DAS SCHATZKABINETT
An Architectonic Display Cabinet With Glass Top and Peek Windows
(Swinburne University of Technology), Brush Box Veneer, Aluminium, Glass.
Differeing from much of Lueckenhausens work, neither of the main components of Das Schatzkabinett has an overtly Zoomorphic quality. The Architectonic nature and positioning of the forms, with the windows in its horizontal faces, summons the image of a miniature medium-rise building. Viewing it is like viewing an apartment building writ small, a panorama of different stories, diverse relationships and groupings and diverse meanings with ultimately, differing degrees of importance to the viewer. The arrangement suggests a theatre of objects where the displayed items alternately group or separate and tell their various stories and make their various diplomatic claims like characters on stage.
The cabinet, designed and constructed on a square grid, includes peek windows that are the means of quick, controlled, voyeuristic glimpses that tease the viewer with a hint of something worth seeing. They are metaphors of promise and reference the historical promise of the Wunderkammer that wonders are to be found contained herein. Between the big, counter-top show window and the peek windows of varying sizes, the work offers a hierarchy of first view a massing of items which creates a sense of context and critical mass; and second to subsequent views - that offer a privileged framing of some select items. While Das Schatzkabinett speaks of itself as a community of objects with the capacity to include unlike objects in its story, its hide and show duality is heightened by a parallel capacity to also keep some things entirely hidden - to keep the embarrassing, the shameful, and in the end, that which is not valued out of sight and out of mind.
