Montreal-based artist and educator Jon Knowles and I recently met at Redpath Museum to imagine how subversive artists’ approaches might reopen the cabinet of curiosities. The Abe Levine Mollusc Collection provided a backdrop to our discussion on contemporary art, the life of public collections, personal collecting habits, museum displays, shrunken heads and narwhal tusks. Hidden behind wooden cases lined with mollusc shells, Jon Knowles discovered and dusted off a plaque-mounted article showing Quebec’s premiere mollusc collector Abe Levine in all of his glory, beaming over his collection and wearing a mollusc-shell pattern shirt.Peculiar, spectacular or curious, personal collections often go off on a tangent; institutional collections imply ordered knowledge and rigorous taxonomy. Nonetheless, classification is a concern for both the amateur and professional collector. In the Victorian Redpath Museum — completed in 1882 to house the collections of McGill’s principal, Sir William Dawson, but still used as a teaching museum for paleontology, zoology, mineralogy and ethnology — the two systems collide: specimens acquired and catalogued by museum professionals are presented alongside collections that sprang from an individual’s enthusiasm. The institutional acquisition process is a form of legitimization; the intuitive method of an individual more often arises from a feverish need to possess. However, both approaches touch on the human compulsion to accumulate and organize.In works of art that layer objects and the process of their discovery, Jon Knowles interweaves his thinking as an educator with his provocative approach to making art. With the artist collective Knowles Eddy Knowles, he has camped out in an urban lean-to while tracking the history of razor design and participated in the 2004 “Informal Architectures” residency. His own work bears traces of his studies at conceptual leaning NSCAD, but with a sly, sophisticated visual humour that is informed by the meanings attached to objects over time, not only through the canon of art history but also through the imagination of popular culture. His recent works such as “History Has a Lot of Ankles in Its Maw, and Is Pulling Straight Down” (2008) in which Knowles collected fifty LP copies of Pink Floyd’s The Wall and “Robert Smithson’s Record Collection” (2008) where the artist exhibited his re-collection of the records of Smithson, upend the usual categorizations of everyday stuff and invest the artist with the role of scavenger to digest and represent contemporary culture.In 2007, Knowles was invited to present a new work in Actual, an exhibition curated by Emily Jones at the Dalhousie Art Gallery. Starting from Sol Lewitt’s dictum “Irrational thoughts should be followed absolutely and logically”, the exhibition investigated “systems inherent in art culture but also of the world in general.” The gallery’s first acquisition (albeit informal) of a John James Audubon engraving of a Black Vulture or Carrion Crow, inspired Knowles to propose adding a live vulture to the permanent collection. The paradox of a live bird residing in the storage reserves of an art museum suggests a new hybrid sanctuary, animating a labyrinth of vaults with the flap of dark wings and soft hisses as the vulture uses its keen eyesight to navigate among the dormant masterworks. The vulture-in-residence could create new artworks in the vaults’ static spaces, laying eggs in the hollows of mobile storage screens, regurgitating scraps of artworks to feed its young, adorning Old Masters with its droppings.In 1972, Marcel Broodthaers founded a “strange bird of prey aviary” in the fictional museum project Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles, Section des Figures. Instead of making works for exhibition, Broodthaers acted as curator, borrowing artworks and objects from other institutions to create his installation. His work was thus the exhibition itself, rather than the artworks exhibited. Held at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, the project included 282 objects, each bearing the figure of an eagle, from eagle-adorned jewellery and typewriters to taxidermy and nature studies. Including the museum letterhead, correspondence and the crates, the objects arrived in as part of the installation. Broodthaers valued each object not for its intended use but for its relation to the theme he had chosen. In treating things and their representations as equivalents and by organizing the objects by their method of presentation, Broodthaers abjured standard museum modes of display. Like a Wunderkammer, Broodthaers’s “Department of Eagles” combined both the natural and the artificial, art and non-art. However, in contrast to the tradition of the Wunderkammer, Broodthaers’s goal in disordering the taxonomy of cultural specimens was not to provoke a sense of wonder but to reveal the museum as a temporary framework.Knowles’s proposal for Actual, too, complicates the customs of the collection, making the content of his art work both his complicity with and challenge to the structure of the gallery. Knowles’s final display at the Dalhousie Art Gallery entitled Coragyps atratus (a work in progress) DAG 1984-61 consisted of...(extract)

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