Olga Ştefan

Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj-Napoca, Romania

olg.stefan@gmail.com

 

 

Simulacra and Phantasms in Wunderkammern: Collections as Sites of Utopia

 

 

Abstract: Reuniting “machinamente artis et naturae”, collections and museums represent “an effort to analyze the objects and the forces of the world, as well as an attempt to relieve their effects, without missing any reference point”[1]. We are, in the present work, particularly interested in the utopian structure of Wunderkammern (or Cabinets of Curiosities), which gather objects of different substance (natural forms, statues, mechanical objects, paintings, tools, buildings, mechanisms) for the sole purpose of creating an illusion of possessing a perfected, unspoiled version of the world seen in simultaneity. This ambition may also be linked to the domain of simulacra (since most of the objects found in these Cabinets were fashioned in order to serve the purpose of the space they inhibited, which makes domains of artifacts often lacking real referents (fantastic animals, myths, phantasms). The present paper attempts to link these phenomena to the concept of utopianism.

 

Key words: Utopia; Wunderkammer; Cabinet of Curiosities; Simulacrum; Artifacts; Statues; Automaton; Museum; Collection.

 

There is a “utopian agenda of directly reconnecting the present to an originary past” and it often relies on mystification. Donald P. Eziosi mentions in this respect his personal experience as an archeologist contributing to “the literal erasure and bulldozing of many centuries of Ottoman Islamic history – so that, in effect, modern Greece and ancient Hellas could be made to seem contiguous and hence continuous.”[2] The same agenda is visible in the space of the museum inhabited by artifacts leading the visitors to understand that all antiquities “exist in a blank medium”, “a history that contains nothing but buried traces of a single sectarian identity- an identity that in effect id reconstituted out of an ethically cleansed sandbox of time”. We are led to believe that the lost traces of those who used these artifacts “have existed in an intact and undiluted or unaltered state through time”, which is both unsettling and disconcerting. Eziosi emphasis on the lack of history that characterizes these museal displays: it is conveniently preplaced by “an evacuated, abstract time which allows antiquity and the present be sewn together in a seamless fabric with no holes.”[3] His thesis is interesting in the sense that he attempts to discuss human individuation as related to its dependence of objects. “’We seem no more separable from the world of artifice we carpet ourselves into than we are from the bodies we grow into’ if, in other words, ‘objects pursue us in our pursuit of objects to sustain and focus our pursuit of ourselves,’ that is because we are not separable from that world outside the fantasies that sustain us as distinct and non-deponent.”[4] He believes that the existence as an individual is a manner of existing in a state of being that is merely defined by a series of contradictions. We thus experience a “tension between the self as unified, coherent, bounded, solid, continuously selfsame, and invariant in all its variations, and the self as fragmented, incoherent, dispersed, conflicted, fluid, migratory and heterogeneous”[5], which makes art history and museology solely thinkable and comprehensible by holding that “the fantasy of the self as selfsame is not a fantasy” since

 

The fundamental beliefs about the nature of time, history, memory and identity that have underlain and made possible the art historical and museological practices we know today themselves depend upon very particular dialogic or dialectical relationships imagined to exist between ourselves as social subjects and the object worlds we build ourselves into.

 

In 1821, the architect John Soane manuscript entitled Crude Hints towards an History of My House in L(incoln’s) I(nn) Fields, which attempted to describe the initial state of his house-museum to a future historian who would have found it in ruins. Soane rebuilt his house in order to obtain “a great assemblage of ancient fragments which must have been placed there for the advancement and knowledge of ancient Art”.[6] The museum would have to predetermine the manner in which time and destruction would work upon its facade, turning the ruined aspect of a building into a predictable product. In Eziosi’s own words, the building should have appeared as if it had built itself. Furthermore, its decay should have contained clues for its future restoration, “instructions both as to how it might reconstruct or resurrect itself after its death, and as to how its future fragments might encode the intentions or desires of the original Artist.”[7] He thus surpasses the intention to equate his work to the work of a god and tries to operate upon his work as nature would. Soane’s houses were more than architecturally challenging buildings: they also built a narrative, a story involving a monastic figure that would haunt the destroyed ruins of his once great parlours.

