A response to the exhibition: samples (A Taxonomy of Objects) by Karin Findeis, Macleay Museum, University of Sydney, March 14 - June 2 2008

The Macleay Museum ¹ is a slow space. As soon as you enter the room at the top of the broad staircase you can feel the slowness: the dignified wood and glass showcases, the lighting which demands the removal of sunnies, the silence.

Macleay Museum
The University of Sydney
May 2008

Sampling ² is a time saving activity; a practice associated with the IPOD, for fast people whose time or capacity is too limited to enable them to encounter the full experience of what is being tasted. Indeed, even for those who pace themselves more moderately or who have the stamina for more sustained investigation, how much time is there in a life to experience what the worlds of nature, of culture, and of the imagination have to offer? Instead of undertaking long and often arduous journeys, one can visit a museum, a gallery, read a book, attend a concert, watch a DVD, and thus sample experiences. Samples of things of particular interest are gathered together in one place or time for convenience. This also permits scrutiny of their distinctive characteristics, with subsequent classification by way of comparison with other samples. It permits and facilitates taxonomic enterprise.

Sampling is what we do in 2008. We hurtle through our lives snatching and grabbing at bits and bytes and snippets from the glut of offerings - actual, vicarious, and virtual - it doesn't matter. But, within the context discussed here, the idea of sampling is not new. The practice of collecting samples harks back to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, exemplified in parlour collections in Europe which were the precursors of our museums. The word sample is variously described ³ as: "a fact, incident, story or suppositious case, which serves to illustrate, confirm or render credible some proposition or statement (as early as 1529); "a relatively small quantity of material or individual object from which the quality of the group it represents may be inferred"(late Middle English); and more recently ⁴ as "a small part of anything or one of a number, intended to show the quality, style, etc., of the whole; a specimen".

Art is almost always experienced thus, except by artists who, with perseverance, plumb to the depths the potential of their enterprise. To this end, samples are often made during the development of work. Tests take place while work is in progress: sketches may be scribbled or plans drawn with care; morsels of matter are tested for their structural potential and aesthetic and poetic resonance; ideas are made material and the activities of manipulating matter and form spur on the imaginative process in reciprocal and cumulative cycles. And while "wasting time - dreaming or daydreaming", lateral thinking, moving outside the square, ripping up the rules and throwing all the balls up in the air, trialling and being prepared to fail, are undeniable imperatives, the practice of taxonomy, usually associated with scientific endeavour, also has its place in the studio, for these results of exploratory and playful activity need to be sorted and maybe even understood before their place in the scheme of things can be established. And the taxonomy of making, which emanates from the realm of poetic imagination rather than traditional scientific endeavour, says as much about the taxonomist as it does about the classified material.

We might ask: how does collecting (or selecting) samples differ from the activity of making samples? Perhaps part of the answer can be found in the temporal dimension. Samples in museums have a past: of collection, preservation, observation, classification. They have a present, which exists in a sequence of transient moments of exposure to the gaze of both taxonomist and itinerant observer. And, they appear to have a future, assured, thanks to the best attempts of conservators, by their preservation arising from their scientific and mnemonic raison d'etre. A prospective sample, one which has not yet been made, draws vicariously on the past of all museum specimens and the associated strategies to which they have been subjected; but, perhaps more importantly, it draws on the past experience of the maker, also on moments of presentness, when this experience leads the maker through imaginative and sentient manipulations of matter and form towards a future, possibly awaiting the vagaries of taxonomic enterprise.

A taxonomical collection does imply a rigorous scientific approach, and there is no doubt that the taxonomic strategy employed by Karin Findeis in her exhibition samples (a taxonomy of objects) is, at least in part, informed by the traditions of the practice. In spite of cherished notions about the rosy cloud of inspiration, such a disciplined approach is not the antitheses of art practice. However we might ponder on the implications for an artist who is to set about making objects that are prenatally and perhaps preternaturally, destined to be cast into the discipline - objects that are collectable or selectable before they are made, items which may take their place as autonomous identities, or as components in new works.

Hexas brucia (isotypes), 2007
6 brooches, silver, paint, coral, onyx, moonstone, turquoise
10x10x10mm

Karin Findeis explores the possibilities of collecting and making with discernment. She makes telling use of the museum's specimens of moths in the case adjacent to her entomoids and of the selection of found brooches and necklaces with their stories of loss and recovery. In an apparent embrace of both options, in the miracles, veneficus magus (holotype) a sample piece of driftwood is used, and onyx; and it could be said that the six brooches hexas brucia (isotypes) display samples of coral, onyx, moonstone and turquoise, as well as the brooches and necklaces in amalga which contain worked samples of glass, ceramic, melamine, carnelian, plastic, ebony, mother-of-pearl, ivory, pearls, cotton and silk, along with the ubiquitous silver and occasionally gold or gold plate and brass. And the forms of brooches and necklaces in which the jewellery makes its appearance in the showcases could be seen as species variants of generic brooches and necklaces.

