The Ashmolean - Ashmolean NOW: Bettina von Zwehl: The Flood - Review

The train down to Oxford was atypically pleasant. I'd set off early, leaving Manchester at 07:25, and watched the muted sunrise usher in the day as we trundled down south. Arriving in Oxford, the weather still bitingly cold, I walked east - stopping by Gloucester Green to pick up a few pairs of earrings from the market - towards the Ashmolean. 

 

I'd come south this particular day for my dad's birthday and thought to double up the visit with, yet another, explore of Oxford's museums and galleries. Today, The Ashmolean were opening their new exhibition on Anselm Kiefer, but - in a typically frugal fashion - I chose to go instead to their free temporary exhibition.

 

After making my way to the basement floor - not the most auspicious location for a temporary exhibition - I became once again distracted by the spectacle of the museum. You see, this floor contains the bulk of the performative introspection for the Ashmolean. An exhibition on the history of the institution. One on the role of a conservator. The shuffled aside Textiles Gallery, and the inevitable Cafe. There is an article to be written here on the relegation of subjects literally to the basement - parallels with the placement of the Benin Bronzes in the British Museum. Kletchka has a good article of the physical location of many arts educators offices and teaching spaces within the basement of museums and galleries, and the Ashmolean is not an exception to this rule. 

 

All this is to say that I came to Bettina von Zwehl's 'The Flood' with the expectation that it may offer a challenge to the museum, its placement in the basement being a product of an under analysed institutional shame, perhaps. This was not the case. 

 

The triple titled exhibition is the third in a series in which artists are invited to create works inspired by the Ashmolean's collections. London-based photographer, von Zwehl, was in residency between 2022-3, and, using items found in collections across GLAM, has created original artworks. Disclaimer text appears underneath the poster outside the exhibition informing the visitor that "this exhibition contains natural history objects and images" that explore and interrogate the past. A catalogue (£20) is advertised.

 

So, artist in residence using the collections to produce artworks - I'm expecting a praxiological intervention into the idea of museum space and collecting. What I find within, however, is a non-critical but aesthetically impressive reconstruction of ideas of wonder and amazement. Beautiful but toothless. Perhaps my fault for expecting teeth. 

 

von Zwehl frames her work around the idea of the 'Wunderkammer' or cabinet of curiosities. An enlightenment phenomenon constructed by affluent collectors that combines items - often natural history or geological - considered oddities or marvels. Strange things still not folded into the protean modern project, not yet constrained by a fully developed system of taxonomy. A 17th century step towards our current understanding of the museum. And, in the right hands, an interesting entry-point for critique of the museum. 

 

A video plays at the entrance, a conversation with curator Lena Fritsch. It outlines von Zwehl's approach, both in subject and in practice. We learn that the majority of artworks are created by sampling interesting things from the archives, placing them on a glass pane and shining light underneath them, to create beautiful silhouettes which are then photographed. A printed quote on the wall illuminates the reasoning behind the title of the exhibition. The Flood invokes an idea of chaos, a jumbling-up of sorts, a breakdown of contemporary taxonomies of collecting. What we see in the gallery is life after the flood. 

 

We are told the works "aim to rekindle wonder and curiosity as critical tools for generating new ideas while reflecting on our interdependent relationships with minerals, plants, fungi, and other non-human domains of existence." 

 

This - to me - is both a valid reason to construct this exhibition and is successful. Artworks combine different materials: organic and non-organic. Wonder and curiosity are invoked. Yet, wonder and curiosity are not - for me - enough. The purpose of this gallery is lacking in any sense of institutional critique, or even a willingness to question why objects were collected and ordered in such ways to begin with. There is both a vacuum of interrogation around the Wunderkammer and a similar vacuum around contemporary collecting and cataloguing practices. Ultimately, it feels as if the gallery says, 'what if we all shuffled everything around a bit', without ever sinking its teeth into the meat of the museum or the gallery. It’s as if a fish becomes suddenly very interested in the colour and shape of the rocks below it, without ever realising that it is in a tank. 

