Cabinets

I wish I could remember what I was thinking when I write some of the things I later find on my to do list. I came across this note (below) the other day and the exact thought behind it is a bit of a mystery - but I'm going to try and jot some thoughts down anyway because it sounds interesting. 

I think maybe what I would have been thinking is how the cabinet is a place where artifacts live, and that this display method has such established connotations with the museum that it automatically impacts the manner in which its contents are perceived. Museums are inherently about the past, exhibiting objects once belonging to people and civilizations long dead, or the skeletons and preserved bodies of natural history specimens,  

I thought I might take a look at some artists who have used cabinets in their work to analyse their function as art objects and curatorial decisions...

Kate MccGwire - FINE (Fucked Up, Insecure, Neurotic and Emotional), 2012

Firstly, the feather sculptures of Kate MccGwire, which are catergorised in their own section of the artist's website as 'Cabinet Works'. I presume that each piece is made for a specific cabinet to determine its size and shape, which is perhaps quite a different approach to museums (what comes first, the artifact or the museum case?). There is an interesting contrast between these works and MccGwire's installations which, although are created to follow the architecture of the space, are a lot more organic, less balanced in their form and composition. MccGwire's decisions to make the pieces sit quite large in the cases conveys a sense of cramped incarceration, making them even more uncomfortable to view. Presenting them in this way, with the connotations of natural history vitrines also makes them even more animal-like and therefore more uncanny. Although the shapes appear as if living beings, I think they still agree with my note and speak somehow of death, and perhaps more broadly about death in the museum context; the sculptures take the place of skeletons or taxidermy specimens and reveal a unnerving, even sinister aspect to the museum's encasement of the dead.

Cornelia Parker - The Maybe, 1995

Tilda Swinton sleeping in a museum vitrine is unusual (not least) because she is a living artifact, but in a way she is almost as sentient as the feather structures of MccGwire. The work would not have nearly as many connections with death if the performance had not occurred in a museum case; although sleeping is naturally associated with mortality and fragility, here Swinton is in the territory of the dead. As 'The Maybe' also includes more conventional museum exhibits, such as artifacts from the Freud museum, Swinton is related to these other works through the cabinet. The function of the vitrine here, and probably in every work, is ultimately to direct attention; in this case it is not just to her form, but also to her existence. 

Mark Dion - Tate Thames Dig, 1999

I always think of Mark Dion first when ( think of cabinets because I remember his talk I heard in first year. His way of using them as a space to bring things together, to create connection is what is most interesting. The cabinet is a kind of device to put authority on a collection of objects that might not have immediately obvious relationships. I think how this relates to death is perhaps less obvious, but because (in this work above at least)  it is using objects that have been found discarded and buried underwater, it is as if they have been resurrected and the cabinet is a means to preserve them. I am reminded of the idea that we are all equal in death, and this is also what the cabinet does by exhibiting things slide by side as if there is no hierarchy between the objects. 

Damien Hirst - No Art; No Letters; No Society, 2006

Damien Hirst and Death go together so intrinsically that it is perhaps difficult for me to forget what I already know of his work and analyse what the cabinets themselves bring to the work. Although, perhaps the cabinet is part of the language that Hirst has built up, so that within his practice alone, the cabinet or vitrine becomes naturally associated with death and mortality. In the work above, the cabinet is almost a found object, as if it has been removed off the walls of a chemists with the contents inside and put into the context of the art gallery. Thisis different to all the other examples I've looked at, as they are reliant on the cabinet being a means to display, something that has been acquired or constructed after the object or artwork itself; however, Hirst's cabinet here is intrinsic, irreplaceable, ingrained in the meaning of the piece with no chronology of what came first.