A few years back I worked on a montage series called Linnaeus’ Desire. You can see some samples on my other website www.friderikeheuer.com. This series paid hommage to the 18th century Swedish botanist Carolus Linnaeus. He was the first to frame principles for defining natural genera and species of organisms and to create a uniform system for naming them (binomial nomenclature.)

In particular, it was the botanical section of Systema Naturae that built Linnaeus’s scientific reputation. After reading essays on sexual reproduction in plants by Vaillant and by German botanist Rudolph Jacob Camerarius, Linnaeus had become convinced of the idea that all organisms reproduce sexually. As a result, he expected each plant to possess male and female sexual organs (stamens and pistils), or “husbands and wives,” as he also put it.

This “sexual system,” as Linnaeus called it, became extremely popular, though certainly not only because of its practicality but also because of its erotic connotations and its allusions to contemporary gender relations. You could now talk sex when you pretended to talk about gardens!

French political theorist Jean-Jacques Rousseau used the system for his “Huit lettres élémentaires sur la botanique à Madame Delessert” (1772; “Eight Letters on the Elements of Botany Addressed to Madame Delessert”). English physician Erasmus Darwin, the grandfather of Charles Darwin, used Linnaeus’s sexual system for his poem “The Botanic Garden” (1789), which caused an uproar among contemporaries for its explicit passages. My montages combined photographs of plants with representations of the human body, hoping to recapture some of Linnaeus’ passionate imagination.

Tulips lend themselves to illustrate Linnaeus’ points; in addition, the desire for them – Tulpenwoede or tulip mania – caused something akin to a sexual frenzy, and ruined many a Dutch life in the 1600s due to failed market speculation. High noon in the tulip fields…..(yes, your’s truly.)

Or so I thought, until I read this, realizing now how capitalism’s mechanisms struck once again…..

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2013/10/economic-history

 

Here is Jan Brueghel the Younger delivering a satire on tulip speculation: count the monkeys….