Appetite for the Magnificent

"Appetite for the Magnificent" is a photographic-essayistic study on the history and present of the aquarium. David and Tania Willen focus on the aesthetic, visual dimension of contemporary aquariums in their photographs. The subjects are drawn from Swiss zoos and the Swiss high-end aquarium scene, including both public and private laboratories where individuals engage as aqua scapers, designing mineral-vegetable-animal cabinets. These cabinets, like images themselves, exist in the tension between reality and virtuality, presence and absence, the living and the inanimate. The fish swimming in the aquarium may be present as a living being, yet through the glass, it is experienced as an image of a fish. The way the fish seem to hang in the air in the strictly front-focused photographs by David and Tania Willen emphasizes the virtual character of the aquarium: it is nothing less than a precursor to television. Jörg Scheller, in his essay, illustrates through the example of Philip Henry Gosse (1810-1888), a co-founder and popularizer of aquaristics, how the aquarium emerged as an interface between art, science, and religion. Gosse was an artistically inclined illustrator, a self-taught naturalist, and a deeply religious free churchman. His biography reflects the essential characteristics of the aquarium: the aestheticization and artistic representation of nature, the systematic observation and exploration of marine life, as well as the orientation towards the Book of Genesis, which states that man should "have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and over every living thing that moves on the earth.".