Wunderkammer!

 

Last night I returned from a quick week-long trip to New York. Of course it was marvelous. How could that glimpse and taste of my old life in New York not be wonderful? And as I thought about the trip on the plane ride back across the ocean, I realized it was just that: wonder-full. My time in New York is always exciting and invigorating because of the friends I see, the old haunts I visit, and the curiosity and energy of that metropolis. I had a lot of time to think on the flight back since the computer system had malfunctioned and there were no movies or maps to watch during the long flight. Oh well. No matter! I thought of several upcoming blog entries! But most of all, I decided that New York, for me at least, is like this delightful old German word, a wunderkammer. Hmmmm…say it a couple times to yourself, ja? And make sure you say a ‘v’ sound on wunder and not a ‘w’!!

What is, or, was ist, a wunderkammer, you may ask? It is literally a cabinet of curiosities, of wonders, about art and the world. In Renaissance Europe such wunderkammer became quite popular—each nobleman aspired to have an encyclopediac collection of objects whose eclectic categorical boundaries were hard to define. These charming curios of curiosities conveyed symbolically the patron’s control he had of the world around him. These “cabinets of wonder” are the precursors to our modern museums.

In reaction to my usual verbose self I decided to sum up in a phrase or two why I love New York so much. I decided that I go to New York to refresh my sense of awe with the world. (Now since I have devoted a whole blog entry to this discussion, I don’t suppose I have avoided verbosity in the least!).  As corny as this sounds, when I am in New York, I find myself gasping in wonderment at all that is around me—the theater, the restaurants, the friends, the museums, Central Park, and I find lessons that can be gleaned so easily from all that is around me in New York. So I decided to look back into my wunderkammer of last week’s trip to see what curiosities dazzled me especially. Art, like the heart, can sometimes defy logic, and it is often the most ordinary things in New York that remind me of beauty. Beauty is often where you don’t expect to find it; that it is sometimes we may discover and also invent, then reinvent, for ourselves; that the most important things in the world are never as simple as they seem but that the world is richer when it declines to abide by comforting formulas.

Christy, my intrepid partner-in-wonder-for-all-things-New York, and I went to an unusual theatrical event together. It was part improvisation, part walking tour, and part detective procedural show. In the Lower East Side we met others in a dingy bar and learned about an unsolved crime of a brother and sister in 1873 “Five Points” in New York. We then had a map and a bag of clues, and set out to find the suspects, all of whom were walking around the neighborhood, and we questioned the suspects about motives and alibis, always trying to crack this case. After a couple of hours each group got to state who they believed the murderers were and why. What an exciting way to spend an afternoon exploring and researching and reliving a bygone era of New York. The actors did a remarkable job fielding our questions, speaking in long ago idioms and prejudices and reminding us of the social history of the late 19^th century Bowery.

On another day I went with my former student Talal to the Met. I had looked forward to this since Talal is one of the most exciting students I have had in art history. How fun to go through and see some of the works we studied. But I also wanted to look at a work that is rather new and contemporary, one we hadn’t studied in class, and that might excite a certain amount of wonder. I chose a work by contemporary Japanese artist Kohei Nawa, an artist under the age of 40.

Nawa has developed an original technique and term called “Pixcell” in which he works. The term Pixcell is derived from both “pixel” and “cell”—the most basic building blocks of the digital and the organic. Mr. Nawa has been working with his unique artificial glass medium of Pixcell beads since 2000, using them to address the discrepancies between exterior and interior, what is perceived and what is actual. Take a look at the top of the page at art work Talal and I encountered. What do you see? 

Hundreds of crystal clear beads coat a once living, now taxidermied deer, complete with a full and proud rack of antlers.

It is a strange sight!  The Pixcell Deer stands in a room, surrounded by ancient Japanese screens that are coated in natural imagery. Nawa’s Pixcell Deer (from 2011) is a solitary figure emanating a cool, silvery light in an otherwise warm, golden room. But its magnetic attraction becomes weird when I realize what lies beneath the bubble-covered skin. A deer, once living, breathing and feeling, is now stuffed, frozen and silent! From afar, the stag deceives viewers into believing that it is simply a sculpture, an inanimate object that was made from nothing into something. The realization of being tricked, as well as being confronted with what is essentially a carcass, is very strange.

But strange is okay. Strange is usually also about wonder. Nawa invites us to look, to wonder, to learn, and then to be a little more confused. It is obvious that the Pixcells reflect what is around the room—but every image is upside-down!!?!

