A Perspective on the Cabinet of (in)Curiosities, by Jim Fleming
Introduction
I have always been partial to a cryptic crossword clue. The sleuth in me attracted to the fact that the answer is contained within the clue. You need no more information. So I decided to use this approach to Matthew Talbot-Kelly’s latest work Doctor Kali Gehry’s Cabinet of (in) Curiosities & Ecstatic Nonsense – a dream theatre display spectacle of chimera, folly and tears, (2020). A title replete with diverse references from German Expressionism, Deconstructive Architecture, Peep-Boxes, Cabinets of Curiosities, Kali, Chimera, the meaning of Ecstasy, Nonsense and Folly. All of which I will attempt to make some sense.
A quick description of the piece/installation is what might be described as a maze-like architecture, which contains a series of Peep-Boxes and Cabinets of Curiosities. These in turn house an inventory of objects, created by Talbot-Kelly from fragments he has encountered in the world. The whole is reminiscent of circus and carnival sideshows from the 19th century.
Incidentally, the origins of the word clue/clew is a ball of thread or yarn used to help one out of a maze or labyrinth. One piece within his Cabinet, “Conversations with Gravity” (2020) which Talbot-Kelly describes as “an entanglement of ancestral wools” contained within a bell jar, no doubt alludes to this origin.
Time to delve further into these clues that Talbot-Kelly has created, ball of yarn in hand, and see if I can decode some of their meaning.
Cabinets / Peep Boxes
In the 15th and 16th centuries we see the appearance of Cabinets of Curiosities. These were privately-owned European collections of extraordinary objects, deployed as a means of representing the world. It could refer to the physical cabinet or apparatus which housed a given collection, to the room or series of rooms in which the collection was housed and displayed, or to the collection itself. Collectors were predominately drawn from the upper echelons of society.
Objects included belonged to natural history, geology, ethnography, archaeology, religious or historical relics – sometimes manipulated or faked – as well as works of art and antiquities. They are repositories of the extraordinary, instruments of understanding, with a particular predilection for the exotic, rare, strange or ingenious object. Collectors constructed meaning through their choice of objects displayed and so build their own idiosyncratic version of reality. These Cabinets were originally rooms that contained the whims and interests of their owner. Any collection was the expression of the collector’s taste and personality, in the fullest sense a manifestation of his mind. These objects became ‘semiophores’, that is, they are no longer serving any practical purpose, but rather function as intermediaries between the visible world and the invisible world of meaning beyond. Thus these semiophores predate the Duchampian notion of ready-mades or found objects.
We can see such an idiosyncratic version of this reality, not only in this Cabinet new work, but in Talbot-Kelly’s earliest film, Blind Man’s Eye (2007), where a blind man conjures up past worlds, in his minds eye. These worlds may be constructed from his earthly belongings or maybe they are future worlds of found objects, yet to be found.
In Samuel Quiccheberg’s Inscriptiones, (The First Treatise on Museums, 1565) in highlighting the value of cabinets of curiosities, he demonstrated how organizing objects made their knowledge more accessible; how objects, when juxtaposed or grouped, could tell a story; and how such strategies could enhance the value of any single object.
These historical cabinets are often described as the ‘precursors’ to the contemporary museum which once sought to distance itself both physically and intellectually from the early modern collection. It is interesting that Talbot-Kelly chooses not to ‘exhibit’ in a gallery or museum setting but instead amongst the hoi polloi. Talbot-Kelly’s ‘traveling show’ is closer to the Fluxus vision of art without a home. As George Maciunas, who coined the name Fluxus explained, “The people in Fluxus had understood, as Brecht explained, that ‘concert halls, theaters, and art galleries’ were ‘mummifying’.” Instead, these artists found themselves “preferring streets, homes, and railway stations.” To which we can add shopping malls or empty stores.
Talbot-Kelly is then like an incarnation of a Carny, a P.T. Barnum – breezing into town with his wonder rooms and vaudeville show and is then gone. His “in Kamera/’After the gold rush’ (a Venetian retirement station of a fictitious New York cabbie)”, interactive installation, (2015) is a perfect example. The project, a single seat interactive magic box assembled from local found materials, was installed and uninstalled over eighteen hours – open to the public for only six hours. Like a mandala, or Ozymandias – nothing beside remains.
An oddity amongst the cabinet curiosities of old was the Bezoar – an intestinal mass of indigestible material – which had value because it was believed to be an antidote against poison.
So Talbot-Kelly as artist healer? or snake oil hustler?