Death and ruin are two major themes in the museum’s environment. As Donald P. Eziosi mentioned,

 

Soane’s museum resembles a memory machine or a modern florilegium – a garden of aphorisms, fragments of wisdom, generating ethical knowledge through aesthetic example (to use two terms which for Soane were in fact mirror images of each other). Its aim was to foster the development of a humane environment based on exemplary fragments providing ancient precedents for the “union of architecture, painting and sculpture”; in other words, to “re-member” a lost or dis-membered unity. In projecting the entire edifice as a mass of future fragments, he aimed to have those future fragments of the building serve functions identical to those served by those now residing in the building.[8]

The concept of art understood under the umbrella of art history is linked to “an unquenchable desire to imagine art as a universal, pan-human phenomenon, as the essential mode of human symbolisation”[9], which leads to the cliché of art as a universal language and, moreover, a language “exemplified (and legible) in the artefacts of every people. The science “for rendering the visible legible” is, according to Donald P. Eziosi, museology, on a one hand, art history and criticism, on the other. Still, our belief in these notions becomes problematic considering that “for some time we’ve been living in an age when virtually anything can properly be displayed as ‘content’ in a museum, and when virtually anything can cogently be designated and plausibly serve as a museum.”[10] This lead to a schizoid concept of the museum, one in which it is “the temple of art” or “the shrine of and for the self, intended to ‘cure’ (i.e., discipline) individuals and transform them through study and contemplation into citizen-subjects of the new nation-state”, the other is the exhibition, “the shrine of the object, the sacred fetish, which was intended to transform citizen-subjects into avid consumers, to induce individuals to conceive of their lives using the bizarre fantasy-language of capitalism, to imagine oneself and others as commodities in every possible sense of the term.”[11] Conversely, these two manners of conceiving the museal space share the manner in which they make visible what is normally hidden, and congruent in space and time what was normally separated by centuries, social class, culture.

I follow the idea that museums are predilect spaces inhabited by a sense of a utopian vision of the world, which often imposes itself through simulacra. Reuniting “machinamente artis et naturae”, they do, in fact, represent “an effort to analyze the objects and the forces of the world, as well as an attempt to relieve their effects, without missing any reference point”[12]. I am, in the present work, particularly interested in the utopian structure of Wunderkammern (or Cabinets of Curiosities), which gather together objects of different substance (natural forms, statues, mechanical objects, paintings, tools, buildings, mechanisms) for the sole purpose of creating an illusion of possessing a perfected, unspoiled version of the world seen in simultaneity. This ambition may also be linked to the domain of simulacra (since most of the objects found in these Cabinets were fashioned in order to serve the purpose of the space they inhibited, which makes domains of artifacts often lacking real referents (fantastic animals, myths, phantasms).

There is a type of ironic approach in the usage of “simulacrum” as a concept or in the act of conceptualizing the term itself. Deleuze and Guattari[13] adopt a rather victimizing aspect regarding the act of conceptualizing itself, as they refer to the risks involved by the exposure of words and concepts to the falsehood of interpretation or to the improper act of being created inside domains foreign to the realm of philosophy. In order to illustrate this situation of this worrying unbalance, they resort to the Platonic acceptation of the simulacrum. We follow a most common definition of the term: simulacra are all things having lost reality or any type of connection to their prototypes (“a copy of a copy whose relation to the model has become so attenuated that it can no longer properly be said to be a copy. It stands on its own as a copy without a model”[14]). It is possible, in this respect, to read their What Is Philosophy? approaches to the notion of the simulacrum through metatextual lenses. Deleuze and Guattari do not explicitly open another way in discussing the question of reality in the postmodern context, in the sense that they do not develop an alternative reading to the ominous Baudrillardian vision of reality corrupted and usurped by signs. They do, however, express a series of meaningful insights we found useful in the context of our very research.