From the wall text I learn that a deer is traditionally considered a messenger for the deities of the Japanese Shinto faith. Nawa repurposes the ancient Kasuga Mandala (the compositional motif of a white deer turned toward a mirror that sits on its back) to create his own harbinger of deception, which communicates the release from physical reality in preference for images. Kawa is quoted in the wall text:    “By covering a surface of an object with transparent glass beads, the existence of the object itself is replaced by a ‘husk of light,’ and the new vision ‘the cell of an image’ (Pixcell) is shown.”

His focus on the space between perception and reality, or what might be called illusion, inspires ominous feelings. The outer layer of things, the skin, is the most immediately attractive portion of the work, but it also physically and metaphorically distorts what lies beneath it. A single bead, similar in size to a fortuneteller’s crystal ball, rests in the slope of the deer’s spine. As the largest Pixcell it is the easiest to peer into, but grotesque fun-house-mirror images form within it. My own twisted and bent reflection mixes with the contorted features of the deer into a vortex of light and color. The glass eyes of the stuffed animal are near human eye-level; a dark and piercing stare hangs beyond the fractal divide.

Reflections force a viewer to both look and be looked at. But this often leads to forgetting the divide between what is presented and what is seen. Knowing that I was both staring at, and being stared at, forces me to reevaluate the relationship that was forming between this art object and myself. Is then this deer that lived into adulthood before being killed, stuffed and sold, still a deer? No. Now this animal exists solely as an image—pixels made of light and color created by its new, artificial skin. The living animal was translated to an image on a website, repurposed into a sculpture, and then recreated as a hybrid physical-image. Nawa’s use of the Pixcell beads on everything great and small, living and dead, imposes a sense of wonder that breeds uncertainty in my mind. What is nature in the technological age? Are we people or are we images of people? And finally, will the human eye eventually lose the ability to tell the difference? I wonder…

I could go on and on, because it seems every episode in New York lends itself to a beauty and wonder for me. But just one more little drawer in my wunderkammer will I share today…about another play. Christy and I went to see a new (only days since it had opened!) and splashy musical on Broadway called Big Fish.

I approach the art of theater in the spirit of an amateur. I mean amateur in the original sense of the word, as a lover, someone who does something for the love of it, whole-heartedly. Big Fish was a delight! I went to see it simply because of four names attached to the show (It was a 1990s movie by Tim Burton, but a film I never saw). The three leading actors and the director are well-known in the New York as consummate pros and outstanding theatrical animals.

Big Fish is a musical built around the tall—or at least well-stretched—tales  of an Alabama-born traveling salesman, Edward Bloom who has a penchant for embellishing his life. With his stocky build, short stature, and thinning hair (wait! Am I starring in this???), lead actor Norbert Leo Butz is an unlikely leading man, but he has the loose-limbed energy and charisma of a young Dick Van Dyke.  For the most part, though, Big Fish finds theatrically inventive ways to reel audiences into its central love story. In this case, it isn't boy-meets-girl but father-hooks-son. And Edward Bloom is quite a catch. But not every critic took the bait (stop me!!! I could on and on with the fishing puns!!) One critic wrote last week: “A lot of loving craftsmanship has gone into this musical, and it delivers satisfying entertainment for those who don't mind being emotionally manipulated.”

Don’t mind?? I have no problem with something that tugs on the heartstrings!

Wholesomeness gets a bad rap on Broadway these days, usually regarded as the kind of unbearably sweet and inoffensive entertainment that sophisticated theatergoers must endure while taking their conservative grandmas out for a night on the town...But Big Fish displays no fear in plopping its unabashed wholesomeness right in your lap. Its spirit is steeped in Rodgers and Hammerstein decency that propels an evening that's adventurous, romantic and, yeah, kinda daring. It was an imaginative and heart-tugging evening, just the kind of wonder I adore.

 

I guess what I love so much about my wunderkammer trips to New York is that I find art really everywhere in that city. There is the accidental masterpiece in lunch with Kate, catching up with Harrison, visiting with a friend who has suffered a tragic loss, enjoying a walk in the park. The art is certainly on display in one of the gazillions of museums in New York, but it is the wonder of discovering it, enjoying it in an Irish suspect in old New York, in a dead deer, and in the hopes of catching a big fish. Time to close the drawers of the wunderkammer but boy I can’t wait to open the cabinet again!