Responses to 3 "Wunderkammers"

Fred Wilson’s arrangements had interesting concepts behind the aesthetic choices: those based on form and visual relational qualities. It is a nice way to view objects in order to learn about them in a global context. However it makes for complications in geographical microcosms and historical/temporal context. It creates a kind of white-wash generalization. It succeeds on a purely on ornamental qualities that have arrived on similar forms through drastically different processes and environments. It reads like a painting, but not as an accurate historical map in the mode of categorizing and classifying within the context of their environments and co-existing elements. One thing it does succeed at is revealing quite another thing: A sort of analogizing of separate isolated entities in their visual forms, which relays a kind of global harmony. It follows classically along the lines of Wunderkammer in its assumed relatedness of things from an improvised intuitive ordering of objects brought together from different contexts.

            The Jurassic Museum is also particularly interesting in it’s strategies of creating confusion and unsuspended disbelief for the sake of questioning and learning. The subject matter is so extremely different, but equal in its extremity. They focus around perceptually unimaginable or unbelievable developments, such as insect brain spores, bats flying through lead, and human horns. They are interesting, but confusion does have a downside. It is true that confusion causes one to question and yearn to find out more, but it also robs a person of direction. The opulent, sound-rich audio tour recordings are over laden with embellishing noise to the extent that the actual information is all but lost. The museum seems to operate on a sort of exotic/touristic spectacle of showmanship that is different from a natural history institution in its disorienting “misinformation in disguise.” In a Wunderkammer context, it does effectively create a place of curiosity and exploration, but buried under layers of confusion and mysticism.

            “Colors” by Joseph Grigely is perhaps my favorite of the three because it reads as a more whimsical piece. Perhaps this is because my connection to words is less than my associations with physical objects. Yes, both can be misused given the weight that the associations carry, but words I feel, allow for a more malleable engagement of play. It is also because a lot of the words invoked aren’t actually objects such as white lies, gentrification, and cloud 9, which are more like concepts that have no real completely embodying physical forms. It would be difficult to cage a concept in glass and put it out on display, as even art is slave to bias interpretation. It is also because it plays on the lexicological contextualization of “white” as concept. From these different interpretations, it explores the different interpretations and sockets them into rather humorous categories. Usually Wunderkammers have physical spaces in which the viewer physically enters to see objects. Here, the page is the space, and the experience is based in the mind.