When Seeing Is Marveling

Imagine, the next time friends visit, calling them over to your microscope to join you in observing the way blood circulates through the body of a frog. Imagine opening up an ornate cabinet, and sharing with them your most prized minerals, shells, magnets, navigational tools and preserved animal specimens. Imagine placing a strangely distorted painting flat on the table, then giving them the cylindrical mirror necessary to unscramble it.

Hardly sounds like 21st century entertainment, but the impulses behind those popular recreational activities of the past differ little from what drives our time on the Web today, our enjoyment of the movies, our exploration of virtual reality. We want to be transported. We want to know the world and have experiences beyond the ordinary. We want to extend our vision beyond its familiar capacity. These are timeless desires, born with the species. They thrive on wonder, what Descartes considered the first of all the passions.

“Devices of Wonder,” which opened last week at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Brentwood, traces those impulses and the technologies designed to act on them during the past 400 years. Full of serious toys, marvelous instruments and art resonant with the theme of discovery, the show tracks a history of visual thinking, “from the world in a box to images on a screen,” as the subtitle puts it. Curators Frances Terpak of the Getty Research Institute and Barbara Stafford, art historian at the University of Chicago, have assembled more than 400 objects from the overlapping worlds of art, science, optics, magic, natural history and philosophy.

The “world in a box” describes a variety of objects in the show--a perspective box painted to resemble a Dutch interior, a mirrored “optical box” that repeats a miniature landscape to infinity, camera obscuras and more. Chief among them in having a profound influence over how we see and think about the world, says Terpak, is the wunderkabinett , commonly translated as a cabinet of wonders or curiosities.

“They’re really the basis of our global network today, our mass communication system. They’re the foundation of it, because they have this incredible grouping of material that came from all around the world. When you took it out, you arranged and rearranged it in endless ways. They were instruments of learning, boxes for learning, just like the Internet. They were multi-tasking objects, just like we’ve become multi-tasking people.”

Three weeks before the show’s opening, Terpak takes advantage of the installers’ lunch break to launch a whirlwind tour, her round, tortoise-shell glasses and no-nonsense demeanor offset by vibrant, coral-colored suede shoes. The Getty’s own 17th century cabinet of wonders is the first stop and a continual point of reference, the conceptual underpinning for the show.

Normally, the ornately inlaid chest is displayed in one of the museum’s decorative arts galleries, all but its front doors closed, a lovely, if mute object. Here in the “Devices of Wonder” show, it sits atop a large, stepped platform, all of its doors opened and drawers pulled out, wearing a magnificent crown of shells and coral. Like most such cabinets, the Getty’s lost its original contents over time, but Terpak and Stafford have gathered the kinds of things commonly found in them and “unfurled” them in the show’s first few rooms. There are cases of purposeful toys, a telescope, a crystal globe, mirrors of all sorts, and several mechanically driven human figures known as automata.

“Furniture to think with” is how Terpak refers to wunderkabinette. “They come out of a long tradition of squat, portable writing desks. It was the movers and shakers of Europe, the Medicis and other banking families who used these compact writing desks”--precursors to the laptop, she notes--”when they were traveling through Europe to do their business.”

By the late 16th century, those writing desks became incorporated into elaborate cabinets with numerous, sometimes secret compartments and ingeniously operating doors and drawers. Every possible wonder, natural and artificial, could be found inside, reflecting their owners’ wealth, power and knowledge. As the “original encyclopedic compendium of world knowledge,” the cabinet, Terpak explains, served as the foundation for the modern museum.

Here in the exhibition, the cabinet functions like the smallest in a sequence of nesting dolls. It sits inside an exhibition that itself is designed to replicate a cabinet of wonders, inside a museum that functions as a cabinet of wonders, within the larger, macrocosmic world of wonders.

Both the cabinet and the show take things out of their natural context and bring them together, encouraging new relationships, new resonances. And neither is meant to be contemplated passively.

Remove your shoes and you can step into Lucas Samaras’ 1966 “Mirrored Room,” an infinity box in the tradition of the small mirrored boxes made since the 18th century to create illusions, and also to study the nature and psychology of reflection.

You can turn the cranks of a viewing box to shift the scenes of a painted panoramic landscape--a delightful precursor to moving pictures. You can enter a room-size, tented camera obscura on the terrace beneath the exhibitions pavilion and see an image of the Getty garden projected onto the tent’s back wall, a live, closed-circuit-style projection using the simplest of means--a dark room, a small aperture and the rays of the sun.

In the past, discovery was a central facet of entertainment. Re-creation and scientific investigation were not the mutually exclusive domains they are today. In 18th century Europe, every educated family would have a microscope in the drawing room. When artificial magnets began to be manufactured, they too became the rage, incorporated into tricks and scientific demonstrations. Today, leisure activities lean more heavily toward escapism than intellectual engagement, and didactic entertainment sounds like an oxymoron. But the seductive assembly in “Devices of Wonder” might open minds to some new-old possibilities.

“My greatest happiness would come if I could see a younger generation walking through the show, particularly the kids I see that work in Hollywood, understanding that they weren’t the first to create special effects. Or that computers didn’t spring up magically a couple of years ago,” Terpak says. “The concept has been with us for a long time.”