The Cabinets of Curiosities have obvious connections to Peep Boxes even though they come from different histories and the latter may predate the cabinets. A peep box, raree show or peep show, as they were variously known, was an exhibition of pictures or objects (or a combination of both), viewed through a small hole or magnifying glass. In 17th and 18th century Europe, it was a popular form of entertainment provided by itinerant showmen. A poor/ordinary man’s cabinet of curiosities? This is evident in Talbot-Kelly’s Still Ready, 2020, where the spectator views a scene through a magnifying glass that covers a small porthole into this interior world.
The earliest known peep box have been attributed to Leon Battista Alberti. Primarily known as an architect, he revolutionized the history of art with his theories of perspective in On Painting (1435). Alberti introduced the idea of a “window on the world”. According to his On Painting treatise, the initial gesture of the painter should be to delineate this window and compose its contents within the frame.
When choosing one perspective, one inevitably excludes others. In his Cabinet work, Talbot-Kelly is prescribing the point of view, directing the action of what is revealed to us on this fragmented stage. In presenting a sequence of mise-en-scènes, as in film, he is shaping a narrative that both, supports and contradicts the narrative within the frame and within the larger Cabinet. He shows the non-theistic viewpointfor what it largely is: banal distracting nonsense. Then again, if we are present, and still, maybe there are mysteries to be revealed.
Some artists from 17th-century Holland, like Samuel Dirksz van Hoogstraten created a type of peep show with an illusion of depth perception by manipulating the perspective of the view seen inside, usually the interior of a room. These peep boxes drew upon perspectival geometry (no doubt aided by Alberti’s theories) and the new science of optics in order to entice their viewers to explore imaginary spaces in a novel way.
The peep box was ‘a construction that also offered various views adding up to make a single world. No single view dominates in the interest of this additive way of piecing together the world’. Hoogstraten’s peep box thus enabled the artist to create the illusion, not only of many worlds contained within a single box, but of multiple worlds seen from two distinct vantage points. Along with multiple and varied framings, these multiple viewpoints and multiple worlds are front and centre in Talbot-Kelly’s work. Each exhibit moment in the cabinet is carefully prescribed, carefully composed within a frame. Further, many times we are viewing these staged moments through glass, glasses, loop magnifiers, screens and other optical instruments. At other times, as with Digital Aquarium 2020 where, through various portholes, we are shown on various monitors and screens, different viewpoints and perspectives of a single object. We have to assemble in our minds eye what we think we have seen.
German Expressionism / Gehry / Deconstructivism
The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) is a film about an insane hypnotist who uses a somnambulist to commit murders. The film takes place in Holstenwall, a shadowy village of twisted buildings and spiraling streets. A mysterious man named Dr. Caligari, a sideshow operator, seeks to present a spectacle at the fair, which features a somnambulist named Cesare. The majority of the film’s story and scenes are memories recalled by an insane narrator, and as a result the distorted visual style is his view of the world. The ‘twist’ at the end is you realise that the story has been told from the perspective of an insane narrator, and therefore you cannot accept anything you have seen as reliable.
In addition to the title, it is clear that Talbot-Kelly’s reference here is the films use of jarring perspectives, sharp-pointed forms, structures and landscapes that lean and twist in unusual angles, an almost cubist, deconstructed perspective. Implicitly, Talbot-Kelly is presenting himself as an unreliable mise-en-scène-ist, a trickster architect. As well, his Cabinet shares with the film an understanding of narrative logic as being largely contingent.
Talbot-Kelly’s twist on Caligari as “Kali-Gehry” are references to a Hindu goddess and the Canadian architect Frank Gehry.
Kali, the Hindu goddess, is usually depicted with blue skin, at least two sets of arms and sticking her tongue out in defiance. She is seen as the goddess of Time, Creation and Destruction. She is the one that bestows moksha, a Hindu concept for emancipation and enlightenment, especially from samsara, the cycle of death and rebirth. The fact that Talbot-Kelly should choose this goddess and her associations are clear indicators that this is how he views his ‘found objects’ and how they are ‘reborn’ into his worlds as something different from their original incarnations. She would also have featured well in a 19th century sideshow some of which featured people with multiple limbs. As well as this cabinets “Inevitable, Kali’s View” (2020), this reference to Kali may also be from Talbot-Kelly’s itinerant travels to Pondicherry, India. Here he produced “falling: catching”, installation, (2014). Bricks and jute-tied scaffolding are arranged as a wall that is seemingly both in the process of tipping over and being ‘caught’. “falling: catching” is a semi-improvised architectural installation that uses some of the most ubiquitous of Indian construction materials to create a ‘frozen moment in time’.