Lepidoptera heterocera
Macleay Museum collection

Taxonomy says much about the taxonomist(e): the collection and selection or manufacture of the objects and the rationale for their selection, then the manner in which they are assembled, filed, ordered, collated, classified, categorised and named. Karin Findeis addresses the taxonomic strategy of the early collectors in her development and deployment of objects in this exhibition, which is housed within the larger and (for me, anyway) nostalgically traditional museum complex of showcases filled with stuffed animals, wondrous brass instruments, and other curios. Her work is sited in a bank of six large horizontal showcases, grouped in three lots of two, and one large vertical case. Enumerating, in her accompanying text, on the general assembly of early collections into naturalia: samples of plants, animals; artificalia: made objects; mirabilia: "miracles" or oddities of nature, she goes on to declare that her jewellery in this exhibition "is an order of culture, within the kingdom in inanimate objects" ⁵. However, these jewels, though strictly of the artificalia ⁶ genus, invoke that of naturalia, with their sometimes organic demeanour, their location in the museum; and as works of poetic imagination, coming from the hand of an alchemist-jeweller, they fall squarely into the mirabilia category. They are poetic and technological miracles, waiting, like moth chrysalids, to take the imagination on wondrous flights.

The first showcase encountered on entering the space holds a traditional museum display of moths ⁷, and in the case abutting are brooches, named entomoids. Their materials (silver, paint) are declared, but not their mode of manufacture. The adjacent moths (which are not claimed in the List of Works) we know to have undergone the oft explained but nonetheless mysterious process of metamorphosis. One might be prompted to wonder whether the brooches underwent a similar process of transmogrification; whether they evolved with family resemblances: globular, much of a size. ⁸ Like their neighbours, the moths, they seem to exist in categories of genus, species, and variety. And, as though endorsing the characteristics of growth in the natural world, they appear to have hatched from a single clutch of eggs, or may themselves be eggs awaiting transformation into grub, pupae, and then the imago of butterfly or moth. These jewels are encrypted with the aura of transmutation of the natural world and with the alchemical traditions so long associated with the pursuits of the jeweller.

entomoids (1-39) 2007-2008
39 brooches, silver, paint
dimensions variable 6mm - 20mm ∅

The almost spheroidal entomoids appear to be hollow. The silver from which they are made performs the function of a skin or shell, and is covered by a second skin of paint, which both reveals and conceals the underlying matter and the structural ontogenesis of the forms. It reveals the nuances and what might be perceived as flaws of form as each colour takes on tonal variations with the ambient light, subtleties which might otherwise be confused by the high lustre of pristine silver. It also reveals the clear determinations or perhaps the whims and predilections of the artist. So the paint conceals the authentic lustre of the silver, which in its turn conceals whatever might be, or might have been interred in or about to hatch from the little eggs. And then there is the trope of the pin. Like the moths, the entomoids perch on tiny pins, in strict geometric array. The act of pinning is a fate wrought upon the moths to transfix them, whereas the brooches, if freed from their confinement, would become agents of impalement - however alluring and delicate they may appear. That is what brooches do.

Veneficus magus (holotype) 2008
brooch, driftwood, onlyx, silver
80x10x10mm

Although she asserts her jewellery's inanimate status, by naming one collection miracles, the artists relates this category to the early collectors' mirabilia: curios and marvels of nature. And so they might appear to be: a grub-like organism of driftwood encrusted with onyx beads rears up on its pin; a silver twig bears an alluring but poisonous looking crimson nest. And they have biological names (hexas brucia ⁹ , flos aliquantulus ¹⁰, holotypes ¹¹, isotypes ¹²) as well as magical ones (veneficus magus ¹³). But, names apart, the thing that makes these miracles is that they have been made, for any made thing can be seen as miraculous in so far as it manifests human attributes of intellect, skill, determination, contiguous with that most miraculous dimension: imagination.

