Illuminating a Modern Marvel

It’s common knowledge that the art museum as we’ve known it for 150 years had its origins with the Wunderkabinett , or cabinet of wonders, which became popular in 16th century Europe. A cabinet of wonders was an elaborate piece of furniture made for the storage and display of everything from seashells, animal skeletons and unusual rocks to elaborately carved ivory, bronze figurines, cut gemstones and other man-made things. With Renaissance Europeans adventuring hither and yon around the globe, retrieval from afar of all sorts of natural and cultural artifacts became an avid pastime for the folks back home in Rotterdam, Genoa and Dresden.

Eventually the furniture-size Wunderkabinett begot the room-size Wunderkammer , or chamber of wonders. The Wunderkammer in turn begot the museum. Slowly but surely the museum transformed a playful hobby into a serious profession, which specialized its interests according to categories of science and art.

The two art historians who organized the provocative exhibition “Devices of Wonder: From the World in a Box to Images on a Screen” know the story well. The catalog to their show, newly opened at the J. Paul Getty Museum, where it remains on view until February, even acknowledges its exceptional modern revival in L.A.’s celebrated Museum of Jurassic Technology, the installation art cum Wunderkabinett -museum made by artist (and recently named MacArthur Fellow) David Wilson.

The exhibition at the Getty, however, has other fish to fry. Barbara Maria Stafford, professor at the University of Chicago and a regular contributor to the contemporary art magazine Art issues, and Frances Terpak, curator of photographs and optical devices at the Getty Research Institute, aren’t merely trampling a well-trod field. They’re interested instead in using the past to illuminate a marvel quite different from Wilson’s singular artistic phenomenon, and something far more up-to-the-minute than the dusty old invention of the art museum.

The Wunderkabinett is back, their show asserts--bigger, now nearly ubiquitous and considerably more far-reaching than any Baroque prince could ever have dreamed. Today’s Wunderkabinett is sitting on your desk at home or in the office, or perhaps it’s resting in your briefcase or on your lap.

The personal computer is the third millennium’s version of that elaborate piece of carved and painted furniture whose function is the storage and display of endless collections of curiosities. In place of seashells, ancient coins and carved gems gathered from afar, we have digital files, electronic windows, e-mail and the strange and exotic virtual realities of the Internet.

In the show, it takes a bit of doing to figure out this conceptual link. “Devices of Wonder” is something of a jumble, rather like your grandparents’ attic or an upscale thrift shop where lots of curious stuff has landed. Often there’s no immediately apparent connection between objects.

And there are a lot of objects. The show’s checklist runs to 384 items. It includes paintings, lamps, puppets, handbills, coins, playing cards, sculptures, microscopes, toys, photographs, automatons and more. A few great works of art are on hand, and they hang alongside utter dross.

Like the Internet, this show is a place to surf among disparate things in a context that renders them equivalent to one another. Think of the show’s numerous sections, which open with an elaborate display about the Wunderkabinett , as a cascading cluster of walk-in Web pages. What links them is their emphasis on optical wonders and visual delirium.

One concerns mirrors, another the concept of artificial life. A third considers the wrap-around spectacles of panoramas and dioramas, a fourth the optical distortions called anamorphic images. And so on.

A clear strength of the exhibition is its emphasis on the visual sense as its own legitimate, productive agency of knowledge. The discipline of art history has always been text-driven--paintings as fodder for a search of sources in Ovid or Genesis, a footnote lover’s heaven--and, in recent decades, academic theory has all but supplanted the art object as its focal point. “Devices of Wonder” shifts gears.

Looking at wondrous things in a Wunderkabinett becomes the launch pad for the wonders of looking. Sight connects with insight. Mirrors facilitate reflection. Images are themselves ideas.

Playful and unexpected connections get drawn. A small, cut-out paper theater by the 18th century German printer and publisher Martin Engelbrecht, for example, shows the interior of a vast, princely chamber of wonders, which includes lavish botanical displays and exotic animals suspended from the ceiling. The pop-up print sparks off other things in the room.

Look up in the gallery and you’ll find suspended overhead a chandelier shaped like a crocodile, designed for a local restaurant in 1982 by architect Frank O. Gehry. Across the way two impossibly lush, 1722 paintings of fruits and flowers by Dutch artist Jan van Huysum subtly link the hugely popular genre of the overstuffed still life to the acquisitive vogue for the Wunderkabinett . The first object italicizes the power of wonder for its own sake--a crocodile chandelier!--the other two make a learned historical point.

The show is filled with these sorts of surprising delights, which can send your mind off in unexpected directions. Take another favorite, which is around the corner from Engelbrecht’s pop-up paper theater. It’s a display on the subject of glass mirrors for the home, which were only perfected for manufacture in 16th century Venice.

The display includes assorted historical examples--flat, convex and concave mirrors--along with cups, goblets, buckets and other reflective decorative items. Some minor 18th and 19th century paintings show mirrors and reflective vessels in various domestic uses.

But the kicker that sets off the ensemble is the dazzling, 1644 still life of fragile glass wine goblets and shiny copper, gold and silver vessels by the little-known Alsatian painter Sebastian Stosskopff. (It’s on loan from the Norton Simon Museum.) Everything in this picture is there for one purpose only: to catch, reflect or refract light. A tour de force of optical pyrotechnics, all confined to a table top, the showy painting makes you feel like a 6-year-old staring wide-eyed at tinsel on a Christmas tree.

Light has obvious power as an agent of visual spectacle, but here it assumes another aspect. Luminosity often assumes an air of mysticism and spirituality in art, but not in this savvy display. Suddenly, it’s revealed as a potent source of conviviality and thus a spur to social dynamics.

Today, in our image-saturated world, “Devices of Wonder” examines optics at a time when digital imagery is joining (and even superceding) pictures made with the aid of optical lenses. It seems intended to throw the current shift into illuminating high relief, and to considerable extent it succeeds.

But this challenging aim has also led to the show’s Achilles’ heel. Contemporary art is included throughout the exhibition, but it’s poorly chosen and deployed. Many of the recent works are trivial, and their selection seems arbitrary and ill-considered.

There’s also the problem of equivalence--of showing, say, a compelling artist’s book by the gifted Kara Walker together with 19th century toys and commercial advertisements. It’s one thing to mix established historical paintings and sculptures with artifacts, gewgaws and scientific devices; it’s quite another to do the same with contemporary art.

New art in a living culture requires special handling. A Chardin, a Gainsborough or a Stosskopff already occupies a relatively fixed position in the slowly shifting constellations of history. Those paintings hold their own in the show.

Yet, no matter how popular Walker, Cindy Sherman or James Turrell might be today, their work doesn’t enjoy that security. New art is inherently volatile.

“Devices of Wonder” would have been stronger if the contemporary work had been shown together in a separate gallery at the end, as an ongoing artistic exploration related to issues raised by the exhibition. Dispersed throughout the show, they’re instead reduced to being nominal illustrations of various curatorial theses. The cart goes before the horse.

There’s a self-defeating irony, too. Because most of the recent art is rather insignificant, the show’s theses can likewise seem less than portentous. The inclusion of mostly mediocre new art ends up undercutting the relevance of what is in fact a timely and provocative show.

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J. Paul Getty Museum, 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood, (310) 440-7300, through Feb. 3. Closed Mondays.