Philosophy is “the art of forming, inventing and fabricating concepts”[15], thus, the philosopher assumes a permanent job in creating, fabricating, forming new concepts. This is a prime condition of survival: philosophy is based on and justified by a never-ending process of concept-creation: “Concepts are not waiting for us ready-made, like heavenly bodies. There is no heaven for concepts. They must be invented, fabricated, or rather created and would be nothing without their creator’s signature.”[16] However, in time, philosophy seems to have aborted its mission and other domains come to pick its abandoned pace. Deleuze and Guattari thus turn to Platonism in order to interpret the situation in which the crisis of philosophy relies:  “if each citizen lays claim to something, then we need to be able to judge the validity of claims”, which means that establishing an order is imperious. The validity of claims should be evaluating through the lenses of Ideas, of philosophical concepts. The rivalry reaches its peak when faced with the fight between the philosopher and the sophist, the issue of their antagonism being the manner in which we may distinguish between what is real and what solely pretends to be so. Adopting a concept and reinterpreting it accordingly is never enough: Nietzsche would therefore determine the duty of philosophy by writing that “[Philosophers] must no longer accept concepts as a gift, nor merely purify and polish them, but first make and create them, present them and make them convincing. Hitherto one has generally trusted one’s concepts as if they were a wonderful dowry from some sort of wonderland,”[17], a consequence of this vision laying in the lack of trust invested in borrowed or inherited concepts. An immutable quality of the authentic concepts, born and bred in the melting pot of philosophy, is the fact that those who last are those who bear their creators’ signature: Aristotle’s substance, Descartes’s cogito, Leibniz’s monad, Kant’s condition, Schelling’s power, Bergson’s duration [durée]. We are thus entitled to wonder whose signature this concept of the simulacrum is. Is it properly assimilated by the domains that now use and abuse it or is it just a term of great impact, a barbarian word which, borrowed, taken as it is, stolen even from a legitimate domain, serves theories and purposes, estranged of its initial state? Is the simulacrum a simulacrum in itself?

Deleuze would see simulacra as a type of aggression: the copy is similar to the Idea due to the loyalty that resides in its accomplishment. The simulacrum is a brutal image, separated from the Idea while claiming that it follows the Idea per se: a false pretense, meant to cover the fragmentarism of an intrinsic unbalance. Since the platonic acceptation of this term primarily refers to an occultation of the more benign sense of representation, we believe important, necessary even to map the manner in which this tension between the mimetic copy and the copy that lost its original survives.

We believe that the narratives preoccupied by this sensible antagonism are justified by theoretical approaches towards art and the manner in which we perceive ourselves as individuals in the context of art’s developments. The story of Frankenstein’s monster would not have been possible in a century which denied the magical potentiality of one’s own image, and neither would Dorian Gray’s cursed portrait exert the type of fascination it throughout the decadent fin de siècle. Both these narratives are obliged to the emblematic myth of Pygmalion and to the never-ending possibilities of artifacts and curiosities sheltered by museums and Wunderkammern starting the 1700s.

In The Pygmalion Effect: From Ovid to Hitchcock, Victor Ieronim Stoichiţă gives two concise definitions to simulacrum. One describes it as “an artificial construction, lacking its original, reproduced as existing in and through itself”, not necessarily copying and object of the world.[18] The other claims that it is a “fabricated object, an artifact that can, at best, produce an effect of similitude, masking the absence of the model through an excess of its own hyperreality”[19]

The myth of Pygmalion is used as a focal point, following a border phenomenon of the image seen as existing. Its starting point is The Sophist, where Plato makes the distinction between eistatike, the art of the copy, and phantastike, the art of the simulacrum. This distinction is followed by the one mirroring the eikon, an image following the laws of mimesis, copying something that exists, and the phantasma, an image invested with autonomy, a vague and obscure notion, transiting the history of representation while challenging the triumphal mimetism. In Difference and Repetition, Gilles Deleuze claimed that the true bet of the platonic philosophy was not the mimesis, which was arguably easier to conceive, but this “other image”, an image “which’s main feature consists not in likeness, but in its own existence”. The modern triumph of the simulacrum, in Jean Baudrillard’s terms, is the manner in which we stop questioning the reality of the real and accept all simulations of reality. From an aesthetical history point of view, however, the simulacrum, Stoichiţă will add, “proclaims the victory of phantasm-artifacts and signifies the estrangement from conceiving the work  of art as  imitation of a preexistent model.”[20]

