DIRECTOR’S FOREWORD
Xa Sturgis
INTRODUCTION
Lena Fritsch
IN CONVERSATION
Bettina von Zwehl and Stephen Grosz
REMEMBER ME. REMEMBER ME? (AN OPERA, UNWRITTEN)
Sophy Rickett
BETTINA VON ZWEHL’S THE FLOOD RETHINKING THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ARK AND THE TRADESCANTS’ LEGACY
Ciara Ennis
NOTES
CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES
AN INVENTORY OF THINGS, 2023–24
ARTIST ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book is published to accompany the third exhibition of the Ashmolean NOW series, in which we invite contemporary artists into the museum to develop new work in response to our collections for an exhibition in Gallery 8.
During a residency in Oxford in 2022 and 2023, the experimental photographer Bettina von Zwehl was drawn to the early history of the Ashmolean and those objects that survive from the founding collections, assembled by the gardeners John Tradescant the Elder and Younger in the early years of the seventeenth century. These collections of natural and manmade wonders – of naturalia and artificilia – ranged from stag beetles to the tail feathers of a phoenix, and from carved peach stones to elephant teeth. Von Zwehl, inspired by this wild variety, has played creatively with subject matter, photographic conventions, and the possibilities of her medium to suggest and challenge different traditions in art history, in visual culture, and in museum display. At the same time, her work reflects upon, and responds to, the purpose of the original cabinets of curiosity, or Wunderkammern, as spaces to understand the world and humanity’s place within it; drawing attention to new perspectives on our responsibilities towards a shared and fragile planet.
As ever, my thanks are due to all the Ashmolean team for realising this exhibition, but in particular to Lena Fritsch, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, who has steered this exhibition, and others in the Ashmolean NOW series, so expertly. We are also enormously grateful to Andy and Christine Hall, and Neil Simpkins and Miyoung Lee, who generously support Lena’s post. Thanks are also due to Ciara Ennis, Stephen Grosz, and Sophy Rickett, for their insightful contributions to this book.
All exhibitions rely on the generosity of our friends and patrons, and this project is no exception. I wish to extend my sincere thanks to the Patrons of the Ashmolean, Christian Levett, and those who wish to remain anonymous for their support of the Ashmolean NOW series. My thanks also to Arts Council England, Helene Klausner-Huth, and Laura and Jim Duncan for their generous support, which allowed Bettina to undertake such detailed research in Oxford during her residency. We are also incredibly grateful to Carlos and Francesca Pinto, and those who wish to remain anonymous for supporting the production of this catalogue.
Thanks also to our friends and colleagues at the Bodleian Libraries and Oxford University Museum of Natural History for the works they have lent to the show. Finally, and above all, however, I would like to thank the artist, Bettina von Zwehl, for her willingness to engage with the museum so thoughtfully, wholeheartedly, and enthusiastically and, of course, for her work.
Xa Sturgis
Stephen Grosz: As a child were you interested in art? Did you go to museums?
Bettina von Zwehl: My mother is a painter, and my parents are both interested in art. Every holiday, they would take me and my brother to museums, churches, and ruins –especially in Italy. We spent a lot of time in Italy.
I remember a holiday in the 1980s when we drove to St Petersburg. I had this incredible sense of boredom when we were in museums; a sense of boredom and of rage that I had to be in this place. I remember my parents’ excitement, and my dad reading about the artworks and about the history of the churches, and I just felt complete resistance to it as a teenager. But over the years I think I came to realise that it wasn’t just boredom I was feeling, there must have been something else, because it has stayed with me, that desire to go to places like that, and it will stay with me all my life.
When I was about 21, before becoming a student in England, I spent quite a few years in Italy. It didn’t take me very long to find another way of being in museums.
Grosz: What were you doing exactly?
von Zwehl: My father always said, ‘Go and travel.’ He never said, ‘Go and study.’ He said, ‘Go, and if you don’t
Jan van Kessel the Elder (1626–79)
A Cockchafer, Beetle, Woodlice and other Insects, with a Sprig of Auricula, c.1650–3 Oil on copper, 8.3 x 12.1 cm © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford (WA1940.2.41)
know what to do, then just go and learn a language.’ So, I went to learn Italian. I found myself in a really cheap flat in Rome – it was almost free as I was looking after it – and, because I didn’t have to worry about the rent, I was at liberty to do what I wanted. I tried to find work as a photographer’s assistant, because that was an interest from childhood; it was something I wanted to pursue, but I never felt I had the space or the courage to do it until I was in Italy.
I began working for the photographer Araldo De Luca (b.1952) in Rome, near the Colosseum. It was a very formative time for me. He had two assistants, me and the first assistant – I just tagged along really, I had no experience. I carried the lights, polished the floor, made coffee, cleaned the lenses, and entertained everyone a little bit. I didn’t feel particularly useful, but I observed a lot. Because he photographed famous frescos, paintings,
and sculptures for high-end publications we spent a lot of time in museums. We spent long hours setting up a plate camera in front of a Michelangelo, and then reproducing it. It could take a whole day. I would sit the whole day in front of a Michelangelo not knowing much about it but absorbing something. I always thought that it wasn’t a coincidence I found this other way back into museums –as an artist.
