Depiction And Fiction: Virtual Wunderkammers

A ‘wunderkammer’ is a cabinet of curiosities, a collection of strange objects, or a group of mundane of objects whose grouping together creates a strange collection. The most renowned example is the extensive collection of Rudolph II who had cabinet after cabinet of more or less anything that one can think of. He was an obsessive collector and the modes of classification and distribution of items within the collection tell us a lot about how the royal collector organised his world-view. He was the patron of Acrimbaldo whose famous double-image portraits created human faces from aggregations of objects and animals. The paintings can themselves be seen as wunderkammers.

Animator Jan Svankmajer is greatly inspired by Rudolph’s collections, as well as those of naturalists and other people who try to organise the chaos of the world into human systems. His films often collect items together into seemingly arbitrary groups, in Alice (Svankmajer’s adaptation of Lewis Carroll’s book), the titular character’s fall down the rabbit hole is replaced by a slow descent in a lift, passing different floors as she goes; each floor a wunderkammer of various objects, from natural curios to Victorian toys.

In Historia Naturae, the different groups of the animal kingdom are explored in all of their varieties, while he even refers overtly to Acrimbaldo’s work in his heads made out of vegetables, kitchen utensils or stationary in Dimensions Of Dialogue.

A modern incarnation of Rudolph II is the eccentric Long Gone John, a sometime record producer, sometime art entrepreneur, sometime vinyl toy manufacturer and all-of-the-time collector. His unique life is explored in the documentary film The Treasures Of Long Gone John, which places its emphasis on two areas: his extensive collection of objects – ranging from mummified babies to 1960s Japanese toys – that now dominates his home to the point that he has moved out and converted it into a museum, and his relationship to a particular generation of artists associated with the underground art magazine Juxtapoz.

In fact, the film uses Long Gone John predominantly as a jumping off point to discuss the work of four artists in particular – Mark Ryden, Camille Rose Garcia, Todd Schorr and the arguable founder of the movement Robert (or Robt.) Williams. These artists are obsessed with the blurring of high and low/pop culture (the movement to which they belong is sometimes known as ‘low-brow art’, a term disliked by many of the artists themselves). They take influence from the ephemeral and popular; cartoons, comics, toys and corporate icons. Indeed, many of them have produced vinyl toys with Long Gone John’s company. They collect the pop culture objects that society forgets about, re-present them as artistically valid and then produce their own pop culture objects, to begin the cycle again.

Let us focus on two of these artists, Todd Schorr and Robt. Williams, whose paintings themselves are, like Acrimbaldo’s before, virtual wunderkammers of the camp and kitsch. Take, for instance, Schorr’s painting The Hunter Gatherer.

The elements of the ‘lowbrow’ movement can all be found in the image above; the fascination with the short-lived products of the fifties and sixties, the association between ancient idols and corporate ones, the implication that our reverence for both is somehow primal, and most importantly, the desire of human beings to collect these things. But rather than an analysis of what these paintings might ‘mean’, I want to focus on the multilayered ‘truth’ of imagery. In the previous two posts I have argued that depictions are both more conceptually complex and straightforwardly simple than photographic imagery. On one hand, depictions have a multitude of possible layers of interpretation as images, while on the other, when fiction is introduced, depictions can offer us a diegetic object or character that is more ‘true’ than a prop or actor.

Sticking with Schorr’s painting, what we have is not only a depiction of a proto-human, but depictions of a variety of art-objects (loosely; the artistic merit of such toys might be debatable for some, but I will continue with it as shorthand – I’ll define an art-object as any article that can be evaluated on some deeper level than just the descriptive). These art-objects are different from the being that collects them. While the central figure exists only as a depiction, the toys are depictions of things. The Adam West Batman toy, the Howdy Doody puppet, the robot, are all paintings of objects that actually exist (the other toys – Betty Boop and Mickey Mouse – are not so simple). As images, these toys are themselves depictions; a toy of Batman is not the actual character but a three-dimensional depiction of the character. While the robot remains fairly consistently itself, the toys of the already established cartoon characters become more complicated – they are depictions of depictions of characters.

