Intervenciones artísticas a partir del concepto y prácticas discursivas en los gabinetes de curiosidades

Abstract

Collecting is linked to Art History, but also to magic, to wonders, to the extraordinary, categories attached, by ritual or myth, to the objects themselves, but also to the places that housed them. Although over time they also played a sumptuary role, this doctoral thesis focuses on wonder as a quality inherent to the identity of a model of knowledge that has been lost in time. We analyse the cabinets of curiosities -Wunderkammern- as predecessors in the exercise of a type of collecting, but also from its design as a device, which culminates in modern day museums. These cabinets participate in the popular taxonomies analysed by Michael Foucault in his studies The Archaeology of Knowledge and must be understood as a non-agreed formula prior to what in his cultural criticism he considered disciplinary devices -museums, prisons, sanatoriums, schools, etc. -. In recent decades, these museums have been the work scene for institutionally critical artists to deconstruct the coercive formulas hidden behind the formulas for collection, ordering and disposition of objects in space. The attraction towards the unusual and wonderful was, in fact, one of the key signs of the scientific zeal that awoke in the men and women of the European Renaissance the spark for collecting and that was reflected in the Wunderkammern or cabinets of curiosities. Ecclesiastical treasures are an undoubtable precedent, with objects loaded with extraordinary or propitiatory properties, but also in the search for the wonderful, rare and unusual, which fueled a time of great scientific and geographical discoveries. This trend, which continued until the Enlightenment in the 18th century, shaped specific ways of understanding objects and ordering them: the macrocosm was reduced to a microcosm at home. After its disappearance, it was followed by the historical avant-garde, particularly under the gaze of the surrealists and dadaists, that signaled the loss of that gaze that they claimed was linked to chance, the absurd or the subconscious. This thesis analyses some European cabinets of curiosities in the form of case studies to understand their typologies, evolution and the personal way in which each of the collectors understood the world from their cabinet. The same methodology leads us to analyse a selection of avant-garde exhibitions, such as the dadaist exhibition at the Montaigne Gallery in Paris in 1921 or the Exposition surréaliste d'objects at the Charles Ratton Gallery (Paris, 1936) to generate parallels with the cabinets and their ways of displaying, ordering and understanding objects. As of the 60s in the 20th century, with the rise of neo-Dadaism in the so-called neo-avant-garde, countless artists also reflect this lost tradition in their way of generating and understanding their pieces. This work traces links between 16th century collections and the avant-garde and contemporary art ways of ordering. As a doctoral thesis within the disciplinary field of Fine Arts, our contribution focuses on three artistic proposals that, culminating in the form of exhibitions, have been carried out in recent years. Artistic practice is presented as a methodological tool that gives creative body to this research work and is useful for a specific research field such as Fine Arts.