Curiosity INTRO.Faye

C U R I O
O S I T Y

C U R I O S I T Y

C L X X V

A Paper Cabinet

P i p p a S k o t n e s
G w e n v a n E m b d e n F r i t h a L a n g e r m a n

Cura tin g co l l ec t ion s at the University of Cape Town

P h o t o g r a p h y b y S t e p h e n I n g g s

LLAREC: Series in Visual History LLAREC: The Museum Workshop at the University of Cape Town 31-37 Orange Street 8001 Cape Town South Africa

First edition Photographic donors: Orms Pro Photo Warehouse and PICTO, Cape Town Repro and Fine Art Printing: Scan Shop, Cape Town ISBN 0-620-33345-6

Dedicated to Lucy Lloyd,
Stephen Jay Gould, Stephen Greenblatt and all other astonishing minds.

C O N T E N T S

A s t o n i s h m e n t

Astonishment

A l t e r a t i o n s

Alterations

t i c A u l r a o n s

Articulations

r i B l l i a n c e

Brilliance

e a B u t y

Beauty

C e n s o r s h i p

Censorship

C o n s i l i e n c e

Consilience

C o n c e n t r a t i o n s

Concentrations

e r i s v i t D y

Diversity

y i a r D

Diary

o c D u m e n t

Document

e n e s s x p E a n s i v

Expansiveness

f f E l u v i a

Effluvia

n c E a p s u l a t i o n

Encapsulation

e n o s i r F c s

Forensics

u g F a c i t y

Fugacity

o u F n d a t i o n s

Foundations

e n G e r a t i o n

Generation

a t G h e r i n g

Gathering

e r i H t a g e

Heritage

w )

i s t H o r c i s m ( n e

Historicism (new)

n I c u b a t i o n

Incubation

s I o l a t i o n

Isolation

u J d g e m e n t

Judgement

K i n g d o m s

Kingdoms

w l e d K g e n s o

Knowledges

L i b e r a t i o n s

Liberations

e

u s L t r

Lustre

L i b r a r i e s

Libraries

O C N T E N T S

y

e m M o Mr emory

k i a n r g M Marking o b M i Ml i t oy bility o t N e Ns otes e o N t No n eoy tony r i g O i On ra it gi o inn ation p e O n Oi n pg es nings b f O u Os c ba ft ui o scn ation e r P s Pp ee rc spt i ev ctives o s P Pi t oi o sin ti n ong ing e s t i c a u r P l Pa ar ri s ta ict ui o lan risation u a Q d Qr i uv ai du rm ivium u a Q r Qa n ut ai rn ae ntine e s R o Rn ea sn oc ne as nces e p R l Ri c ea pt li io cn ats ions e c t i o n e s R u Rr er surrections i m S Si il mi t u ild ite ude t h a n h d S o Sr horthand u S b Sj ue c bt ji ef ci c tia ft ii co an tis ons

y

e r a s T u Tr easury

n m U Ua k ni mn g aking i s i V o Vn ision t u r i o V s Vi t iy rtuosity o n W d We r onder k r W Wo ork
| x |xa am m- -k ka a- -! a !au u e a Y Yr n ei an rng ing o o Z Zm oo or mp h oi rs pm hism

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A Paper Cabinet: Curating The Left-overs

