Appetite for the Magnificent

Appetite for the Magnificent is a photographic-essayistic study of the history and present of the aquarium. In their photographs, David and Tania Willen focus on the aesthetic, pictorial dimension of today's aquariums. The motifs come from Swiss zoos and the Swiss high-end aquarium scene, i.e. public and private laboratories where people work as "aqua scapers", as designers of mineral-vegetable-animalistic cabinets. These cabinets, like pictures as such, stand in the field of tension between reality and virtuality, presence and absence, the animate and the inanimate. The fish that runs its course in the aquarium may be present as a living creature - but it is still experienced through the panes as an image of a fish. The fact that the fish in David and Tania Willen's photographs, which are strictly concentrated on the front, seem to literally hang in the air underlines the virtual character of the aquarium: it is nothing less than a pre-form of television. In his essay, Jörg Scheller uses the example of Philip Henry Gosse (1810-1888), the co-founder and populariser of aquatics, to show how the aquarium emerged as an interface between art, science and religion. Gosse was an art-loving illustrator, an autodidactic naturalist and a deeply religious free churchman. In his biography, the essential characteristics of the aquarium emerge: the aestheticisation and artification of nature, the systematic observation and study of marine life, and the orientation towards Genesis 1, where it says that man should rule "over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air and over all the animals that stir on the land".