Cabinets of Wonders: On Creating and Collecting

For me, obsession is the start of everything, and I invoke her as the most important muse, for her energy is desire. I don't make too much of a distinction between creating and collecting. Both are directed by the principle of passion, and in both, I'm basically passive. The objects of my desire seek me out, not I them, and it's similar with the subjects and objects of my movies. I'm like a sea sponge. But when I'm soaking, then it's heavily: this is what my obsession actually entails.

I don't care for either of the words archive or curator. They're redolent of documentation or museum work, neither of which interests me. Each creation involves me from the moment it transcends something that we can call a document of a period; that is, because of its many meanings, an imaginative work is always able to accumulate new interpretations and evoke new ones, as times change. An imaginative work is always able to react to the present, even if it originated in an entirely different era, as a reaction to an entirely different impulse.

I will always prefer a cabinet of wonders to a museum, as it has a completely different function from either a museum or a big state gallery. Whereas museums and galleries are edifying or "aesthetically cultivate" us, a cabinet of wonders initiates us. After leaving it, we are transformed. Museums are objective; a cabinet of wonders is subjective. Museums are organized rationally; a cabinet of wonders is organized emotionally. Objects in a museum are classified by the principle of identity; in a cabinet of wonders, the arrangement is directed by the principle of analogy, governed by what Roger Caillois calls "diagonal science." A cabinet of wonders is my latest obsession. For the last few years, I've been building one at my castle in the former granary, which I've dedicated to this purpose.

I've always admired the emperor Rudolf II, even when it wasn't fashionable, and he was judged as a bad ruler and a freak. I admire him just because he was a bad ruler who neglected his duties in government for alchemy and his collections, and because he created an unbelievable cabinet of wonders to which he admitted only chosen people, regardless of title, with no gawkers to desecrate it. He blithely ruined the empire for his desires. He didn't give a shit about the war with Turkey, sat in the middle of his curiosities, and dreamed, transforming his life.

I've been collecting things my whole life. Their artistic, collectable, or actual value is not the decisive factor but rather the imaginative power glowing out of them, which can melt my spirit, that in turn can transmute base into precious metals. There are many formulas for producing a sorcerer's stone. The old alchemist manuscripts mention sulfur, mercury, salt, or lead, but not the chemical elements of sulfur, mercury, and salt; rather they are "live" sulfur, "live" mercury, "live" salt. It's similar with the objects I collect. These are only "live" objects, full of substances, memories, and emotions, which have gone through a ritual. And although they are usually old things, which already have the essential part of life behind them, with me, it's not an antiquarian interest.

[André] Breton once wrote that the most fantastic thing about the fantastic is that it's real. The surrealists never looked for the fantastic outside of this world. Science fiction didn't and doesn't interest them. If I place daily objects in my movies or art pieces in unrealistic relation to one another, it's because I want to evoke doubts in spectators about their everyday reality: to disturb the common utilitarianism that steamrolls this civilization. In connection with this, it's possible to speak of the slavery of utilitarianism. "Living" objects are becoming ones that are not alive, with which we don't communicate, that we only employ pragmatically. Objects of daily use have ceased to be cult...