In the 1990s three South African courts, the Magistrates’, the Supreme and the Appeal courts heard arguments for and against a book being a work of art. The defendant in the case argued that a book could simultaneously be an artwork and that if it were an artwork then its ‘artness’ was its primary identity, its ‘bookness’ secondary. The plaintiff argued that a book, however attractively compiled, was just a book and could, by no stretch of the imagination be considered art. In the end, the Appeal Court ruled it was less concerned with the definitions of what constituted book or artwork. If an object looked like a book, then it fell under the legal restraints pertaining to books, regardless of whether it was also an artwork. The identity or ontology of the object was determined by its appearance. For us as artists and curators, definitions and identities of objects are important, indeed, often central to how we understand our own practice. A collection of objects curated into a display may be equally convincingly argued to be a book as a sculpture. An installation of paper works and projections could be described as printmaking, a series of photographs as painting. For us, the definition of an artwork has less to do with its material presence than with the history of the discipline it brings with it into the zone of display in which it is encountered.
All three of us graduated from Michaelis as ‘master’ printmakers. All three of us developed a sense of what constitutes the identity of printmaking from the way in which it was taught and practised within the department. Printmaking at Michaelis originated with Katrine Harries in the 1950s and she taught at the school for more than 20 years. She was trained as a lithographer and designer. Printmaking in her day was a discipline that developed through intense technical training and was nurtured by her great love of lithography and etching. She would sit on her high chair, in her red checked apron, puffing away on a Lucky Strike plain cigarette, drawing on one of the Solenhofen limestones (p71) she had arranged for the school to import from Germany while students ground the stone surfaces or polished copper plates to a mirror-like shine. We would make prints that perfected the technique of hardground or aquatint, or revealed a nuanced understanding of the relationship between water and grease, gum Arabic and chalk. Our concern then was to produce images that realized each discrete process in the making of prints. The taxonomy of processes was as important as the images we described through it.
When Jules van de Vijver took over the teaching of printmaking at the School in the
1970s, emphasis was diverted away from the idea of the print as iconographic component of the illustrated book, and towards its realization as a series of individual images that make up the artwork as a whole. He insisted on the importance of the

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tradition of printmaking and the origins of prints in serialised imagery, reminding us of the tradition of the portfolio or book of prints, exemplified by artists such as Goya or Picasso. Printmaking became less about technique than about a way of conceiving of an artwork – as an object or collection of objects where each component depended for its meaning and significance on all the others, and where understanding the work was about ‘reading the images’ in a circular, rather than a linear way. This sense of the past use of printmaking pervades its current use. Today at Michaelis, printmakers see themselves as curators of images and objects, producing books, portfolios, installations and video. As printmakers, their three-dimensional projects or curated displays depend as much on the history of their discipline as they do on a break with its traditions. We three curators of this Curiosity CLXXV exhibition, as teachers and graduates, see ourselves as both products of our history and as participants in shaping it. What we have produced here is as much about printmaking and an understanding of its taxonomy as it is about curatorship, museology, installation art and book-making; as much about our sense of what art is as about the diverse and curious nature of the scholarship in the university.
It should come as no surprise, therefore, to discover that this publication, which has been produced to accompany the exhibition Curiosity CLXXV, is neither a book nor a catalogue. Rather, it is a paper cabinet – a curated collection of the images and texts that have been assembled in the preparation of this exhibition. As a paper cabinet, it depends less on the linear readability of its sequence of pages, and more on the visual delight of its layout and the play between the various taxonomies that both govern display and describe the disciplines and curiosities we have sought to represent. Inevitably there will be areas of over- and under-representation. What we have featured here has as much to do with what seemed to us important and fascinating as with the unexpected discoveries that both appealed to our individual visual sensitivities and teased and challenged our expectations and preconceptions. Representing 175 years of the history of a university is, of course, an impossible task, or at least impossible for us in the seven-month period we researched and assembled it (and produced this publication). We hope we will be forgiven for what will surely seem to some as inexcusable oversights. Yet while our attention may have focused more closely on some areas of scholarship or creativity, we hope that we have been able to use our own obsessions with objects, taxonomies and display to play with ideas and insights that bridge disciplines or dart through them and nurture curiosity.
We began this project in May 2004. At the start we had the good fortune to make our first appointment with Professor Deon Knobel, head of Forensic Pathology. His was

