Full of Wonder - by Linda Duke, Indianapolis Museum of Art

(Accompanying The Ninth Letter's featured section, "Where We're At: Nine Collections".
http://ninthletter.art.uiuc.edu/ )


Wunderkammern, in English "chambers" or "cabinets of curiosities," were displayed by European and American intellectuals and collectors as late as the19th century. They included objects of many kinds, those considered to be rare, beautiful or strange, mysterious, and precious. The objects were thought-provoking when examined individually, their combined effect wondrous when viewed as a group. Early Wunderkammern brought together objects that later Western scholarship would sort into increasingly distinct categories, such as botany, geology, anthropology, and art. As the rigors of scientific thought developed, influencing even popular culture, the chamber of curiosities went out of fashion. In private collections and public museums - and in universities - it became imperative to specialize and separate by discipline.

At the beginning of the 21 st century, some of us feel drawn to reconsider the Wunderkammer. When modern science triumphed over its "primitive" approach, we gained focus, but what did we lose? The intellectual process that the early Wunderkammer represents is one that includes - and celebrates in a visceral, un-pretty way - the aesthetic. This "aesthetically infused" thought process models a way of approaching multiplicity, complexity and ambiguity that seeks connections and fosters new, emergent meanings; it allows for creative, provisional meaning-making in the face of the unknown, the uncharted, and the seemingly contradictory. In the aesthetic of the Wunderkammer, not only is the whole more than the sum of its parts, the whole emerges as arguably other. Sound familiar? The World Wide Web - a kind of modern Wunderkammer - allows access to a vast amount of information, in many cases un-formatted by traditional hierarchies and boundaries.

As a society and as individuals, we sometimes feel daunted by the quantity of information that digital and Web-based technology provide. At this moment of fast-expanding technologies and access to untamed information, it might be proposed that our aesthetic ways of thinking can serve us increasingly well, and yet still go largely unrecognized. The word "aesthetic" itself has an image problem. And no wonder; aesthetic thought, like the old-style wunderkammer , is free of ordinary boundaries. It allows intuition and information, heart and mind to join forces in unexpected ways. I wonder if the scientific "revolution" could, over time and prompted by pervasive new information technologies, give way to an aesthetic one. Perhaps the struggle is already being felt in the tensions around public education: the relentless pressure to turn schools into factories where information is presented, drilled, and tested, resulting in the repression of creative thinking and a retrenchment into standard academic "basics." Provisional and aesthetic meanings are demeaned as wrong answers and irrelevant sidetracks.

It might be useful and honest to advocate transgression here. Though the early Wunderkammern were not trangressive - the boundaries between disciplines didn't yet exist, in modern hindsight transgression is the sin that makes the Wunderkammer either despicable or ridiculous. In it unlike things are juxtaposed; the known and the unknown commingle in a lascivious manner. There is, in my view, a lot to be said for transgression - of boundaries and categories, of custom and propriety, of every and not just some assumptions. Wunderkammer-like thought threatens the categories and boundaries of information now, now that they are firmly established in schools, in higher academia, in our everyday thought. It threatens, but it also promises new discoveries. What if something as frightening as pain can have a beautiful dimension? What if fear and hatred can be shown to be composed of the same elements as attraction? What if gender identity and sexuality aren't always cut and dried but mutable, situational, and unpredictable?

For a very long time human beings have sensed that realization, fresh insight, and deeply satisfying understandings emerge when things, be they ideas or objects, from very different domains are brought together. On one level, we enact this process unconsciously - as though the mind has a calculating capacity that works overtime, that goes beyond the world of numbers to test out the result of adding a sunset to a bit of conversation, a fossil to a philosophical idea, a rare feather to a beautifully glazed ceramic piece - always searching for new answers that represent more than simple sums. Each of us probably calculates such random and chosen juxtapositions hundreds of times in a day. On another level, artists and art lovers, scientists, and collectors have pursued this aesthetic arithmetic very consciously. Disparate elements have been experimentally combined; subtle and unique collections built. It is this process - of the mind in high gear - in aesthetic mode - that is celebrated in ww@'s new on-line exhibition series, 9 collections: a mental place where science, philosophy, and art meet and are endlessly recombined; a cyberspace where image and reality engage in mutual causality.

Linda Duke