SECTION 1 - via - School of Visual Arts

These objects became remediated in many, many ways and I want to show you two possible
ends of this remediation. Collections of rarities, shells, gems, coins, sculpture, painting,
watches, and automata were material expressions of the turn towards the empirical first
emerging in the 16th and 17th centuries.
[Both of them please; focus please]. Here on one end you see that it expands into rooms upon
rooms. This is Levinus Vincent’s famous collection in Amsterdam and print from 1715 where
you have rooms and rooms going on but I want to draw your attention to the interactive mode,
the conversational mode, of knowing but here something that fits in the palm of my hand at the
other end of the spectrum for five pence even, the infant’s cabinet of shells. There was also an
infant’s cabinet of flowers and so on that is a learning tool, a high art object but also a private
object. Here you have a more public aspect but here you have kind of private educational
aspect and you also have a whole economic range in between so these media get re-mediated.
I’m proposing then that the wundertrunk or the cabinet is an inter-sensual for personal
realization and transformation as the little child would be if it handled those little blocks and as
the adult is on my example in the left. Such assemblages, however—and this has to do with the
panel this evening—also constituted a cultural inventory and artismo archive exposing the
collective heritage of nature and humanities greatest handiwork. But the French have been
great in recent years—everything is [UI] this and [UI] that you know, this is our national
patrimony. Nobody has ever pointed out what is in these wonder cabinets is, in a way, God, the
great unusual singularities produced by God but also the singularities proved and produced by
human skill, by ingenuity, by the power of the imagination of the artist and that the items in
there are kind of cultural inventory. A cultural archive of empirical skill, of skills, of skills of
the hand. Another aspect of this material that has not been pointed out is that it also points
elsewhere, the beyondness of this technology and that we’re familiar with in the contemporary
world but I want to try and show it to you much earlier. This technology broadened horizons by
exposing an intangible domain, lying beyond the boundary of the unaided senses and
accessible only through optical devices.
[Both please.] I want to propose to you that cabinets and instruments also share certain formal
properties. Here again, in a bulging bulbous mirror a convex mirror and a wonderful joke one
of Joseph Cornell’s crystal cages, a continuation of that wundertrunk tradition. The practice of
confining and isolating rarities in a compressed space is not just western; you find it in Japan,
in China, in India. No matter what else you do to it, compression intensifies the aura and
strangeness of those objects.
[Next on the right please.] Like the wooden cabinet with its swirl away oddities, optical devices
similarly capture and frame transitory phenomena. This is a terrific globe, a mid-19th century
globe on a Chinese vase from the Smithsonian, quartz and that is not some weird mutant
floating inside. That is literally optically captured from the collection, the Smithsonian
collection, which occurs back in the room but that almost automatic snatching of things and
making them present, making them there, giving them to you in all of their reality but at the
same time making them hyper-real. It’s that double function that I want to stress. Just as the
wundertrunk [right please] compartmentalizes the scattered bounty of the cosmos in niches
and drawers to accentuate them so apparatus boxes of universe of disembodied images. This is
the slide drawer to the microscope that I showed you earlier. The rush of space and time [right
please] is halted for an instant in a flat and curved mirror or stalked temporarily inside the lens
and slides of microscopes and telescopes letting us observe miniscule objects, right, in grand
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