 

Back to the exhibition at hand, we see a striking image of a preserved monkey. Is this curiosity morbid? Later on the inclusion of a preserved aye-aye cements the Wunderkammer aspect of the space. Only, curiosity here is more akin to Ripley's believe it or not. The morbid fascination aspect is valid in that it forces the viewer to consider the reason for their viewing of these objects, alongside the more standard rocks and insects. Yet, to what extent this critical viewership is suggested or made possible by the exhibition, I couldn't tell. 

 

The stars of the exhibition are the silhouette photographs. Each of them plays like a Miro or a Vezelay. Almost musical compositions of lines and forms dancing within their frames. I love this kind of work, and the choice use of colour is very effective. 

 

Only, once you realise that each shape is a 'thing', the experience of viewing metamorphoses into a much simpler puzzle or game. Rather than contemplating images in their entirety, I begin to see the shell of a beetle, a casted mould of some teeth, a thread of fabric. They look like microscope slides unpicking and illuminating cell structures. There is something to be said for the work's success in continuing the theme of the flood and the chaotic re-ordering of life afterwards. We begin to see a plateau of natural connections in which lines branch out rhisomatically between each node. [here I have deleted a self-indulgent recapitulation of Deleuze and Guattari's Thousand Plateaus]. 

 

In all honesty, I would have preferred the works if they were not a puzzle of wonderous objects, but merely the work in and of itself. 

Their placement - effectively into triptychs - was a nice use of space. The entire room, in fact, is pleasantly laid out, with calm lighting and a sub-marine colour palette. However, the centre of the room is dominated by a large table upon which fungi are lazily glued to small boards. They are almost drowning in glue. Perhaps they are to speak to ideas of the perpetuity, inevitability or eternality of fungal life. I wasn't taken by them.  

 

Also not to my liking was the inclusion of a model theatre, in which a glass orb can be used to view the inverse of an upside-down image of a woman. Any thoughts inspired by this piece - of age, performativity, decay, isolation, illusion - didn't fit within the wider gallery. I imagine its inclusion here was purposeful and that von Zwehl could give me a convincing argument for why it was here. Yet, without much more to go on, it felt - to me - out of place. 

 

At the far end of the exhibition is a Wunderkammer. Here we find the aye-aye, alongside lots of curios. Rocks with eyelashes. Photographs of children, snakes draped around their necks. In a more declarative critical context, it would be a provocative act of curation. The presence of forgeries and ideas of authenticity, strange connections and the resurgence of morbidity. It all works. Only, here, it feels like a flat addendum. A punchline to a joke that hasn't been built up. 

 

Neighbouring this is perhaps the most interesting object found within the gallery. A small book. It is displayed open to a page upon which is written an outmoded taxonomy of collecting - a view of the whole. Yet, as an object, it is denied context - it has no label, presented as art rather than historical anchor point. I ultimately find its name, date and author from a large print booklet stowed within the exhibition. The Musaeum Tradescantianum; or, A Collection of Rarities by John Tradescant, from 1656. Here it is, and here is the entryway into a discussion of collecting and curiosity that has been neglected by the exhibition as a whole. Here, it is merely an appendix. 

Overall, von Zwehl's work, her photography, is remarkable. The images are beautiful and engrossing. Some of the ideas within the space are strong. However, it misses such an obvious angle of criticality, that it is ultimately a disappointing - if pleasant - space. Perhaps were I to have visited this in a gallery setting, outside of the Ashmolean, I may have found it more understandable. But the lack of praxiological critique in favour for a toothless engagement in wonder and curiosity felt like a real missed opportunity. 

 

Ashmolean NOW: Bettina von Zwehl: The Flood is on at the Ashmolean between 18 Oct - 11 May and is free to enter.