missed assignment fm week 1

1- In Cabinets to Museum the Tradescant collection is discussed. Why is it so significant in terms of who was allowed to view it? It was known by its owner as the “ark” – interestingly zoo as also often described is “arks.” Why would there be this parallel?

It is so significant of who was allowed to view the Tradescant collection because it existed outside of high ranking and esoteric circles. The Tradescant collection was the first to be open to the public without discrimination of age, status, or gender. This is significant because it invigorates a public educational awareness to the zoological world on a greater scale beyond economically sound academics and wealthy aristocracy. It pined upon public exhibition without prejudice, for enrichment, educational purposes and increased awareness of the natural world. It is known as an “ark” because of its classificatory and encyclopedic arrangement of animals into a certain order for the understanding of the natural world. The museum is parallel to the zoo’s common definition to an “Ark” because of its artificially controlled gathering and arranging of the world’s natural wonders in an understandably linking order by means of classification.  It resembles a zoo in its structure of these classifications of “naturaalia” into subcategories in hoped of discerning a organizational link between a large diverse collection of taxonomy/animals.  Zoos are also referred to as “living museums.”

2- What is the primary purpose of a Wunderkammer as described in the readings? Is it simply to collect odd things like a souvenir case of circus show, or something more? Explain in some conceptual detail. In your explanation reference the Dawn of Zoology readings about early natural historians such as Aristotle and Pliny the Elder that you read about tat the very beginning of the semester.

Wunderkammers operated both on a mode of entertainment and on a mode of arrangement and creating links. Despite amassing a seemingly unconnected overview of natural and artificial “exotics” there were attempts to create ordered visual and logical links in their aesthetic arrangement, sometimes without knowledge of history or context. In the same way that Aristotle tried to create a hierarchy out of animals he was able to acquire and even animals of which he’d only heard tale of, he imposed a kind of order, dictating an understandable flow to the world at large within a consolidated volume or space.

3- How are Mark Dion’s cabinets of curiosities similar to the Tradescant one? And how is it perhaps also very different both materially and conceptually? Discuss.

They both focus on ordering arrangements of aesthetics and assumed relationality, creating peculiar conversations with one another. However, Mark Dion isn’t involved in creating a truth, he is involved in posing questions of truth by means of commenting on the act of collection and arrangement itself. He engages the viewers to discern their own interpretations, histories, and links. He models them off of other cabinet collections, based on pre-existing philosophies and aesthetics of previous collectors, but not within the same aims. He acts within a tradition of wunderkammers, but does so in order to both participate as well as critique by taking creative license on the relationships invented.

4- The essay Why Museums? makes the general case for the importance of museum-based natural histroy today. How does the organization, rationale, and functionality of the museum as they describe it differ from the wunderkammer of the past? Out of the various examples they discuss regarding the practical scientific use of museums pick one or two you thought as most interesting or surprising and describe why they caught your attention.

The organization of these useful collections are highly specialized to inform particular categories of threat and can be used as tools to assess and rectify difficult situations.

The first one that stood out to me are the public health and safety section in regards to the CDC. Disease has been cause for serious, world ending paranoia and panic. With the rise of newly adapted “super-viruses” that resist medicinal/technological treatment, it’s no wonder we have buried insecurities that give rise to apocalyptic/zombie virus related pop culture. It is reassuring that there is a facility to monitor these changes in diseases, but also perhaps a but terrifying in the sense that that same facility could be used to engineer much worse. 

The second part that caught my eye was the agricultural segment. It also operates along the line of engineered threats such as bioterrorism. Food supplies are taken for granted, though they make all the difference in conflict and population sustainability. Warlords in Somalia have often used hunger to control. The understanding of catastrophic agricultural threats is a particularly important center of study because it effects large scale populations of people beyond border and class. Historically, events like the dustbowl, though not biological, are constant reminders of what hunger inflicts upon people.