Kat Austen, CultureLab editor
Lucky Devil, 2012 (Image: Rosemarie Trockel, DACS 2013, Courtesy Sprüth Magers Berlin London)
What makes a human mind? Forget all those wet biology descriptors and imagine it’s possible to walk through the forest of someone else’s neurons to see what they see, to explore their consciousness.
Viewing any artwork opens a window into other minds - just a little. But the Cosmos exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, London, goes a step further. Spread across seven rooms, it drills into the mind of influential contemporary artist Rosemarie Trockel by collecting her works and showing them with works of other minds that she has picked, chosen for their resonance with what she holds dear.
Polyclonia frondosa, circa 1876 (Image: The Natural History Museum, London 2012)
Themes emerge - geology, sexuality, vitality, zoology - but are presented with a randomness and apparent illogic that perfectly reflects the way our minds seem to work. The appearance of a chair in one room - Trockel's Atheismus - layered with tasselled felt, recollects the shapes of valuable glass jellyfish sculptures made by the Blashka family on show in another room (borrowed from the Natural History Museum's Treasures Gallery).
Then there are the multiple layers visible in the multicoloured yarn-encased objects by artist Judith Scott. These recall both lepidopteran cocooning - and there is a butterfly pinned to one of the pieces in another room - and the geological layers evoked by Trockel's own Lucky Devil, a stuffed crab atop a layered stack of fabrics.
To best reflect the mind, then, Trockel's curation is not linear, but rather a web of connections that allows you to free-associate as you walk through her galleries.
And the juxtaposition of the artefacts imbues them with extra meaning, layering on new interpretations. Their arrangement recalls Victorian cabinets of curiosities: take Trockel's As Far As Possible, a cage containing three stuffed birds, animated in such a way as to catch the viewer unawares. A small wren moving behind a log plays on our primal reflex to avoid scurrying creatures.
The piece is placed next to another of the artist's powerful works, Replace Me, which shows a tarantula standing in for a woman's pubic hair. The proximity heightens the connection with the same reflex, which responds to spiders in particular - and, interestingly, is more prevalent in women than men.
Mechanical Reproduction, 1995 (Image: Rosemarie Trockel, DACS 2013, Courtesy Sprüth Magers Berlin London)
Trockel has included some extraordinarily beautiful and rare pieces in the collection. Among them her own illustrations of poppies spreading their seeds, Mechanical Reproduction, are stunning examples of images from nature, as are those of pioneering natural historian Maria Sibylla Merian, dating from the beginning of the eighteenth century, which have a vibrancy and vitality belying their age.
Not everything in the exhibition is beautiful, but there is a coherence to the whole which is the result of a collection built on wide-ranging but ultimately reflexive choices.
Cosmos is at the Serpentine Gallery, London, until 7 April.
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How to use art to help explore other minds
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How to use art to help explore other minds