The simulacrum prevails, through and through. Due to the obscure notion it embodies and in the context of its protheism, we find it stubbornly placed amidst mimetic images, becoming a constant throughout the centuries. According to Victor Ieronim Stoichiţă, the attraction of these types of images is an essential component of the occidental aesthetics, its founding myth (Pygmalion in love with a product of his own skill and imagination) being a myth of surpassing, obliterating even, all limits.  Images, as David Freedberg noted[21] are capable of rousing, infuriating, inciting affections as well as cruelty, possessing a magical force which leads to fascination as well as to fear. The statue of Galatea becomes the premises of phantasms surrounding the avatars of an imaginary woman, objectifying desire as well as danger, and so does the story of Helen of Troy’s Döpplegänger, which led to a war lasting for a decade, a war over something that was solely fashioned in order to celebrate perfection. The one that was stolen was not the human being, but a statue of an autonomous beauty. Pygmalion is not attracted by a real woman, but by one perfected by art, which is a transgression in relation to the unapproachable status of the untouchable art.

The pictural representations of Pygmalion show him surrounded by curiosities, an artist preoccupied by the “principles that governed the cummulative taxinomies of Wunderkammeras”, which followed the “reversibility between nature and art, between animated and inanimated”[22]. The phantasm of Elena’s Dooplegager, often confused with Galatea, was kept alive during the XVIIth century due to texts such as Giambattista Marino’s La Galeria, who imagined her as a talking statue. This motif is no stranger to the fascination for simulacra that ruled the principles of art galleries and cabinets of curiosities, all of them insisting to claim a form of antique mythical legitimacy. The talking statue motif (derived from the statues’ eulogy in Imagines by Philostratus or Descriptiones by Calistratus) “underlines the threedimensional nature of sculptural objects as well as their capacity to filling out the space inahbited by someone else, in the same manner livingt beings would”[23]. The museum, programmaticaly manifesting a prohibitive attitude towards experiencing the object of art throughout the tactile, does nothing but to confirm a triumph of the image over the thing in itself, “a consequence of the consecrating the unreal part of itself.”[24] As they solely exist as separated from the rest of the world due to this clearly delimited status, images are intangible: to touch the work of art is, according to Stoichiţă, to downgrade it, “to see it as a merely functional object and to fundamentally endanger its very essence, that belongs to imagination solely.”[25] The image, once isolated in the space of the museum, becomes its very phantasm, entertaining a type of utopian parallel reality. In this respect, the talking statue is an irruption of the museal utopia, allowing itself to exist in a an autonomous regimen.

In The Lure of Antiquity and the Cult of the Machine. The Kunstkammer and the Evolution of Nature, Art and Technology, Horst Bredekamp wrote that these moving statues and automatons were perceived as half or almost living. He thus begins the chapter that focuses on the confrontation between sculpture as the prerrogative of nostalgia for the art of the Greek and Roman antiquity and the inovation of machines, which threatened to take the place of the work of art by reproducing an episode in Benvenutto Cellini’s life who had to execute a serie of silver statues as part of a comission for King Francois I. The artist wasn’t able to complete but a single statue, representing Jupiter. Since the king was going to visit his workshop after dark, Cellini found an ingenious way of turning the defavorable situation into an advantageous one. He lit the torch in the god’s hand, allowing his face to look particularly uncanny. This effect was further amplified by placing the statue on a moving plinth, that created the impression of aliveness. Bredekamp believes that “the mechanial impulse which enlivened the statue helped its creator win the competition: the modern art, turned into machina, overshadowed the effulgence of the antique”[26]. Although one may envision this conflict as a predecessor for the fame automatons knew throughout the 18th century, it will, however, oscilate, the relationship between the modern automatons and the sculptural art of antiquity being more complex and ambiguous than it seems. The hyerarchy that placed one above the other was fragile, easily challanged. Another crucial moment in mapping this very relation, seen by Bredekamp as both a “confirmation and a manner of further potentiating the manipulative effects obtained by Cellini” is the 1731 engraving by Charles Nicolas Cochin, La Charmante Catin. The work depicts a feminine society captured by a moving doll, actuated by a clock mechanism, bathed in candle light. Reminiscent of the fascination exercited over the women in the engraving are Vaucason’s automatons, compared by Voltaire with the works of Prometeus. Morover, the automatons were seen as a bindingt between art and the human reproduced as an artifact (Bredekam quotes Julien Offray de la Mettrie who, in 1748, affirmed that, considering the remarcable progress of automatons created by Vaucason, it was only a matter of time before the human being would be artificially reproduced by a skilled artisan.”[27]. The 1770s are abundant in similar figures, allowing the fascination for the artificial being to open a new phase in the history of art, but not necessarily diminishing the respect still shown to statues of antiquity.