Since 2011, I’ve mostly been working with museums and archives; researching collections has become important to me over the years. Unconsciously, museums seem to be a place where I want to be, for whatever reason. I think that reason changes, but when I enter museums there is a sense of going home.
Grosz: Was there a certain point where you decided, ‘Painting is my mother and, in my disidentification from her, I am going to do something different’? How did it work? At what age did you become interested in photography?
von Zwehl: Disidentification is an interesting word, because this is exactly what Ruby, our daughter, is doing now. She’s picking up painting and not photography. So she is doing what her grandmother is doing.
Jan van Kessel the Elder (1626–79)
A Dragon-fly, two Moths, a Spider and some Beetles, with wild Strawberries, c.1650–3 Oil on copper, 9 x 13 cm © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford (WA1940.2.43)
I think I always quietly admired my mother’s perseverance because she painted for joy. She certainly didn’t strive to make a living from her work because in the 1970s that wasn’t something you could easily chose to do. It was the ordinary patriarchal family setup: my father worked, made a living, and she would look after us children and my grandmother, who also lived with us. My mother was busy, but in her free time she painted.
The first picture I took – I think I was twelve years old – was with a little analogue camera and it was of a pig. I always loved animals and my parents took us to a farm every weekend. They had a little holiday place and I always spent lots of time with the animals there, I found it very comforting. Later, I started photographing my friends and setting up days where I would take portraits of them. Portraiture became something I was interested in from around the age of fifteen.
Speaker 1 (the artist) and Speaker 2 (the artist’s friend) are sitting upstage of the proscenium arch on spindly gold chairs. They are facing each other and between them is a large spherical glass object reminiscent of an oversized crystal ball.
A large black and white photographic portrait of a woman hangs upside down on the back wall of the stage, her matriarchal presence complicated by the inversion of the image. The orchestra pit at the front of the stage is filled with rippled dunes of dark, almost black, sand.
Chorus (visitors murmuring softly mingle around the edges of the otherwise empty stage)
The Speakers, centre stage, are discussing Speaker 1’s forthcoming exhibition at the museum, and how her research has uncovered the story of Hester Tradescant, wife of the collector and horticulturalist John Tradescant the Younger. Speaker 1 wants to understand more about Hester’s role in building and caring for the couple’s vast collection.
The Speakers reflect on the distortion of stories about historical figures by simplified tropes that
deny subjects and situations complexity and nuance. Speaker 1 describes some of the narratives that have built up around Hester, the whispered rumours over the circumstances of her death.
They discuss Speaker 1’s use of photography as a way of understanding and representing Hester’s story. Elements of the stage set are reminiscent of photographic processes: the optical inversion of the image, the reflective, refractive qualities of the crystal ball, and the resemblance between a theatre’s proscenium arch and the viewfinder of a camera. Speaker 2 notices that when viewed through the crystal ball, the portrait appears the right way up.
Chorus (becoming restless) ‘Up is down. Left is right.’
Speaker 1 and Speaker 2 imagine the thousands of stories the collection must hold: the severed horn of a Unicornu Marinum; the hawking glove of a medieval king, moulded into the shape of his warm puffy hand; a wrought iron cradle with deadly spikes, one at each corner.
They wonder what lay behind the Tradescants’ drive for acquisition, the relentlessness of it.
Chorus (increasingly restless)
‘Will they ever be satisfied? Could that voice ever be stilled?’
At points Speaker 1 and Speaker 2 become distracted, and, just as the botanical specimens that made their way out of the collection to find roots in parklands around the country did, the focus of their conversation escapes, meandering away through half-forgotten dreams, and train rides, and muddy fields on misty mornings. And the silence of a gong bath in a darkened space, and the feeling of wet grass under bare feet in the City of London in the middle of the night, deep and delicious. And a box of biscuits with tapered edges, and green tea steaming hot, drunk from a soft pink cup with a mottled metal lining, and a drowned river valley, and why do people have to wear perfume. And remember that time, and that time, and one of the times they disagreed, and went to a party in another artist’s studio that had a lenticular print of a unicorn, its fluorescent
colours signifying ‘magical’ tacked to its paint-splattered door. And how do you say ‘I’m sorry’ in Italian? Shared consciousness. Spontaneous, unplanned.
And aren’t the objects in the collection like those thoughts: distinct entities drawn together to produce powerful new affects? A noisy, unruly cacophony of meaning, which in time would come to be moderated by an even greater force: the first public museum; the beginning of museum culture as we know it now. A means of representation, endless streams of possibility enabled by contingency, determined by politics. And the violence that has been and is yet to come.
