J. Smith, ‘Wunderkabinets, On the Shelves of Memory and in the Temples of the Wardrobe’, Object, No 3, 1999, p. 49.
IF WE CAN SPEAK OF THE MYTHS WE LIVE BY, THEN WE CAN ALSO SPEAK OF OBJECTS AS BEING INTEGRAL TO OUR CONSTRUCTS OF IDENTITY, MEANING AND VALUE. If meaning does not inhere [inj objects] but is invested in them by those who handle them, and if that meaning is likely to be formed narratively and in relation to contexts, then this suggests an open-ended quality to our perception of things. 1
In thinking about some of the recent works of Helmut Lueckenhausen, I have been meditating on concepts of emptiness and fullness. And certainly in an open-ended way: not only as these concepts pertain to the volumes and potential functions of Lueckenhausen's
Wunderkabinets, or his more recent Ark of the Law, but for how they trigger philosophical enquiry into the relation of the self to the interior and exterior world; to our needs and desires to structure and order the environment of which we are a part or that we find imposed upon us. Lueckenhausen's cabinets connect strongly with humanist philosophies and evoke essential human experiences, integrating with current discourses centred on the theories and aesthetics of object design and art-craft-design definitions, histories and interactions.
This brief essay, then, will generally sidestep the integral issues of craft, skill and materiality that have often been the basis for evaluations of Lueckenhausen's work. Instead, it will attempt to reveal something of the allusive density of Lueckenhausen's enigmatic objects—their social, cultural, poetic and metaphorical layers of meaning. Rather than offer a general survey of his work to date, this essay will focus on his Wunderkabinefs of 1996 and 1997, and on a recent work Ark of the Law (Aron Ha Kodesh) commissioned by the Jewish Museum of Australia for the exhibition Btessed be the work; Australian contemporary design in Jewish ceremony II.
For all their references to the Wunderkammer and Kunstkabinet of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to the development of disparate collections, categorisations and associated taxonomic systems, and especially to containment, we encounter Lueckenhausen's cabinets as empty vessels. They present themselves as potential containers of the material and the immaterial; receptacles into which we might place tangible products of human endeavour or the metaphysical experience of individual and collective memory.
The hybrid forms of Lueckenhausen's Wunderkabinets correspond with what Mary Ann Caws refers to as the surrealists' "attitude toward mystery and the marvellous". Her writings on the boxes and assemblages of Joseph Cornell bear a pertinent relation to the theatre and "marvellous interchange of one thing and another" that characterise Lueckenhausen's acute attention to technical and conceptual construction. His works elaborate the purposes and raison d'etre of design: object for living, object as sign or metaphor, object as political statement. Like Cornell's "spaces of the imagination", Lueckenhausen's cabinets "witness that interior necessity that motivates vision on a small scale, carrying it forward into the wider analogical understanding of the universe." 2
In his exploratory essay The Cabinet of Helmut Lueckenhausen, Kevin Murray has noted that while historically the kunstkammer was generally an inconspicuous object compared to its heterogeneous contents of naturalia, exotica and artefacta, Lueckenhausen "makes the cabinet itself an object of wondrous transformation." 3
Lueckenhausen's Wunderkabinets are zoomorphic and architectural enigmas that compel the decipherment of their various dichotomous signs: animal/architectonic; natural/artificial ;commonplace/bizarre;
formed/unformed.
Aside from the cabinets' historical association with collecting and muscology, Murray has suggested that Lueckenhausen's selection of precious, rare timbers participates in the green politics of local and global ecological management, and transitions in human thinking regarding the 'rights' of non-human natural forms in a world "consumed by the interests of short term capital". 4
Green politics is, however, but one of many sites of interaction—on the "raft of complex sociological structures within which the 'designed' object is needed, desired, conceived, evolved, produced and recognised" 5
in which Lueckenhausen wishes to see his objects operating. Because it repeatedly attempts to (and in fact does) structure, alter and situate us in our various contemporary contexts, is design as an activity political on a fundamental level?
When is a cabinet not just a cabinet?
