BUILD NOTES

How to create your own museum of the bizarre and the beautiful.

Your Own Wunderkammer

BY HEATHER McDOUGAL

■ THE WUNDERKAMMER (CHAMBER OF

wonders), in its original 16th- and 17th-century incarnation, was a way of housing and displaying collections of natural oddities or curios in a room — usually in the home of someone with wealth or influence, or that of a scholar. The chamber was arranged according to similarities or other groupings, on the whim of the collector.

Collectors then, just like today, were competitive, and tried to gather the strangest, rarest specimens for their displays: the largest bezoar ( gastrointestinal mass) found in the stomach of a camel, the most bizarre two-headed animal fetus preserved in fluid, the most unusual fossil or fish skeleton, and fascinating objects from faraway lands. All of these were common wunderkammer content.

Interest in Wunderkammern spread throughout Europe into the 18th century, spawning not only rooms, but boxes, cabinets, and other furniture full of curiosities. These collections became something of a requirement for the well-rounded gentleman.

As collections evolved, and European thinking shifted from the theological to the more analytical, the need for a more thorough, universal way of organizing objects emerged. Arguments about the taxonomy of spiritual matters became arguments about the scientific taxonomy of birds and beasts, and the old collections, with their more personal approach, fell out of favor. Great houses went into debt, revolutions rose up and faltered, and the collections were sold off or acquired by government or academic institutions and eventually made public. And so, the modern museum came into being.

Some of the great collections have survived, leaving weird remnants of a different way of thinking, of a time when all things on Earth existed solely for conquest, acquisition, and trophy-like display. The frontispiece of Ole Worm’s Museum Wormianum, for example, shows the voracious clutter of an early wunderkammer. Peter the Great’s famous Kunstkammer (art chamber), which included much of

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Frederik Ruysch’s collection of preserved anatomical specimens, seems to us today to be gruesome and horriific, but strangely beautiful at the same time.

My introduction to wunderkammern came in 1996, with a brief glimpse of Rosamond Purcell’s photographs of Peter the Great’s collection in Finders, Keepers. I couldn’t get the images out of my head. How could somebody treat other peoples’ teeth as something to be beautifully housed and classified? Why would someone trouble to dress a disembodied arm in a frilly sleeve, edged in lace, before pickling it in a jar? It bent my mind. I thought about it for years.

What it came down to was presentation — treating your collection as if it were treasure, to be housed and counted and lovingly arranged. The Renaissance scholars who began these collections came from the world of the church, of splendid reliquaries, saints’ bones and holy fragments, and their arrangements are clearly influenced by church culture.

Unlike modern galleries, they don’t isolate objects with space but stun you with numbers, with the sheer overwhelming experience of entering a room whose every surface is filled with gloriously strange objects. Only very big or very unusual things get focal treatment. Later collectors, living in the splendor of the Enlightenment, went on to stun instead with their art of presentation, building cabinets and displays of great elegance and artistry.

So what does the wunderkammer mean to us today? Purcell, who’s worked with some of the greatest wunderkammern in the world, feels that the term gets thrown around far too often. It’s easy to use it to mean any collection, real or conceptual, which startles and fascinates. However, the term has evolved into something more metaphorical: an idea, reclaiming something that’s been lost to the strictures of modern science and commodification. To build your own contemporary wunderkammer is to actively imagine authenticity, putting some wonder and mystery back in your life.