The Meditation Collection Space

At the edge of nothingness and invisibility is the materiality of collecting. These reminders of what cannot be seen include reliquaries containing the bones of saints, Buddhist shrines, and boxes designed to capture the fleeting experience of a day together. On a mountain in Nepal, I gathered green granite crystals, along with scraps of prayer flags, rusted pitons, and old coins. Later, these become a shrine to an ineffable experience of living in the clouds, which I named the Meditation Space.

The Meditation Space includes natural objects, religious icons, bones, rocks and toy animals. It brings up many questions. What do we collect and why do we collect? How do these collections represent knowledge? Why include dice and toy dinosaurs? Is Batman the strength to fight inner fears, a consumerist icon, or the voice of the inner hero we long to be? The Meditation Space is about the power of chance, coincidence, silence, and life’s inner forces. The space also makes reference to the cabinet of curiosity. It is curious. It could make people wonder. It is a Wunderkammer, a microcosm or theater of the world, and a memory theater.

Magical Objects

Objects have their own language and collecting is a dialect with its own meanings, narratives, and sense of memory (Bal, 1994). Sacred objects in medieval reliquaries held deep symbolic meaning connected to complex religious stories. These objects were encased in shrines where they were catalysts for contemplation and worship. The Wunderkammer or European cabinets of curiosities told stories about the elusive relationship between art and science. They were created to inspire wonder about the mystery inherent in the natural world and suggested that there is a fundamental link between nature and art (Tilley, 2006). Objects are a kind of text that reveals the cultural layering and meaning of life. In spite of the discourse that surrounds these artifacts, their primary authority continues to reside in the object themselves (Duncun, 2005). There is a dialectical, recursive interaction among persons and things that influences how we think, act, and construct our sense of self. The biographies of people and things are intertwined. Without material culture we would not know ourselves (Tilley, 2006).

In the Wunderkammer, each unique and marvelous object held the promise of an ancient body of learning, a lost secret that waited only for the passionate gaze of the collector to become known. They reflected a fascination with the origins of life and the relationship between reason and magic (Mowries, 2002). Surrealist artists echoed the Wunderdammer’s juxtaposition of the strange and marvelous by putting objects at the service of dreams, the irrational, and the subconscious. They emphasized the disorder of desire and the irrational shadow cast over the mind by objects (Putnam, 2001). The Surrealist tension between the desire to recapture the past and the impossibility of succeeding, found its way into Joseph Cornell’s fondness for the esoteric and commonplace as vehicles for poetic associations (McShine & Ades, 1996). The Wunderkammer was also ancestor to the modern museum, which still retains remnants of the symbolic and magical (Buchli, 2002).

Insignificant and Disturbed

The Meditation Space grew from an obsession with the magical objects of childhood. When I was a child, I wanted to be a naturalist like Charles Darwin. I expressed these desires through collecting. Organizing my collections was deeply satisfying, and the objects within them became close friends. They were also my art education. The Meditation Space has some characteristics of a natural history or archaeological display, but it could never qualify as natural history or archaeology because, in archaeological terms, it is insignificant and disturbed. Here, it is presented in a more childlike way as a marvel or as a question or as an opportunity to meditate.

Collections and Artists

A collection can be a form of memory, veneration, or knowledge. Collections can be a way to put in order or come to terms with the strangeness, randomness, and complexities of the world. A collection can represent the mundane, trivial obsessions of popular visual culture, a record of natural history, or the transcendent and mysterious beauty of the ordinary. Some contemporary artists...