Chorus (agitated as they react to a disturbance off stage) ‘What do they say? What does it mean?’
From behind the wings, stage left, sand starts to blow over the stage, accumulating in shallow drifts and the lights fade to darkness.
End of scene one
Ashmolean NOW: Bettina von Zwehl
18 October 2024 to 11 May 2025
Copyright © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford, 2024
The authors have asserted their moral rights to be identified as the authors of this work.
We are most grateful to our lenders, who are supporting our exhibition:
Bettina von Zwehl
Oxford University Natural History Museum
Bodleian Libraries
Extinction Rebellion
This catalogue has been supported by:
Carlos and Francesca Pinto
Those who wish to remain anonymous
The artist’s residency has been supported by:
Laura and Jim Duncan
Helene Klausner-Huth
Arts Council England using public funding through the National Lottery
• pp.2–3: Camellia sinensis var. sinensis II, 2023. Archival pigment print, dimensions variable, Sea of Troubles series
• pp.4–5: Bellybutton nautilus (Nautilus macromphalus) broken and partially polished shell. Courtesy of Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH-ZC-M001505). © Bettina von Zwehl
• p.6: Feather (Test strip I), 2023. Archival pigment print, 110 x 28.5 cm
• p.7: Portuguese Man-O’-War, leaf from a volume (now consisting of 113 leaves of drawings), associated with John White. Pen and ink and graphite with watercolour and bodycolour. © The Trustees of the British Museum (SL,5270.19)
• pp.8–9: Thing Eleven, 2023. Archival pigment print, 76 x 57 cm
• p.10: Drawing of an Illustration in the ‘Herbal of Benedetto Rin’, showing a ‘Porus’ Plant. From the John Ruskin Collection. Watercolour and bodycolour over graphite on wove paper, 37.3 x 26.1 cm. © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford (WA.RS.RUD.264)
• p.11: The Symptoms, #40 (Collage), 2021. Gelatin silver print, 30 x 23 cm
• p.12: Thing Six, 2023. Archival pigment print, 76 x 57 cm
• p.14: Thing Four, 2023. Archival pigment print, 76 x 57 cm
• p.58: Feather (Test strip I), 2023. Archival pigment print,110 x 28.5 cm
Exhibition is supported by: Christian Levett
The Patrons of the Ashmolean Museum
Those who wish to remain anonymous
British Library Cataloguing in Publications Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN: 978-1-910807-63-7
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording or any storage and retrieval system, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
Catalogue designed by Ocky Murray
Printed and bound in Wales by Gomer Press
CBP2275
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• p.58: Camellia sinensis var. sinensis II, 2023. Archival pigment print, dimensions variable, Sea of Troubles series.
• p.58: Greater Argonaut (Argonauta argo) eggcase. Courtesy of Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH-ZC-2019-013).
© Bettina von Zwehl
• p.58: Ruby, 2023. Archival pigment print, 25 x 19 cm
• p.59: Ivory Memento Mori pendant, c.1510–30. Elephant-ivory, silver; carved, 6.5 cm. © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford (WA2013.1.30)
• p.59: The Symptoms, #38 (Collage), 2021. Gelatin silver print, 30 x 23 cm
• p.78: Ruby (Deep Blue), 2023. Archival pigment print, 60 x 60 cm
• p.78: Portrait of a Whippet, 2019. Bromide print, 30.5 x 24 cm
• p.79: Chess piece in the form of two knights, c.1230–50. Walrus ivory, with traces of gilding and dark green paint, 7.7 cm. © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford (AN1685.A.587)
• p.79: Cattle Egret (Bubulcus ibis) taxidermy. Courtesy of Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNH-ZC-B/8939). © Bettina von Zwehl
• p.80: Feather (Test strip III), 2023. Archival pigment print, 110 x 28.5 cm
• p.85: Bettina von Zwehl's studio, 2024
• p.87: Thing Sixteen, 2024. Archival pigment print, 76 x 57 cm
• p.88: Southern Pig-tailed Macaque (Macaca nemestrina) bisected foetus in spirit. Courtesy of Oxford University Museum of Natural History (OUMNHZC-20305). © Bettina von Zwehl
• p.89: Frederik Ruysch (1638–1731), Thesaurus animalium primus ... / The First Cabinet of Animals by Frederik Ruysch. Copper plate, 1710. Wellcome Collection
• p.90–91: Fungi Island, 2024. Shimeji mushrooms, plywood, acrylic paint, goldleaf, glue, dimensions variable. © David Robinson, Bettina von Zwehl, Calvin Pang. Courtesy of the artists
• p.92: Owl cup, c.1540–80. Coconut, parcel-gilt silver; carved, 17 cm. © Ashmolean Museum, University of Oxford (WA2013.1.70)
• p.93: Thing Nine, 2023. Archival pigment print, 76 x 57 cm
• p.94–95: Camellia sinensis var. assamica III, 2024. Archival pigment print, dimensions variable, Sea of Troubles series