Your New Favorite Author Should Be a Bug.
How the essence of colonial museums cleave a deeper wedge between humans and other beings.
Amsterdam’s Rijksmuseum is world renowned for its incredible collection of masterpieces and centuries worth of historical artifacts. It’s also a prime example of Dutch colonialism, which is renowned for its brutality, efficiency, and nearly indescribable impact on today’s world.
Museums across Europe are taking a turn to face their colonial pasts and the institutional role of museums in perpetrating colonial narratives. The Wunderkammer, German for a cabinet of curiosities or rarities, was an early predecessor to the modern museum, particularly ones like the Rijksmuseum which display thousands of said ‘rarities and curiosities’. But seldom are these truly amazing pieces solely of Dutch origin.
It wasn’t an exhibition of this ongoing discourse that I found to be the most interesting when I visited the Rijksmuseum — but rather a discussion on the related topic of authorship.
Intertwined with the questions of colonialism and art, the special exhibit Clara the Rhinoceros delves into how one animal changed European perception of the entire species, and how art facilitates a dispersal of the world’s “wonders” into public hands. Intrigued by my namesake and the (adorable) renderings of animals throughout the exhibit, I found this exploration of credibility, perception, and authorship to be exceptional.
Through bugs, butterflies, and a very special rhinoceros, the Rijksmuseum picked one piece of its colonial nature to examine — bringing viewer attention to the impact art has on how society creates and perceives “the other”.
Of course, any great exhibit has to start with more than four legs. Over 140 artifacts throughout the joint exhibition examine how perceptions of crawly, creepy creatures have changed throughout the arts and sciences.
Their mobility and anatomy might make your skin crawl or raise some arm hairs, but their reputation today pales in comparison to the villainization of these little beings centuries ago. Some of the most vital creatures to our ecosystems, these “pests”, left 17th century scientists and civilians nothing less than horrified. Their image was associated with all things horrific and sacrilegious. It took centuries for their character to regain respect. While scientific advancement meant more observation of species and appreciation of their complexity, art too, was vital in shaping public perception of all sorts of creepy creatures.
The Cloak of Infamy from 1688 — a wooden, linen, iron, and wool cloak — depicted numerous snakes, toads, and lizards; all symbols of unchastity to punish women. No men were ever chained to this contraption and pulled throught the city streets on a cart to be taunted and mocked. Only ‘disgraceful’ women covered in the renderings of loathed creatures suffered a common association with “lesser” creatures.
Frustrating in that it’s far from the truth — we desperately need these beings and have them to thank for our world today — but so too because their artistic renditions are simply beautiful. And it’s through beautiful art displayed in this exhibit that we see how creatures like this crawled their way into a lighter era of perception and appreciation. The frequency with which insects and reptiles graced the pages of books, both scientific and not, increased rapidly. Albrecht Dürur was the first to depict an insect as the main subject in 1505, but popularity took up speed after the 17-hundreds, where we see table ornaments made of shells, decorative depictions of insects, and realist paintings of all sorts of previously undesirable beings.
Misunderstood as spawning like satanic creations, it was believed that these creatures replicated through “spontaneous generation” rather than mutual procreation. But art turned this notion around before science could prove otherwise. The inscribed table ornament made of an enameled shell reads,
“I am the earth, the mother of all things, laden with the precious burden of fruit that has sprung from me”.
Life casts of insects grace the bottom to depict the fertility of the Earth rather than all things sour. The majesty of these subjects — and their vital role in ecosystems — found its way into hearts and minds through art.
While we must thank the renderers for their revolutionary depictions, we cannot ignore the true authors of these wonders: the creepers and crawlers themselves. Thomas Saraceno and his studio think so too. The piece “Gravitational solidarity semi-social solitary solitary Choreography LHS 477” first credits the species of spiders that co-authored the final work’s webs.
In calling attention to those we thank for the wonders of this world, we can’t dismiss who brought them to us in the first place. Even then, those that helped bring pieces like this to colonial Europe’s public eye were dismissed. It’s at this point we see how deeply entrenched theft is in colonialism. Not only theft of ideas, but of people themselves, ecosystems, cultures, and resources.