Dr. Caligari may be some sort of alter-ego for Talbot-Kelly himself or the titular character from his own film The Trembling Veil of Bones (2010). There maybe also be a reference to the sleepwalker, someone who can seemingly go about their normal life, albeit limited, while sleeping. To whom might Talbot-Kelly be referring to here in this era of ‘woke’?
When he was young, architect Frank Gehry built miniature cities out of ‘found’ scraps of wood from his grandfather’s hardware store. This sense of play may have inspired him later in his career to use corrugated steel, chain-link fencing, unpainted plywood and other utilitarian or “everyday” materials. Gehry’s pre-Guggenheim style at times seems unfinished or even crude, but his work is consistent with those artists who used ‘found objects’ and non-traditional media to make art. Further, like Talbot-Kelly’s work, Gehry’s buildings are essentially non-perspectival, in that they are multifaceted unfoldings of space and its delineation.
The Pritzker Architecture Prize jury, when describing Gehrys work, might well have been describing the work of Talbot-Kelly. “His buildings (substitute art/films/installations) are juxtaposed collages of spaces and materials that make users appreciative of both the theatre and the back-stage, simultaneously revealed.” A graduate architect, Talbot-Kelly has said “I am engaged in many of the conceptual and physical matters of architecture. My recent projects are becoming more architectural in scale and scope, including this cabinet. I consider this cabinet work as architecture and theatre, and ‘live film’, as much as it is art.”
The references to Gehry and in turn to German expressionism are clear in the deconstruction of Talbot-Kelly’s maze-like playful layout . This destabilizing is achieved by juxtapositioning, fragmentation, unpredictability and controlled chaos within the show.
Ready-Mades / Present-at-Hand / Assemblage
Talbot-Kelly’s work contains all the tropes of Neo-Dada with its combination of playfulness, appropriation and iconoclasm, although his ‘found objects’ may have already encountered their destruction, at least from their original use. This is encountered flotsam and jetsam from a deluge, of 20/21st century materialism. Talbot-Kelly has said “The tidal shore, like the local highways, are my art supply store.”
The ‘found objects’, or ready-mades of the Duchampians, are somewhat different to the ‘found objects’ of Talbot-Kelly. The ready-mades of Duchamp resemble what Martin Heidegger called the ‘ready-to-hand’. Heidegger explains, when we see a hammer we understand its function, its essence as an object but when it is broken, is it still a hammer? We then shift our view from defining an object (a hammer) to perceiving it (its constituent parts). Heidegger describes this broken hammer as a present-at-hand. It is not the way things in the world are usually encountered, when a hammer breaks, it loses its usefulness and appears as merely there, present-at-hand. We have all experienced this when we encounter a tool or object whose purpose at first we are unsure. It is just an object devoid of any preconditions.
In much the same way a Talbot-Kelly ‘found object’ starts out as present-at-hand but is transformed, into some new ready-at-hand, through assemblage and collage. An example of this is Vipers Nest (excellent technology), cabinet seven (2020) with it collection of bits of wire and paper twist-ties, or Melancholic Ring Worm, 2020, where a vacuum hose in a jar is reminiscent of something you might have expected to see at a circus sideshow Useless fragments as art object.
Ecstasy / Nonsense
Ecstasy or ekstasis, from Ancient Greek means “to be or stand outside oneself, a removal to elsewhere”. When we view these other worlds of Talbot-Kelly we are invited to ‘stand outside ourselves’ in order to imagine ourselves within these worlds. And what is it we are viewing? Does Talbot-Kelly suggest, nonsense?
Nonsense would suggest a lack of any coherent meaning, sometimes synonymous with absurdity or the ridiculous (Dada). In the philosophy of language and science, nonsense is distinguished from sense or meaningfulness. For Jacques Derrida, there is no such thing as meaning – it always eludes us and therefore anything goes. Other philosophers have called his view ‘nonsense’.
Nonsense is also an important field of study in cryptography regarding separating a signal from noise. So my plan to ‘decode’ Talbot-Kelly’s work by following the clues in its title may only take me so far as it becomes hard to distinguish the signal from the noise. Referencing John Cage’s “I have nothing to say and I am saying it”, Talbot-Kelly has said “I have nothing to reveal and I am revealing it”.