Several years ago my scattered siblings and I met at the home in which we
had been raised. Leaving the family room to walk through the hall to the opposite end of the house, our mother discovered my sister Gemma standing quietly before an open linen press, her face pressed into a folded bath towel, inhaling deeply the lingering veil of soap and sunlight that permeated not only the towel but the recesses of the cupboard. When asked what she was doing she simply replied that the towel and the cupboard "smelled like home". For my sister the essence of home as we knew it as adolescents was, at that unpremeditated moment, condensed into the material and aromatic qualities of the linen press.
Gaston Bachelard suggests that "wardrobes... are veritable organs of the secret psychological life... They are hybrid objects, subject objects. Like us, through us and for us, they have a quality of intimacy". 6
The inside is the outside
Lueckenhausen's major work in 1999 has been the design and collaborative production of an Ark of the Law (Aron Hakodesh), a container that is regarded as the most important object and interior architectural feature of the Synagogue. The Ark is the repository for the Torah scrolls, the holy and lawful texts on which are inscribed the biblical books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy. Ceremonies and services within the Synagogue are centred on the Ark because of the sanctity of its contents.
The ark in which Moses conserved the tablets of the Ten Commandments was made of Acacia overlaid and inlaid with gold. Lueckenhausen has used a native acacia—Blackwood—in his Ark of the Law. Grids of anodised aluminium in varying tones of gold and silver adorn parts of the two doors of the Ark and carry abstract incised delineations of the lion of Juda, a leopard, a deer and an eagle. The mathematical design of the Ark has been based on a system of grids, endowing the finished object with a formal order that corresponds with its sacred and symbolic function.
Standing before his Ark, one cannot help but be awed by the precision of Lueckenhausen's detailing and finishes. It is this very precision that, paradoxically, enables Lueckenhausen's objects to transcend their technical virtuosity and materiality. For instance, the book-matching of the timber veneer at the base of the Ark results in a series of three concentric rings that echo the incorporeal world that scriptures suggest is the final destination of the soul.
Lueckenhausen's Ark of the Law is an extraordinary work of contemporary design that must somehow and somewhere take its rightful place in the Synagogue. Seen in the context of the exhibition for which it was made, however, the Ark stood amongst other items of Judaica as an object of potential function. The emptiness of the Ark indicated its promise—as a home; the temple of the holy word; the guiding principles on which the spiritual and daily lives of so many people are based.
What is inside exists outside.
Friday 9 July 1999
I am walking on Princes Bridge away from the National Gallery of Victoria and toward the city. I am still thinking about Lueckenhausen's cabinets and their potentialities. Not only containment now, but how, in their extraordinary idiosyncrasy they represent a mapping of an imagination—fuelled by the wonder of making and a critical enquiry into the theories and practices of his work—which 'opens into a whole world', an environment in which material culture generates thought on the world at large.
At the river end of Flinders Street station there is a foily-like alcove that gives onto steps down to the water. An aged homeless man is sweeping cigarette butts out of this folly, and away from its entrance. This often-ignored architectural punctuation mark is, momentarily, a sanctuary for this man, investing in it, despite abject poverty and unknown despair, something with which Lueckenhausen's works are in empathy: a fundamental and universal need to order the chaos of contemporary life.
endnotes
1. Sue Rowiey, '"There once lived..."; craft and narrative traditions' in Cra?t and con?empow,' theory. (Sue Rowiey ed.). Alien and Unwin. Sydney, 1997. p83.
2. All quotes this paragraph KI Mary Ann Caws, The Surrealist Look: An Erotics of Encounter. The MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts. 1997. ppl97-213.
3. Kevin Murray, 'The Cabinet of Helmut Lueckenhausen' in Crafl (Su/ie Aitiwil! ed.i Voi. 29. No. 237. Craft Victoria. 1999. pl8.
4. ibid., pl9.
5. Helmut Lueckenhausen. 'Wonder and despite: craft and design in museum history'. and contemporary theory. (Sue Rowiey ed.). Alien and Unwn, Sydney, 1997. p35.
6. Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, Presses Universitaires de France. 1958, !
Jason Smith is Curator of Contemporary Art at the National Gallery of Victoria. Meibourne.
