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Appetite for the Magnificent

Jörg Scheller, David & Tania Willen - Appetite for the Magnificent
Appetite for the Magnificent is a photographic and essayistic exploration of the history and present-day world of the aquarium. The contribution by David and Tania Willen tackles the aesthetic dimension of Swiss present-day aquariums, while Jörg Scheller's essay on naturalist Philip Henry Gosse retraces the evolution of the aquarium at the interface between art, science and religion...
David and Tania Willen focus their lenses on the pictorial, aesthetic dimension of present-day aquariums in Swiss zoos and Switzerland's high-end aquarium scene: public and private labs in which “aquascapers” design animal-vegetable-mineral gardens of aqueous delights. These moving-picture aquascapes float between the poles of reality and virtuality, presence and absence, the animate and inanimate world. The fish swimming around in the tank may be present as living, breathing creatures, and yet we also perceive them through the glass as images of fish. In the Willens' photographs, all shot from the front, the fish seem suspended in mid-air, an effect that brings to the fore the virtual side of the aquarium: it is nothing short of a precursor to the television set.
In his essay on the co-founder and popularizer of aquaristics Philip Henry Gosse (1810-1888), Jörg Scheller retraces the evolution of the aquarium at the interface between art, science and religion. Gosse was an artistic illustrator, a self-taught scientist and a devout evangelical, whose life and thought are reflected in the underlying principles of the aquarium: the aestheticization and artification of nature, the systematic observation and exploration of marine life, and belief, according to the Book of Genesis, in man's God-given “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” (Jörg Scheller, 2017).
Jörg Scheller (born 1979 in Stuttgart) is an art historian and heads the theory section of the bachelor degree course Art & Media at the ZHdK. He freelances on the side as an author and curator, as well as singer and bassist in the heavy metal duo Malmzeit.
Photographer David Willen (born 1968 in Bern) and picture editor Tania Willen (born 1967 in Bern) have been working together since 2003 and teaching at the Zurich University of the Arts since 2013.
Edited by Tania Willen, David Willen, Jörg Scheller.

Graphic design: Prill Vieceli Cremers.
 
published in October 2017
English edition
18 x 27 cm (softcover)
128 pages (23 color ill.)
 
43.00
 
ISBN : 978-3-906803-48-7
EAN : 9783906803487
 
in stock
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