In the course of his wide-ranging artistic practice – and initially very much through his exploration of natural history museums and questions around ecology – he has enquired into collecting as a foundation for knowledge in Western cultures and into the institutions that impose order on and make sense of collected items. (Dion et al., 2015)

Mark Dion chose to use cabinets to present his finds from the Tate Thames Dig. Cabinets are often used by artists to present found or made objects and become integral to how the work is seen and its meaning (the cabinets are sometimes referred to as vitrines when used in this way) . This section looks at the history of curiosity cabinets – or wunderkammer (as they were originally called).

Wunderkammer or curiosity cabinets were collections of rare, valuable, historically important or unusual objects, which generally were compiled by a single person, normally a scholar or nobleman, for study and/or entertainment. The Renaissance wunderkammer, like the modern museum, were subject to preservation and interpretation. However, they differed from the modern museum in some fundamental aspects of purpose and meaning. Renaissance wunderkammer were private spaces, created and formed around a deeply held belief that all things were linked to one another through either visible or invisible similarities. People believed that by detecting those visible and invisible signs and by recognizing the similarities between objects, they would be brought to an understanding of how the world functioned, and what humanity’s place in it was.

The wunderkammer collections were displayed in multi-compartmented cabinets and vitrines, (which later in the Renaissance grew to be entire rooms), and were arranged so as to ‘inspire wonder and stimulate creative thought’ (Putnam p10). Exotic natural objects, art, treasures and diverse items of clothing or tools from distant lands and cultures were all sought for the wunderkammer. Particularly highly prized were unusual and rare items which crossed or blurred the lines between animal, vegetable and mineral. Examples of these were corals and fossils and above all else objects such as narwhal tusks which were thought to be the horns of unicorns and were considered to be magical.

Mark Dion in his work Tate Thames Dig (1999) makes use of the form of the wunderkammer, or curiosity cabinet. He does this for two reasons. The first is its association with the beliefs that underlie the way in which Renaissance society organized and categorized the world within the space of the curiosity cabinet. He uses this association to make the viewer question why the modern museum is organised in the manner that it is, and what lies behind the rules that curators and art historians follow in the classification and organization of objects.

Secondly, Dion uses the wunderkammer as a means of presenting as museum artefacts, objects that might otherwise be considered rubbish. In the case of Tate Thames Dig he put the material through a series of pseudo-museological systems: the dig itself; the cleaning, sorting and classifying, in tents of the type used on archeological sites; and finally the display in the wunderkammer. (Tate, n.d.)