Maria Sibylla Merian, a critic of the treatment of enslaved peoples, continued to exploit colonial systems while creating her art. No one is perfect, but Merian resided on plantations, used enslaved people to catch and breed the insects she painted while stealing their knowledge about plants and animals native to their homes. The name of the woman Merian exploited to finish her book of plants and creatures is never mentioned. Modern museums got their start by taking and claiming while purposely obscuring the true people and beings behind lucrative thefts.
Embedded within the discourse of authorship is subjective othering in art and science. Without due credit, depicting these beings without respect for their sentience or accomplishments furthers anthropocentric notions of hierarchy. It’s particularly visible in the museums culminating feature: Clara.
The world’s most famous rhinoceros appeared in the Netherlands in July of 1741. Brought all the way from Assam in what is now India, never before had a living, breathing, thinking rhino ever set foot in Europe. Killed while it happened, Clara’s mother could do nothing to stop her one month old baby from capture. In Bengal, a vital location for the Dutch (the center of their cotton, opium, and enslaved peoples market), a prince gives Clara to the director of the Dutch East India Company. She’s cherished in Shitcherman’s household and watched over by a native caretaker, mingles with dinner guests and grows enormously in her first two years. Once too large, she’s passed on to Captain Douwe Mout, who takes her to the Netherlands.
For the next 17 years she toured through Europe with her owner, and everywhere she went a sensation followed. Nothing like her had ever reached the eyes of Europeans, and they marveled at the monstrosity of the ravenously hungry, enormously heavy, fantastical creature before them. She fascinated them. We can only assume from the countless paintings, sculptures, adverts, and more made in her honor that she was cherished and marveled.
But learning about new things — new beings — that are far from unknown to the communities they come from, even with earnest and joy, isn’t harmless. Clara is a celebrity example of the extraordinary effects colonialism had, and continues to have, on human relationships to other species. Wonder isn’t the problem, othering is. Curiosity, science, exploration — appreciation. None of these are absent from the minds of those that drew the first insect charts or captured Clara and killed her mother. There’s an innate desire for the new and the extraordinary. But colonialism, and it’s excessive violence in handling beings of other species, both in the physical and in dispersal of imagery, cleaved an ever widening disconnection between humans and the ecosystems we are a part of.
By othering animals, by attributing human beliefs to them and their origins, by harnessing their bodies and minds to satisfy the colonial machine (one that feeds off newness, excess, and a diligently drawn desire for the ‘exotic’), innate human-ecosystem interconnections are torn. Torn until severed entirely.
With my penchant love for animals, I couldn’t help but hurt reading about Clara’s capture or the loss of her wondrous horn during confinement. And I can’t help but feel hurt for the ecosystems that collapse everyday while the world watches. However shrouded by modern notions of humanity or strained by anthropocentrism, our connection as humans to the ecosystems we participate in will make themselves even more visible as we continue to hurt them.
I hurt for the women and creatures vilified in Medieval streets, for the beings slaughtered to satisfy a colonial hunger, and to the Earth’s creations that remain captive in museums across the world today — surely continents away from their ecosystem origins.
“Were it possible in the future to liberate myself from the slavery that presently imprisons me and return to my homeland, in revenge I would exhibit men to my brethren. I am sure that the genus of rhinoceroses will look upon the wonder beast that man seems to be with more favour than human beings view a rhinoceros.” — said the rhinoceros, according to Christoph Gottelieb Richter.
I’d like to note that this piece is meant to cover my experience in the Rijksmuesum Amsterdam, and that only. It’s a commentary on my connection between the two exhibits and colonial ideology in human-Earth relations. I purposefully leave out mentions of the human enslavement that occurred and continues to occur in the tentacles of colonial powers because I don’t find any appropriate productivity in attempting to muddle two issues into one, short, read-by-no-one Medium post.
All information and quotes taken from the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, 2023.