There’s also the possibility, however, that viewers might see the work in the show as quaint and decidedly obsolete.

“Might people come into this show and see just a graveyard of apparatus?” asks Stafford, reached at her home in Chicago. “I’m hoping not. What’s fascinating about older technology is the enormous variety and multiple ways of viewing that it encouraged. We’re hoping people will be struck by that. We talk about multimedia all the time, but it’s really multimedi um . It’s all being compressed into a single delivery system run off a single platform. TV does something different than movies, but it’s squeezed into a single delivery system. But not every medium does or was intended to do the same thing. There are many ways of viewing and delivering. I think people seeing the show will be struck by the choices.”

Devices with tantalizing names like “zograscope,” “thaumatrope,” “blow book” and “orrery” are on hand to stretch the minds and tolerances of a contemporary audience much the way they expanded the experience of users in their day. Although the show makes a point of bridging old and new technologies--by including up-to-the-minute video games, for instance, and a robotic insect--its curators have kept the tone neutral, looking neither at the present nor the past with regret.

“The show is not about bashing technology or praising it, but exposing its multivalence,” Stafford says. Rhetoric surrounding new technology has become too polarized, she feels.

“We’ve created these technologies. They’re our children. They’re artificial, but we’ve created them. Don’t we want to give them complex, creative lives? This earlier technology points out that you can’t just divide it neatly into a positive and negative camp. It really works many ways. Maybe we need to recuperate some of those earlier, multifaceted ways of thinking.”

Stafford and Terpak started to develop “Devices of Wonder” about six years ago, after the Getty Research Institute acquired a diverse collection of pre-cinema material from filmmaker Werner Nekes, based outside of Cologne, Germany. Terpak spearheaded the acquisition, and Stafford, who had just written a book about the use of images to teach complex concepts, served on a committee advising on it. Terpak campaigned for the purchase, she recalls, the same way she campaigned for the show it generated, arguing that they both illustrate the foundation of current technology.

At first, the curators thought the show would be staged, like most Getty Research Institute shows, in its modest, 650-square-foot exhibition space adjacent to the museum. Instead the show fills, with purposeful density, the vastly larger and far more central museum exhibitions pavilion.

The project snowballed when Terpak and Stafford started to visit public collections in the fields of natural history and science, and private collectors, such as Ricky Jay, the sleight-of-hand artist and historian of conjuring. The diversity of lending sources helped flesh out the show’s concept and reinforce its cross-disciplinary connections.

Jay, who describes himself as a student of deception, lent several 18th and 19th century handbills announcing public demonstrations by astronomers and other itinerant showmen, events that capitalized greatly on the capacity for wonder.

“Scientific exhibitions presented before a mass audience which doesn’t understand them are likely to be embraced as magical,” he said by phone from Boston. “At one point in time--actually, many points in time--magic really was an extension of science and technology. Many of those objects [in the show] weren’t intended to deceive, but the lines get pretty thin sometimes.”

The external resources for the show turned out to be surprisingly diverse, but the curators took advantage of the Getty’s internal resources too in an unusual way. This show is a first in joining material from all of the museum’s curatorial departments, from antiquities to photography. Even the art that appears in the show does so under a refreshingly new guise, not positioned along the conventional art history timeline, but as part of a broader history of material culture, a continuum of wonder.

A genre scene by 18th century English painter Joseph Wright of Derby shows two boys blowing up an animal bladder by candlelight, mimicking an experiment in air pressure that they likely observed in a scientific demonstration, when such performances were a form of popular entertainment. Nearby, contemporary artist Suzanne Anker’s installation involves looking at chromosomal patterns through a glass globe filled with water, one of the earliest methods of magnifying objects and focusing light. Kara Walker’s edgy silhouettes and Cindy Sherman’s photo-masquerades find homes here too, among older games and devices resonant with their themes and visual forms.

Of all the artists included, Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) figures most centrally, and Terpak counts him as a primary inspiration for the show. Cornell’s shadow boxes, filled with urban and natural ephemera he had collected, are 20th century riffs on cabinets of wonder. They too prompt associations and connections by joining objects from disparate contexts.

An array of lectures and performances accompanies “Devices of Wonder,” and its amply illustrated, 400-page catalog probes deeply into social, technological and philosophical influences on the act of seeing. Still, to the curators and those who produced the works in the show in the past four centuries, vision itself remains a marvel. Extending it through mediating devices only amplifies the possibility for wonder.

“Any time you talk about being put in another world, or transformed, it seems to me there’s an element of magic to it,” Stafford says.

“Even when I turn on my computer, and suddenly things come up--my icons--as much as I’ve used it, there’s still this little gasp. I click on an icon and I’m transported to another place. What’s it doing? It’s taking us toward the unknown. It’s an old but a new experience.” *

“Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen,” J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood. Through Feb. 3. Open Tuesdays-Thursdays, 10 a.m.-6 p.m.; Friday-Saturday, 10 a.m.-9 p.m. Closed Mondays and major holidays. Parking, $5; parking reservations required weekdays before 4 p.m. (310) 440-7300.