Cabinets of Curiousity

The unwashed masses

Substanceshadow

Leading on from the British Museum, F is serendipitously finishing up the touches on an essay about the British Museum and got me to scan this Punch and Judy comic for her.

Hopefully I'll get the time to photograph a few spreads from her books before she gives them back to the library.

Filthy working class. So very undeserving to be in the presence of great art

Edit: Its of the National Gallery of London not the British Museum. But stil, how about those undeserving poor people?

Posted on October 17, 2007 in Cabinets of Curiousity | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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The Kings Library

Archaeology_2

Natural

Case

Civilisation

Classifying

Felt

Holophuskion

Merman

Leading on from the London photos, and with a little help thanks to Anna Coren, I thought I would finally get around to showing sketches I made at the Kings Library from The British Museum. Having been fascinated with stone tools and other evolutionary artefacts, and a recent interest in Wunderkammers, I was like a little child in a lolly shop when I found this part. Except it wasn't a lolly shop, it was a museum, and it was full of old oddities. I'm kinda happy that my camera got stolen so I had to sketch out the interesting parts, it forced me to pay attention to the things that were there, things that were worth noting. The room itself was amazing; absolutely huge and full of amazing things, presented in beautiful wood panelling, glass, and everything was labelled with great care. At one point this woman was showing off a stone tool, and said that people could touch it, but this guy got there before I did, and then I wussed out and didn't hang around to touch. Which I really regret, because not only was it 100,000 odd years old, it would have made it the oldest man made thing I'm ever likely to touch.

Plus it probably would have killed a mammoth or something.

So, I guess now would be the time to introduce a new category to this blog: Cabinets of Curiousity. Starting with this post, I'll be taking a look at Wunderkammers of al sorts throughout town and out of town. Blogs seem to be a modern day equivalent of them, except that you don't have to be a rich white guy to have one (although I'm sure you could have some whinge about global distribution of riches and that in the big picture, relatively rich white guys are the only ones with blogs, but we won't).

They're kinda the inspiration for this blog; I was going to have some really detailed and scientific method of tagging and categorizing everything, based on what I found at the Science Museum in London (more of that to come), but meta-tagging and multiple associations seemed kinda easier. Presenting things that you have found in your travels, the connections that they make by being next to each other, and the illustrations that they make between those connections, wether internal on this blog, or external in relation to other blogs, just seem to relate to Wunderkammers in some 21st century kinda way. There's a killer quote in the recent Gibson book Spook Country about that, but I couldn't find it when I did my original review.

But I digress a little bit. Using this as my starting point, I'll be starting to look at display cases, museums, shop windows and online. Anything that has elements of Cabinets of Curiousity within them.

Posted on October 12, 2007 in Cabinets of Curiousity | | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)

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    Elsewhere

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