DAS WUNDERKABINETT 2 AND 3
In the Collection of National Gallery of Australia
Intersecting Display Cabinets (National Gallery of Australia)
Silky Oak, Silky Oak Veneer, Silver Ash, Silver Ash Veneer, Glass, Sterling Silver Keys.
Lueckenhausen, one of the invited designer makers to exhibit in The Chicago Fifteen, Contemporary Australian Furniture, presented at the Sculpture, Objects, Functional Art (SOFA) in the US, chose to use the opportunity as a vehicle to continue his investigation into the display cabinet form.
Das Wunderkabinett 1 was also conceived as a vehicle for housing and celebrating a domestic collection and it was scaled accordingly. It was designed to allow its overt iconography, and its narrative, to celebrate an interactive relationship with its contents and not to be in mute subservience to them. One of the essential dualities inherent in his works, is that they may manifest as both container and contained, the enabling agent and, at the same time, the enabled object.
Das Wunderkabinett 1, 2 and 3 utilize a dynamic tension that has been set up between the sections of the work containing Zoomorphic references (adding to a suggestion of animation, usually arrival) and other sections of the work suggesting inanimate, usually geometric, Architectonic forms. Here they are realized somewhat differently however. Kevin Murray commented that slippage between human and animal is one of the key monstrosities,
(K. Murray, The Cabinet of Helmut Lueckenhausen, Craft Victoria, 29, 1999, pp. 17-19.).
but it seems, to Lueckenhausen, slippage between animal and artificial cant be far behind.
Like living tissue from different species they have grown together and have become, not twins rejoined, but different species spliced together as though in some surreal medical experiment. Neither is supporting or holding up the other, they have an equal, dynamic, and shared relationship.
A version of the Teraph, or household, kitchen or hearth god, the benign visitor/protector, sits at the bottom left of Das Wunderkabinett 1 and provides the third element in the cast of participants.
Tiny peek windows have been installed into the towers of the Das Wunderkabinett 2 and 3 pair. Whereas the centaur form is glazed to display its contents, the tower strong, vertical, inanimate and largely opaque keeps its door closed and its secrets to itself. This represents another conscious duality woven into these works, on the one hand showing, telling, exhibiting and celebrating the contents and on the other hand, protecting, keeping safe and hiding them. The peek windows are the little gaps, 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.
