Art in the Archives of Natural History: The Temporalities of Spoerri’s Ein Inkompetenter Dialog?

The essay analyzes contemporary artist Daniel Spoerri’s 2012 retrospective exhibition, titled Ein Inkompetenter Dialog?, held at the Vienna Natural History Museum (NHM). The exhibition comprised a selection of works from Spoerri’s œuvre shown alongside a selection of the Museum’s specimens. I argue that juxtaposed with the Museum collection, Ein Inkompetenter Dialog?, both as a collection of works and as an archive of the career of the artist, playfully calls into question the “nature” of art, the presentation of nature in the NHM, and the temporality of the archive and natural history. Much of Spoerri’s œuvre involves the reworking and assemblage of his own collections of found objects. I argue that these imaginative assemblages, which merge human and non-human life, present concrete visions of possible alternative natural histories and prompt us to rethink natural history from a multispecies perspective, where humans and non-humans function as co-agents, and where history and natural history are fused. Overall, I argue that Spoerri’s creative exploration of the material archives of natural history presents an alternative approach to re-collecting the past, and the possibility of writing history for a non-anthropocentric future.