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an environment full of curiosity and curiosities and his willingness to share his considerable experience and understanding of his discipline seemed to be part of the quality of generosity that characterises his academic life. This first visit was thrilling – it convinced us at once that the process of gathering material would be full of surprises. Like Deon (although no one is quite like Deon) we found other remarkable thinkers and generous scholars who gave us access to their ideas and objects. We carried a great many things out of people’s offices. We scrounged through drawers, browsed bookshelves, waited while keys were found to open long-locked storerooms, and we recovered treasures which ranged from lead blocks in a physics storeroom (p22), to stuffed mice from an office desk (p121), a photograph of Richard Nixon with Elvis Presley (p124), and precious documents from the UCT libraries (p42, 176) and the Irma Stern Museum (p182).
Many of these objects when displayed immediately become fascinating mnemonics able to refer to a range of ideas and stories. Others were, as we frequently found ourselves declaring, were ‘pressed into service’. There is nothing, for example, particularly curious or informative about old boxes of discarded battery glass casings. Yet when organized into a cabinet about ‘replication’ and reshaped by light, mirror and reflection, they become quite transformed and their original function is displaced in the interests of representing something entirely different (p141).
Our original impetus for the mounting of this exhibition was to produce something to celebrate the university’s 175th anniversary. We wanted to draw together collections of objects that could represent the various activities that characterise a university. Right from the beginning it was clear that UCT does not have a ‘culture’ of collecting and curating. While there are some established collections like the Drennan Anatomy Museum, the Bolus Herbarium and, of course, the libraries that are cared for by dedicated curators and librarians, there are uncurated collections in almost all departments. Most of these do not have keepers and much has been lost or destroyed over the years for want of proper attention and adequate funding. There were a number of places we arrived at only to be told that the whole storeroom had been cleared out and all the ‘old stuff’ thrown away. In some, old teaching collections or small museums were shut down and their contents decaying. In the end, it would be true to say that what we worked with in much of this exhibition is the ‘left-over’.
Which brings us to the moment in this introduction where we must acknowledge our debts. We have, of course, been influenced by dozens of scholars, museologists and artists, but a few require special mention here. The idea of the left-over, borrowed from Stephen Greenblatt’s discussion of early modern debates about the fate of the Eucharist (the body of Christ) when swallowed and digested and eventually expelled,

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has illuminated all our discussions about objects and what they come to mean long after they have served their purpose or been appropriated for another. His various discussions on representation have, equally, been foundational.
Lucy Lloyd, whose manuscripts constitute one of the most important collections at
UCT, has continued to inspire as both a scholar and a woman who prevailed against all odds. We thought of her many times and of the many months she spent sending her manuscript backwards and forwards from Cape Town to London by boat as we rushed this book from page lay-out to press in a mere three weeks.
We have drawn on Stephen Jay Gould and his creative collaborations with
Rosamond Purcell. We were inspired by the way in which he has drawn together subjects and ideas not usually discussed on the same page or even in the same book and made them communicate with each other in fascinating ways. There have also been many visual sources we have referenced. These include the work of Marcel Duchamp, Joseph Cornell, Peter Greenaway and Joseph Beuys, and collections of the Wellcome Trust in London and La Specola in Florence. Our great source of inspiration, and indeed the one thing we reference most, is the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Subjected to much criticism, debate and argument about the display of objects and the politics of representation, the Pitt Rivers Museum remains for us an extraordinary place. While we have engaged critically with its methods of display through our own display choices, we have also tried to pay tribute to the wonder of objects and the value of collecting them that it exemplifies.
Finally, this exhibition includes three bodies of work made specially for it, a trinity which will be its own left-over and become part of the art collection of the university. The first is an assembly of cases created by artists who have, or have had a connection with the university. These are small gems, treasures placed in the centre of the exhibition, each representing the visual as a site of meaning, creativity and imagination. The second is a series of four works created by the three of us, ‘Filing the Archive’ (p153), ‘Place Holders’ (p28), ‘175 Chalkboard Dusters’ (p171) and ‘References’ (p188), which provide a structure for the exhibition and refer directly to the activities that are central to a university. These left-overs with the third body of work, this ‘Paper Cabinet’, will ensure that Curiosity CLXXV survives its end, enduring like the medieval relic described by Caroline Bynum as ‘a shimmering reflection of eternity’!

Pippa Skotnes
Gwen van Embden Fritha Langerman

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‘Let him who does not know how to astonish go work in the stables!’

Giambattista Marino (1569-1628)

There are places and things in the world that truly astonish. The painted caverns of Lascaux, the shelters of the Drakensberg and the Duccio altarpiece at Sienna all astonish for they represent the full realization of the human imagination at a time before the written word, before architecture, before surgery. The bronze feet of the charioteer at Delphi astonish, as do the island of Torcello with its church and the small sheet-gold rhinoceros from the citadel of Mapungubwe. Each resonates with the extraordinary presence of human creativity.

