Theatrum Mundi: Armarium

Mark Dion (b. 1961, New Bedford, Massachusetts) and Robert Williams (b. 1960, Liverpool, United Kingdom) collaborated on a work to explore the ways in which humans have attempted to impose structure and order on a complex and chaotic natural world. Dion has described their work as "creating an encyclopedia of the methodologies of how one arranges things to make meaning." In Theatrum Mundi: Armarium (2001), based on a collaboration with scholars and scientists at Cambridge University, the two artists filled two nearly identical cabinets with objects representing the belief systems of two cosmologists, Ramon Llull (b. 1232, Palma de Mallorca; d. 1315, Palma de Mallorca) and Robert Fludd (b. 1574 Kent; d. 1637, London). Each cabinet could be thought of as representing a cosmologist (a scientist who studies the universe in its totality), and each shelf in each cabinet represents a different category of his theory. The top shelves of both cabinets were left empty to symbolize both men's belief in the existence of God. The cabinets are connected by a single-shelf cabinet containing a human skeleton. The skeleton points to the limited ability of man to conceive of the universe. The artists have great awe for the "sheer audacity of the attempt to explain existence," but also recognize how inevitably "humancentric, and thus deeply flawed" this attempt is.