Spectacle / Chimera / Folly
Talbot-Kelly mentions a ‘spectacle of chimera’. Spectacle may be a reference to Guy Debord’s “The Society of the Spectacle” (1967) who’s Situationist movement had its foundations in Dadaism and Surrealism. Debord’s ‘spectacle’ was a critique of advanced capitalism manifested in advertising, television, film and celebrity, where commodities rule the consumers and even our experiences have become commodified. This is evidenced today within our culture of corporate surveillance capitalism. Talbot-Kelly’s ‘found objects’ are then the cast offs and cast asides of this consumerism. His cabinet is to be presented in a mall, as a pop-up store that sells nothing save vaporous chimera, but displays monetarily worthless refuse as being circumstantially, socially, conceptually, historically, anthropologically valuable.
When Talbot-Kelly uses the word ‘chimera’ he may mean in the greek mythology sense of a creature composed of the parts of multiple animals. An example is one of P.T. Barnum’s many hoaxes, the ‘Feejee Mermaid’ – a monkey’s body grafted onto the body of a fish. But there are human chimera also. A fetus that has absorbed its dead twin in the womb is a human chimera, having two sets of DNA. As are people who have had bone marrow transplants. In some cases, all their blood cells will match the DNA of the donor. In the 19th century there was a traveling sideshow that featured an Indian boy, Lalloo, with two sets of limbs said to be a boy and girl mixed together, reminiscent of the goddess Kali. In Talbot-Kelly’s earlier films, Blind Mans Eye, and Bones, there is a character, Heartman, part human, part machine, part avian, that is a chimera. Although a digital/virtual character, you get the sense that he is made up from leftover fragments in Talbot-Kelly’s digital bins. In its broadest definition most of Talbot-Kelly’s ‘curiosities’ are chimeras, being composed of disparate parts, illusory, wildly imaginative and somewhat, implausible.
Talbot-Kelly’s mention of folly may be related to the french word folie and to the nonsense in the title but I think there is definitely a resonance with architectural follies, primarily built as decoration but in appearance suggest some practical form of use. Eighteen century versions were often mock Roman temples, ruined abbeys or Egyptian pyramids but they are also not easily defined. These ‘architects’ were not constrained by form or function but only by their imagination. Ireland, Talbot-Kelly’s birthplace, was once considered to have more follies an acre than anywhere else in the world. This can be explained that during the Irish famines of the 17th and 18th centuries, in order to provide work for the needy and not deprive existing workers, follies were constructed. Some of these, roads in the middle of nowhere that went nowhere and piers in the middle of bogs were like early conceptual, environmental art projects.
While Talbot-Kelly ‘Cabinet’ is not simply a folly it follows some of the the same principles by resisting attempts at definition. Talbot-Kelly may want us to believe or maybe he believes himself that his sideshow is a pointless folly but this is not the case. This unwillingness to be defined is what marks Talbot-Kelly’s work as essential.
Theatre of Dreams
I have left until last the most understandable phrase of Talbot-Kelly’s work title but I believe it encapsulates the whole of the work because first and foremost this piece can be seen as theatre.
There is a line to follow from Talbot-Kelly’s work from Alfred Jarry’s ‘pataphysics’ and Antonin Artaud’s ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ and through to the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’ which all deal with absurdist characters who are in crisis because their world is incomprehensible. They are trapped by some ominous force that they can not understand. Their world defies science and logic. Talbot-Kelly’s film characters can be seen in this Beckettian light. The chaotic world outside of ‘Bones’ clockmakers shop in ‘The Trembling Veil of Bones’ or the internal anarchic world of the old man in ‘Blind Man’s Eye’. Artaud spoke of ‘anarchic dissociation’ and ‘profound anarchy’ as two of his key principles in his new form of theatre. These ideas spoke to the practices of composer John Cage who heavily influenced Fluxus. He understood an artwork as a site of interaction between artist and audience. He privileged the process of creating over the finished product. This is evident in earlier work by Talbot-Kelly’s where he held ‘closings’ of his installations and encouraged dialogue on his work as it was being created in situ.
Artaud described his ‘Theatre of Cruelty’ as a “communion between actor and audience in a magic exorcism; gestures, sounds, unusual scenery, and lighting combine to form a language, superior to words, that can be used to subvert thought and logic and to shock the spectator into seeing the baseness of his world.” Talbot-Kelly’s attention to mise-en-scène is a clear indication that he also considers his work theatre along these Artuadian lines. He views the contents of his cabinets as, elevated refuse, provoking us to confront our materialism.