As a matter of fact, new collections of antiquities appear throughout Europe, original works often being replaced by copies, since the new intention of these collections was encapsulating an ideal, utopian artificial environment, where one would be safe from all historical determinisms, and artistic, as well as natural wonders would coexist in a scattered, yet fascinating harmony.

In From my Life: Poetry and Truth,  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe depicts such a collection, seen in Mannheim. He was impressed by the manner in which these splendid statues of Antiquity were scattered all over the place, as if they formed a forest or an ideal gathering. As Humphrey Trevelyan notes in Goethe and the Greeks[28], “there were in fact few works of the great period of Greek art among them, hardly any indeed that are now recognized as being Greco-Roman art”[29], however, they impressed and imposed themselves as rare an unique due to what, authenticity aside, they attempted to express. We notice that Goethe underlines the statues’ arrangement, the way in which light and motion work together in creating the impression that they were more than just vestiges: they possessed a supplementary dimension due to an extrinsic mechanical. Whilst “the sculpture and the android are the embodiments of two shapes which are not only diametrally different, but diametrally opposed”, since sculpture imposes “the unattainable pretenses of a remote past”, while the android contains “the hope of human and machine intertwined”, as a pretext for a new stage of artistic creation, Bredekamp quotes Etienne Bonnot de Condillac who, in the 1754 Treaties on Sensations depicts a potential connection between the two. Condillac imagined a statue “organized inwardly like a man but animated by a soul that had never received an idea or a sense impression. He then unlocked its senses one by one. The statue’s power of attention came into existence through its consciousness of sensory experience; next, it developed memory, the lingering of sensory experience; with memory, it was able to compare experiences, and so judgment arose. Each development made the statue more human and dramatized Condillac’s idea that man is nothing but what he acquires, beginning with sensory experience.”[30]

Embodiment of existence lacking content, the statue, once endowed with the capacity of sensorial transformation, soon becomes a living human being. The story is somewhat related to that of Pygmalion but, as Bredekamp notes, its movements are those of a mechanical being, one that educates itself. The statue Condillac described combines autonomous movement with the marble epidermis, the Antiquity and the world of machines[31]. From the point of view of the epoch, Condillac’s statue was a hybrid structure, an “intermediate posture” between sculpture and automaton and might, thus, be considered a leitmotif. Despite their intentionality and their antagonist shape, both antique sculptures and androids owned the common denominator of having been created, of being the result of effort, of labor. “In both of them one may see the effort of creation, by shaping brute matter, a mediating instance which, from the intermediate zone between the natural state and the human intervention, allowed the elucidating the relationship between the human being and the environment”[32]. Moreover, their occurrence, as well as their history was essentially awoken by a theoretical curiosity: how would they answer to the question regarding the manner in which one might define the balance between human artifacts and the nature.”[33]