Another Schorr painting, Variations On Kitsch, gives us a similar premise – a collector and his collection. But now the objects in the collection seem to possess more of a life of their own. While in The Hunter Gatherer, only Mickey and the Idol moved, here all of the kitsch objects seem to be bouncing around the space, perhaps dancing to the beat of the beatnik’s bongos. On top of this, though they possess intentional nods to existing objects, the art-objects here exist entirely as depictions. Though the astronaut caveman in the corner is clearly designed to remind us of Fred Flintstone, he isn’t that character, nor even a toy of that character, he remains a completely unique object that exists only within the painting. The relationship between the depicted art-objects to the real world distinguishes the two paintings; the emphasis on the former being the depiction of real toys (themselves depictions of characters), while the latter is depictions of entirely ‘diegetic’ art-objects. While we can evaluate the hunter gatherer’s collection on two levels, as objects with their own pop cultural baggage or as depictions of those objects by Schorr, how do we evaluate the art-objects of Variations On Kitsch? As components of an overall composition, or as virtual art-objects?

Such considerations will be the focus of future posts, but for now let us stick with the idea of these paintings as collections of virtual art-objects. Moving on to Robt. Williams, two paintings offer up similar collections for our multi-layered perusal. The first gives us an image with similar levels of visual interpretation as The Hunter Gatherer, a vast collection of art-objects that are depictions of real ones. Wooden Spirits Persist Where Termites Fear To Tread  presents us with another collection that exists as a single depiction.

On the other hand, In The Land Of Retinal Delights might, as a painting, appear to be less interesting at first glance; the vast collection of objects presented to us do not have the same multiplicity of possible diegetic truth layers as Schorr’s do.

But what Williams’ painting lacks in diegetic complexity it makes up for in sheer scale. The entire landscape in which the figure stands is made up of these strange apparently plastic kitsch objects. At first glance they might appear to be toys, the kind of cheap plastic ones that you get in Christmas crackers; one appears to be a red spinning top, another a green facsimile of a lunar landing pod. But these are only superficial similarities of shape. In fact, these objects are entirely surreal and virtual, depictions of themselves, not of anything we might find in the real world. But each of these objects is rendered in minute detail, each given a solid distinctness which continues as far back as we can make out. Only the furthest peaks of the distant hills reduce the objects down to coloured dots. This is a collection of the imagination, a multitude of virtual art-objects that we can only see through the medium of this painting. Williams invites us to delve into his collection just as Long Gone John does at his home-cum-museum, but while Long Gone John’s objects are real and we can view them by walking through the space that holds them, Williams’ collection is one we can only appreciate via the depiction.

And this is where these paintings have a particular resonance and relevance to a collector like Long Gone John – as his own collection of real art-objects contains many of these Juxtapoz paintings, themselves containing a variety of virtual art-objects, his collection becomes augmented, a collection of real objects, depictions of real objects and depictions of entirely virtual objects.

One more Schorr painting, The Pirate’s Treasure Dream, was created specifically for Long Gone John (he’s the pirate king on the altar on the left); the image depicts some of the various objects of his collection as prisoners taken by the monstrous pirate band. Marching along in chains, the prisoners are taken a step further from those in Variations On Kitsch; they have become sentient characters like their collector. They add yet another layer to the complex imagery – they are depictions of characters that are toy depictions of characters. That gives us four possible ways of looking at some of these figures. One figure in particular is fascinating; the bunnyduck, held aloft in the tentacle of the pirate octopus.

The complexity of this figure lays in its history: the character appears in two earlier Schorr paintings Romantic Notions Of The Mysterious East and The Spectre Of Cartoon Appeal. In these paintings, he is a character, an amalgam of Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, existing as a diegetic entity within the world of the paintings.

But the character was also produced as a vinyl figure in the real world. And in The Pirate’s Treasure Dream, we are given not the character itself but a depiction of a toy of a depiction of a character that is an allusion to other characters (Bugs and Daffy, themselves only existent as depictions).

These paintings, and others like them, are so complex in their multilayered depictions that they instantly set up a multitude of possible visual interpretations and modes of evaluation. Depicting virtual collections of art-objects both real and imagined, the painting becomes a double itself; it is both an art-object in its own right which can be appreciated as a single composition, but we can also look through the depiction at the art-objects being depicted and evaluate not one art-object but many – the paintings become virtual wunderkammers.

                                                                                                             - P.S.