Stipes limbus (holotype) 2008
brooch, silver, paint
length 75mm

The collations of diverse components designated amalgama ¹⁴ elicit our curiosity about the associations and conjunctions devised by the jeweller. The diversity of its constituents recommend that we peruse it as a collection of samples, however, we might be drawn to wonder why the particular materials and objects trouvéres were selected, what taxonomic principle or poetic insight prompted their predisposition, and why they were then worked and developed into their existing jewellery forms of brooches and necklaces. These jewels are virtuosic hybrids of Karin Findeis, collector and maker. View images

The eight objects in the found collection (a grandmother's metal disc, an inherited bracelet, the memento of a friendship, a pigeon pair of necklaces, a ring made in granddad's workshop, a first-ever pair of earrings, earrings lacking their partners, a heart) share only the fact of their lost and found status as a strategy of classification. Like members of a motley bunch of refugees, each with its own story, they have been assigned to their shared location in the showcase. With an ambition to disclose the idiosyncratic strategies of Karin Findeis the taxonomist, we might ask: were these the only ones on offer or has a selection been made from among others? If so, what was discarded and why? Were decisions considered or arbitrary? (This is all too often the fate of refugees.) In any case, these jewels, both absent and present have a history of ownership and of wear. In the showcase, their stories, and those of their erstwhile owners, wearers, or makers, accompany the objects (or the space of their absence) in all their human poignancy, reminding the viewer of the intimate connection between jewellery and the human condition.

Valerie

Although Karin Findeis has previously made work which is so intimately connected to the wearing body that only a stain remains as evidence of contact with the piece ¹⁵, this is not the first time she has detached jewellery from the human body in such a deliberate strategy. In two previous installations ¹⁶ the shadows of objects have taken centre stage in an apparent denial of the presence of a wearing body. However these very shadows have enticed both bodily cooperation and imaginative collusion in the process of viewing the works.

In this exhibition, as with any museological display, the viewer is asked to imagine the history - the handling, the hoarding, the hiding, the donning, the public flaunting or more arcane wearing of these jewels. Only in the found collection, with its stories of losing and sometimes finding, is the potential of another life for the jewels acknowledged or explored. This is often the fate of jewellery. Bereft of the warmth of human association, as is with so many museum collections, the objects are in a kind of limbo, denied association with the body in their institutionalised deployment and deprived of the opportunity to celebrate their potential motility on a wearer. Like the moths - stilled, skewered, encased, these are jewels in vitro rather than in vivo. However, even though all these objects are accessible only to sight, the memory of other objects, especially jewels which are so bodily in their connection, is evoked through previous experiences of weight and tactility. Their substance can be imagined, if not tangibly confirmed.

inventorium (detail) 2008
specimen jars, photographs

Pursuing her exploration of "the object as specimen" ¹⁷ with inventorium Karin Findeis eschews materiality. Forty-five assorted objects: some identifiable (a decorative bottle, a bead necklace, a watch, a twig, a wind-up running duck, a pair of hands carved from ivory) others more obscure, have been captured by the camera, then printed on clear acetate sheet, each stored in one of forty-five varied specimen jars, housed in a large vertical showcase. In an accomplished display of reductive deceit the chimerical specimens feint with revelation, lure with the promise of disclosure; but on close inspection, offer nothing but the pattern of ink on acetate. Each semblance of an object exists in a liminal zone between revelation and concealment: revelation via transparency, which tantalizes with the potential to see into the object, and its denial: there is nothing there. The emperor is indeed naked - naked and trapped in this simulated disclosure, for within the showcase of inventorium entrapment in an insubstantial mise en scène is just a singular aspect of the each objects' demeanour. Spurious revelation is absolute in this surfeit of superficiality. We can never see into these specimen objects. Wraith-like, they are the reverse of x-rays where the interior is revealed, shed of its outer covering; unlike the jelly-fish, where we can scrutinise the internals through their transparent bodies, they have no interior; they provide less information than a smear on a microscopic slide, where, with focal adjustment, more than one level is visible; unlike pickled, fleshly specimens, we can access no more than one view of the object. In treble entrapment and treble exposure each object lays its image on the surface of the clear acetate sheet in a single plane, which is placed within a glass specimen jar and sequestered with others in a glass display case. And, although the phantom object in each jar appears to be unique, its presentation as a photograph suggests the possibility of multiple identical images: a prolifecation of such "samples". The display brings to mind Marshall Berman's quote from Marx, part of which he used in the title of his famous treatise on Modernity: ¹⁸ "to be modern is to be part of a universe in which all that is solid melts into air."

Karin Findeis, material poet and taxonomist extraordinaire, has produced for our delectation and curiosity, such as might have been aroused by the earliest collections, a unique concentration of samples. Clearly, this was not a rushed pursuit. It is both appropriate and rewarding to honour it by lingering over and savouring to the full the objects and their installation, for to engage with such intensity and dexterity of material manipulation and poetic imagination, and with such close supervision of each telling nuance, to explore unfamiliar intellectual, emotional, and expressive terrain, is to chart the particularity and evolution of one's consciousness. This is one reason to make art, and to treasure it.

© Margaret West
Blackheath NSW
July 2008