But it is not only these undoubted works of art that astonish. In a tiny cardboard box in an office on the third floor of the Beattie Building at the University of Cape Town nestle the bones of an infant Rock Dassie. Its ribs as slender as toothpicks, the dassie is the closest (if distant) living relative of the African elephant. But this is not its most remarkable feature. When John Parkington (Professor of Archaeology) proposed, in the 1970s, a novel theory of the seasonal mobility of late Stone-Age hunter-gatherers, dassies’ remains were able to confirm it. Born in late October and early November, and with teeth erupting in regular and predictable episodes, dassies are archaeological clocks – a comforting presence of certainty in the often disputed and contested calendar of human mobility.

A l t e r a t i o n s A r t i c u l a t i o n s

1960

2002

1848

UCT economics student Philip Kgosana leads
30 000 people from Langa to Cape T o wn to protest against the Sharpeville killings.
In an international survey of vice-chancellors published in the UK’s Financial Times, UCT is rated in the top 23 universities worldwide.
Langham Dale is brought out from Oxford to occupy the chair of English Classics.

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Things of Enchantment In 1594 Francis Bacon listed among the requirements of an educated person – a library, a garden, provision for rare animals, birds and fish, and also a ‘huge cabinet wherein whatsoever the hand of man by exquisite art or engine has made rare in stuff, form or motion; whatsoever singularity, chance and the shuffle of things has produced … may be kept; shall be

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sorted and included’. The Renaissance cabinet with all its diversity could be interpreted as a microcosm of the known universe. The arrangement of objects within these cabinets, however, was not intended to simulate the order of nature but was governed mainly by outward appearances. Divination, signs and wonders prevailed over rational argument and deduction. During the eighteenth century the intellectual environment of the Enlightenment fundamentally changed the way knowledge was constructed. Systematic order, empirical methods of observation, classification and description, brought the miscellany of known things into an emerging framework of scientific discipline and discourse.
Through the following centuries, the quest for knowledge continued to produce an extraordinary array of artefacts that constitute a tangible record of the ideas and practices that gave rise to them. The enchantment of the object, like the archaeological site, lies in its physical presence and its promise of revelation. But the unknown is revealed only through human engagement and interpretation – ideas and artefacts are inseparable. While the conceptual domain may still occupy the intellectual high-ground, the materiality of objects can claim aesthetic and sensory ascendancy.
Curiosity CLXXV brings together objects of knowledge that have been kept in UCT departments over the decades, either by design or default. Re-positioned literally and conceptually by three artist-curators, these objects have been transformed within new taxonomies that simultaneously

1930

1995

2002

Professor Igor Barashenkov receives a National Research Foundation ‘A’ rating for his math- ematics of solitons, the moving wave phenome- non that underpins the field of fibre optics.
Patricia Massey graduates from UCT as a doctor and goes on to become a leader in the obstetrics profession in Cape T o wn.
UCT’s first on-line course – on relativity—is launched on the worldwide web.

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resonate with and undermine conventional classificatory schema. Having mined the university in pursuit of the memorable, the forgotten, the curious, and the souvenir, the curators have presented their finds in ways that elicit interest and provoke imagination.
At first glance the exhibition suggests the quintessential Victorian museum. Antique cabinets – many of them – echo the spatial arrangement of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford, in which a vast collection of objects is arranged typologically to show the evolution of formal attributes from the rudimentary to the most sophisticated. The classification of objects in this way, in keeping with scientific ideas of the time, proclaimed that the evolution of culture could be inferred from the material development of artefacts. By arranging objects typologically, origins could be determined and theories of progressive evolution affirmed. Curiosity CLXXV affirms a curatorial vision of a different kind. Formal taxonomy has been subverted by the bricoleur-curators to be replaced by an eclectic juxtaposition of things that defies easy classification. In a neat inversion of the ethnographic gaze, the university has become an exotic field, and there is no longer a division between observer and observed but a reflexive awareness that the extraordinary is ever present in the familiar. Surrounded by artefacts that reflect the material history of UCT, the viewer is invited to look anew at the wondrous creativity of intellectual endeavour.
Curiosity CLXXV reminds us that physical presence cannot be fully circumscribed by description or classification. Material things appeal to the senses and evoke many meanings – herein lies their enchantment.

Patricia Davison
Iziko Museums of Cape Town