Flickering video art illuminates a huge egg in Teylers Museum

The egg seems irresistible. It is so large that an adult rabbit could be born from it. The bird belonging to that clutch is, according to the brief caption in Teylers Museum, the extinct elephant bird of Madagascar. What the animal looked like or when it lived is not told, but it is not difficult to fantasize about a monstrous Pino.

Nature is a source of wonder and alienation in the exhibition Surreal Science That can be seen in the natural history museum in Haarlem. The exhibition brings together in one room 250 natural history objects that the Dutch banker Joris Loudon (b. 1942) collected over the past twenty years in his home in London, from tropical shells to a plaster model of a cut-open squid.

The exhibition is more than a historical Wunderkammer: the Italian visual artist Salvatore Arancio created modern company for Loudon’s naturalia in the form of iridescently glossy ceramic sculptures and a hallucinatory video wall that flickers the display – so that the museum felt obliged to warn of epileptics. to attack.

Multiformity

“I feel a bit like Alice in Wonderland” with Loudon’s objects, Arancio is quoted at the entrance to the exhibition. Collector and artist must both be gripped by the unpredictable multiformity of nature which, as Charles Darwin wrote, “endless forms most beautifulhas produced and continues to produce. Loudon, who has lived in London for over 40 years, was a noted collector of contemporary art until he shifted his field around the turn of the century, saying the art world had become “an investment market.”

The former banker has since found beauty in 19th-century natural history objects that biologists and other scientists used to represent their field at the time. It was mostly educational material, made with impressive craftsmanship in materials such as plaster, papier-mâché or glass.

Many such objects have been damaged or lost due to intensive use, but the enlarged flower models and plaster embryos are now treasured by museums. In 2018, London’s Whitechapel Gallery invited Salvatore Arancio for a joint exhibition. Surreal Science would be on display in Teylers Museum in 2020 – Loudon’s favorite museum, he once said in an interview – but due to the corona pandemic, the exhibition was postponed.

Portuguese warship

The appeal of his objects is perhaps greater now than when they were made. A small ‘Portuguese man-of-war’ (a kind of jellyfish) was blown out of glass 150 years ago by father and son Leopold and Rudolf Blaschka from Dresden, smooth and delicate like a piece of jewellery. Other objects are intriguing as relics of outdated ideas, such as the book Soul Shapes (Alice Murray Dew-Smith, 1890) in which a ‘blue soul’ is depicted (rare, according to the writer) as a round thing with compartments for qualities like ‘enthusiasm’ and ‘courage’.

Arancio’s art can be as organic and alienating as the natural history objects. The Italian artist turned a North American hand ax from Loudon’s collection into a man-sized version in rainbow lacquer – it rhymes beautifully. The same goes for Arancio’s lava lamp-like projection that illuminates a field full of flower models. This is no longer biological material, this is alive.

Arancio’s ceramics don’t always enhance the experience. The egg of the elephant bird would be just as intriguing without the dark green tentacle sculpture that the Italian artist designed for it. Many visitors also seem interested in the objects and try to see them up close. That goes wrong: several times a minute the tightly tuned alarm system of the exhibition starts to beep irritatingly.

Fetal heads

That’s in it Surreal Science little is explained about the objects, which is typical of the artistic approach. And it suits the Teylers Museum, which consciously maintains the atmosphere of 19th-century natural history in its permanent collection, including the brief captions that were common at the time.

It is a choice that satisfies the senses more than curiosity. What would those wooden fetal heads that were sliced ​​through have ever been used for? And what is the origin of that – which to modern eyes seems uncomfortable – image from Myanmar of a naked man, half his skeleton painted on his body?

Arancio’s large video wall that envelops the arrangement enhances the sensoriality. Microscope photos, a petri dish, a rhinoceros, a wobbling worm out of focus: the images and sounds follow each other as if on a trip. It makes the experience Surreal Science to a daring contrast with the serene museum rooms of the Teylers: too superficial to be educational, but exciting enough to continue the tradition of the Wunderkammer.

Also read about the Bonnefanten museum, which now houses an exhibition of plaster objects: In Maastricht, the entire history of art can be seen in plaster