is both exotic and impossible:

 

…out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought – our thought, the thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography – breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age old distinction between the Same and the Other.

 

Taking a cue from Foucault, Let the Work Begin: Theatrum Chemicum confronted the viewer with similarly confounding sets of symbols, wonders and apparatus whose taxonomic logic, while faithful to actual Alchemical doctrine, rendered any attempt to make overall sense of them a charmingly futile exercise. Wunderkammern proceeds from a very similar logic, captivating viewers with a sense of wonder at the marvelous—an ecstatic embrace of the world—all staged through a ludic embrace of modern science and the perspective on nature that it provides.

 

Nickard and Reitzenstein’s ludic philosophy follows the Psychoanalytic ideas of Sigmund Freud who, in Civilization and Its Discontents, postulated what he called the “reality principle” as an explanation of the utilitarian social bondage of work and exploitation.  In Eros and Civilization, Herbert Marcuse elaborated upon Freud’s postulate, seeing it as a mutation of Freud’s pleasure principle, a function of the child's ego reshaped by the world of objects, an encounter that for Marcuse collapses into the Hegelian dialectic of subject and object. As a result, both Freud and Marcuse asserted that both literary and artistic creations—and, as the artists would maintain, the activities of natural science—together restage the essential confrontation between the self and world.  More to the point of Wunderkammern, to use Lawrence Weschler's succinct phrasing in Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder:

 

For a good century and a half after the discovery of the Americas, Europe's mind was blown. That was the animating spirit behind, and the enduring significance of, the profusion of Wunderkammern.

 

Thus, these collections of wondrous objects were made to bridge the gap between the natural and artificial worlds, a mechanism for displaying all that is wondrous in the world, inviting the viewer to think in new ways, to embrace the savage, the eccentric and the strange beauty of the world in all of its “Otherness,” as it was expanded by exploration.

 

Gary Nickard sets the tone for this installation by invoking the Kantian aesthetic of the sublime through thirty-two images made in a hydrogen bubble chamber, which several decades ago was the main particle detector at Fermilab National Accelerator Laboratory in Batavia, Illinois.  By displaying these images that were originally constructed as empirical evidence of the microphysical world, he presents the viewer with the panoply of ghostly swirls and “contrails.”  These suggest the passage of the elusive constituents of the atoms that make up our physical world.  Given that the mechanism of this scientific visualizing system is plainly visible in the photographs, the images reveal that the instrumentation involved in extending perception beyond the limits of human vision actively construct our vision of the microphysical world.  While empiricism essentially means “show me,” if our instruments are constructing our images of the microphysical world, then, at best, we must be very cautious of terms like “real” and “true”:

 

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of questioning.

--Werner Heisenberg

 

At its most extreme, as the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum physics maintains, it is meaningless to ask if the denizens of the microphysical world are “real,” in the sense that they are concrete entities, because we can only empirically know the image constructed by subjective instrumentation.  Any certainty about the “reality” of the microphysical world itself must remain forever lost in the depths of Kantian noumena.

 

Kant’s philosophical theory posited exactly the idea that observation (the synthesis of objects in consciousness) imposes certain forms and rules before things can appear as phenomenal objects.  In other words, consciousness conditions phenomena. Early in the twentieth century, Einstein and his contemporaries must have been suspicious that there was something uncannily familiar about the emerging quantum world. Without question, both Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg were well aware that their Copenhagen interpretation, although the focus of realist/anti-realist conflict to this day, was precisely in line with Kantian idealism.  Since Kant's was the original philosophical theory, in which the observer imposes conditions upon the nature of objects, it is arguably the philosophical precedent for quantum theory. Accordingly, the sublime in physics must be the vista that unfolds before us of the noumenal microphysical world and all its quixotic rules and entities that behave as if they were characters from Alice in Wonderland:

 

Anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood a single word.

- Niels Bohr

 

For Reinhard Reitzenstein, the great German poet and naturalist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the unsung “hero” of empiricism, was openly recognized by no less a figure than Heisenberg.  Goethe’s heterodox Theory of Colors, which has been dismissed by so many as a personal and anti-science diatribe against Newton, in actuality outlines a prescient scientific position that is uncannily similar to that of the Heisenberg indeterminacy principle (popularly known as “uncertainty”).  Goethe maintained that theories are not objective descriptions as such, but rather the points of view of the scientist framed within a particular context of knowledge—what Foucault would call an episteme:

 

Natural Science is not nature itself but part of a relation between man and nature, and therefore is dependent on man.

 

- Niels Bohr

 

Accordingly, an homage to Bohr and Heisenberg, Reitzenstein’s symmetrical, “panoptic” photographs of waves, when viewed within the context of Nickard’s photographs of subatomic particles, together provide us with a compellingly succinct encapsulation of the particle/wave duality posited by the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum theory.

 

Motivated by their understanding of the Kantian sublime, Nickard and Reitzenstein in this installation, have developed their own permutation of Wunderkammern, presenting for the viewer’s edification their own diversely imagined and imaginative assembly of “the marvelous,” including a number of insect and animal sculptures by Madeline Courtney, and a collection of birds’ nests lent by Patty Wallace.  The ludic task of the artist is undertaken in an effort to reorder the way we see and, ultimately, the way we articulate and dream the physical world. The shocking reality revealed by science is that humanity stands bracketed by the sublime in two directions—by the microphysical and by the cosmic. Wunderkammern transgress the conventional boundaries of the viewer's imagination by taking them beyond the point of comprehension and out into flights of imagination, revealing natural and man made wonders.  Such dissonant combinations are at times so startling and abstruse that viewers must struggle, not only with the artist’s metaphors, tropes and suggested meanings, but also with their own cherished and comfortable certainties about their place in the world—how it is constructed and how it is imagined to work.

 

--Karen Elliot

Karen Elliot is an imaginary critical thinker, living and working in Buffalo, NY.

 

The scientific apparatus on view in this exhibition is curated from the collection of Thomas B. Greenslade, Jr., Kenyon College Professor Emeritus of Physics.  Books, maps and memorabilia—on view in Special Collections and in the Olin Art Gallery—are borrowed courtesy of the Greenslade Special Collections and Archives, Olin and Chalmers Libraries, Kenyon College.  Animal and insect artworks by Madeline Courtney ’08 are borrowed from the artist.  Birds’ nests are lent courtesy of Patty Wallace.  Aspen Golann ’10 generously lent her white rose pendant necklace.  

We extend special thanks for their participation to: Thomas Greenslade Jr.; Lynn Manner and Michael Reilly, Special Collections; and artist Madeline Courtney.  We are appreciative to all at Kenyon who assisted in this project. 

This exhibition, publication and educational programs are made possible, in part, with support from the Mesaros Fund for Art.