The concept of “natural history”, as found in Pliny the Elder’s works, was in fact turning to the state of data contained by things and species in nature, never once regarding their actual evolution. His exhaustive efforts in describing everything lacked “any notion of historicity of the natural world, the pure description of matter, its particularities and its possible uses being favored above everything else.”[34] Christianity canonized this concept of a nature lacking history as it followed the Mosaic outlook on chronology, according to which the world has indeed been made in no more than six days. Immanuel Kant, however, challenges this view upon an unhistorical, purely physiological nature, by dividing naturalis historia into a descriptive component and a historical one, claiming that we generally tend interpret the notions of depiction of nature and history of nature as if they had the very same meaning, when it is, as Bredekamp comments, “obvious that a knowledge of things as they are today always makes room for a desire of knowing how they once were and through which type of transformations did they pass before reaching their current shape.”[35]. Bredekamp believes that the Kantian vision upon a concept of natural history regarded “in time”, distinguished from the descriptive, classifying one, which imposed a spatial perspective, was based on visual experiences conducted in the Wunderkammer two hundred years before his contribution.  Here, “situated in two focal points converging as well as diverging nature and human creations”, both the antiquities and the innovative automatons played a decisive part: they imprinted a certain dynamic to the perspective upon nature”[36]. Even though it was not endowed with the capacity of actually dictating the meaning of this perspective, one’s glance was able to dower natural history a more profound meaning”[37]

The consequence of simultaneously displaying antique sculptures and automatons in collections would then be the avant la lettre historicity of nature. In natural sciences professed during the Renaissance, antique statues find themselves “in a plosive context, as they embody the confusion which distinguished divine creation from the human one”. Having been found in the round they are, therefore, classified as fossils, because they too were often found buried in the ground, owing their shape to both human creation and the nature’s participation in transforming the matter (a principle no different from John Soane’s “as if” ruined museum). The Renaissance established the principle of collecting as a manner of possessing a small-scale version of the universe, Quiccheberg[38]’s descriptions of early modern collections always maintaining the ambition of covering a whole continent, a whole area, also being interested in escapes into the unknown and the exotic, which documents a need to encompass the whole world, horizontally. This is why, Bredekamp concludes, the Wunderkammer intersects the vertical hierarchy in which the Naturalia, the Artificialia and the Scientific succeeded one another and the horizontal plateau that would embrace the whole world”[39]. One may say that the Wunderkammer was simultaneously, “a microcosm and a manner of blurring time”, not unlike the modern museums Donald P. Eziosi described.

The objects conserved in Wunderkammern (or Cabinets of Curiosities) marked representations of the world itself: the cosmos is often represented as a machine, its moving no different from that of a clock’s mechanism. In 1647, Descartes uses the metaphor of a God as a mechanikos or a mechanapoios, which leads to the conclusion that the curiosities displayed in these Wunderkammern influenced this vision. Moreover, John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding expressed the idea that the intellect is “a closet that is wholly sealed against light, with only some little openings left to let in external visible resemblances or ideas of things outside. If the pictures coming into such a dark room stayed there, and lay in order so that they could be found again when needed, it would very much resemble the understanding of a man, as far as objects of sight and the ideas of them are concerned.”, thus linking knowledge to filling a collection of objects, of structuring knowledge through artifacts.

The 18th century is especially interested in the sculptural art, in sculptural metaphors, which link creation and mechanics, unifying natural and artificially fashioned images in an effort of filling a void of ambition: the ambition of conquering all history and displaying it simultaneously. As Susan Pearce writes, “objects, like language and the manipulation of the natural world which gives living space, shelter and food, constitute one of the fundamental ways in which we construct ourselves, both as societies and as individual social animals”[40] which is why the manner in which collections are conceived becomes a fictional disposal of obsessions, fears, desires organized, not unlike the literary depictions of utopian societies. We can see, Pearce adds, “that the collection bears not a continuous or a one-to-one relationship to the source material, but rather a metaphorical relationship to this material, of which it can only be said to be representative in a very particular way.”[41]

As a rule, F. Hr. Michael writes “museums take as their object a reality different from that of which they themselves are a part”[42] because they both “engage in the construction of realities not present in the here and now.”[43] They both gather fragments and create whole different, circular structures based on a different manner of viewing things. In this respect, the topos of the Wunderkammer may be a starting point in finding utopian thinking in art that affirms itself autonomously (like the statue Pygmalion fashioned and fell in love with). The collector sees himself as a Promethean force that reunites incompatible domains, furthering the fantasy of “creating artificial life”[44], having as a guide mark “imitating nature and life to the point of illusion”[45].

 

 

This work was supported by a grant of the Romanian National Authority for Scientific Research, CNCS – UEFISCDI, project number PN-II-ID-PCE-2011-3-0061.

 

 

Notes