There are also parallels with Bertolt Brecht’s ‘estrangement effect’, where the spectator is confronted with subjects they would be used to seeing in other surroundings, which is furthermore connected to Freud’s concept of the ‘uncanny’, where something is both familiar and strange at the same time. This, I believe, can be expanded to include the objects in Talbot-Kelly’s ‘Cabinet’. We recognise Talbot-Kelly’s ‘found objects’ as familiar but then they are assembled into something strange yet familiar. His sideshow and objects therein may look familiar but you would not expect to see them arranged in such a jarring and theatrical manner let alone as a store in a shopping mall.
In one of his manifestos ‘Theatre and the Plague’, Artaud later declared that his theatre is designed to be a place of ritual, ceremony and healing; both church and hospital. A place where an audience could both contract the ‘plague’ and be cured of it. Talbot-Kelly’s Red Balloon, 2020, an inflated blue surgical glove found in our current Covid-19 era, is presented to us on a plinth as something to be revered. Quite timely in this era of pandemic and plinths and recalls the earlier question of Talbot-Kelly as possible healer, through laughter from the ridiculous if not literal medicine.
Artaud saw his contemporary theater as decadent because it had “lost the feeling on the one hand for seriousness and on the other for laughter”. And there is humor throughout Talbot-Kelly’s work. He presents us with objects with titles like Inevitable, Kali’s View, and then lists it as being made from ‘alphanumerically embossed metal plate, rusted blue pipe, sliced dollars, nickel shavings, quad armed helping hands, pince nez glasses’. The result hints at the common phenomena Pareidolia, that is to anthropomorphize, to see human faces in everyday objects. Or in Vipers Nest, mentioned earlier, ironically made from the not so dangerous materials of paper, plastic and wire ties or (deep fake) Seven Dwarfs, 2020, made from a flattened egg carton and seven seemingly random fragments.
This dichotomy of seriousness and humour is evident in the ‘pataphysical’ work of Alfred Jarry, a precursor of the Dadaist movement, Artaud and the ‘Theatre of the Absurd’, who described ‘papaphysics’ as ‘the science of imaginary solutions’. Others have described it as a “absurdist pseudo-philosophy/ideology” or a “form of conceptual flatulent hot air that hinges on the idea of utter nonsense”, with which I think Jarry would be very happy. It also resonates with Talbot-Kelly’s “I have nothing to reveal and I am revealing it”, which is both a meaningful phrase and nonsense.
Artaud attempted to create a non-written play with a new kind of language; a physical, visual and pictorial language. Regarding Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams, Artaud stresses another important element towards this new visual and language. This does not mean that the theatre of cruelty is a theatre of the unconscious; it means that in dreams, speech is transformed into images. It should be a theatre of dreams.
Conclusion
If the curiosity cabinet existed to demystify the world, contemporary art often seeks to problematise it, to obscure it, to re-mystify it. But an artist is also someone who is capable of unveiling the invisible.
Talbot-Kelly collects objects to resurrect them as new curiosities only at a later stage (when the sideshow have moved to its next venue) to leave them behind at the dump to reclaim their non-status. Talbot-Kelly’s work is like a modern day ‘vanitas’, a symbolic work of art showing the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death.
His work also functions as a time machine, recalling past cultural practices hidden beneath layer after layer of referentiality. This referentiality, as I have tried to allude to, is sufficiently entangled, however, that the practices of one era merge seamlessly with those of another in a complex web of associations which eschew neat compartmentalisation or categorisation.
But Talbot-Kelly’s work is not merely an echo of past practice, but rather the continuation and transformation of a cultural performance which may be considered to parallel those of the early modern collector. Both creator and collector, Talbot-Kelly is like some kind of time traveller as his ‘contemporary’ artwork has resonance across multiple temporalities, offering us a glimpse into the past – a pastiche – of whispering ancestors and also a glimpse into his own past of art making, film making and architecting.
So is Talbot-Kelly like some Marquis of old, master of the house? Or some itinerant shaman, traveling conjurer, who, having mastered artifice and illusion, is out to fool the world? or heal it?Talbot-Kelly has said ‘I am the director of this bonkers theatre of the absurd, and you the viewer, become a player on the stage, and therefore complicit in its absurd intentions”. P.T. Barnum often quoted the lines from Hudibras, by Samuel Butler, “Doubtless the pleasure is as great, Of being cheated as to cheat;” It seems like it takes two to tango.