David Pescovitz, "Wünderkammern"

If curiosity killed the cat, its skull may be on a shelf in Bruce Beasley's loft.

"Wunderkammern" By David Pescovitz

If curiosity killed the cat, its skull may be on a shelf in Bruce Beasley's loft. Perhaps next to a 19th-century wax anatomical model of a monkey below the 17th-century Russian executioner's sword. Or near the slightly more modern trepanation tool, used to drill holes in a patient's cranium to cure any number of illnesses, that sits on a shelf beside a tiny dinosaur mandible and a collection of antique ivory figurines. Or between the Clydesdale and manatee craniums in his massive display of human and animal skulls, perhaps one of the largest personal collections in the world.

This is Beasley's Wunderkammer, his cabinet of wonder, where unusual artifacts, natural and man-made, are displayed with no obvious rhyme or reason, no easily discernible method behind the curatorial madness. "The real collector doesn't know what he wants," says Beasley, an internationally known sculptor who resides in post-industrial West Oakland, California. "Some people will collect anything about elephants, for example. They want anything and everything related to their focus of interest. But my kind of collector is looking for a visual and intellectual hit on a very personal level. It's a combination of inquisitiveness, curiosity, and wanting to have things affect you. If things don't give you a 'wow' feeling, then they just take up space."

Indeed, it is this goal of "wow," the self-motivated desire for a double take, the subtle satisfaction of one's own raised eyebrow, that drove the first wave of cabinets of curiosity in 16th and 17th century Europe. These ancestors of modern-day museums, in the homes of princes, physicians, and politicians ranged in size from intricately crafted cabinets to entire rooms of wonder.

The Wunderkammern housed plant and mineral specimens from distant lands, unusual artifacts from "primitive" cultures, weird weapons, skeletons of human "monsters" (like conjoined twins or a hydrocephalic child), mutated vegetables, primitive surgical instruments, a mummy's extremities, seashells with uncannily lifelike patterns...Quite simply, cabinet keepers were on a quest for "Any thing that Is strang," as Tradescant the Elder, one of the most notable cabinet keepers in history, requested in a letter to the Secretary of the English Navy in 1625.

Then, as now, collectors traveled the world in search of additions to their cabinets. Classic cabinet-keeper Sir Walter Cope, a member of the Elizabethan College of Antiquaries, boasted an "appartment stuffed with queer foreign objects in every corner," according to a visitor's diary quoted in the Origins of Museums, edited by the curators of the Ashmolean Museum at the University of Oxford, which evolved out of the collection. Cope's cabinet featured pottery and porcelain from China, a Madonna sculpted from feathers, monkey teeth formed into a chain, and a horn from a woman's forehead.

Of course, today's world and its wonders have become commodified, and now, collectors like Beasley scour the backstreets, flea markets, and antique shows of vibrant cities like Cologne, Paris, and San Francisco searching for their holy grails. Once you begin your collection, word of mouth or serendipity leads you to dealers with a random assortment of treasures or an obvious predilection for antique scientific instruments, yellowed medical charts, exquisitely sculpted wax anatomical models, and decorated skulls and skeletons. On a lucky day a relic will speak to Beasley, pulling him toward it like a magnet. Like the sleek, Art Deco design of a stainless steel head with a Bakelite jaw and teeth attached built for orthodontic study, proudly displayed beside the wax monkey.

"What interests me is an unofficial crossover into aesthetics by something that was not officially an aesthetic object," says Beasley. "It's something that starts off with one intended purpose and an aesthetic gets into that either at the hand of the maker or through some accidental process."

But while Beasley's fascination with unusual or morbid historical "trophies" may seem eccentric, he is far from alone in his interest. The increasing number of curiosityŽshops in Europe and in the United States, popular culture's fascination with oddities as evidenced by numerous television programs on sideshow "freaks" and "wonders of nature," the popularity of museum exhibitions and catalogs that not only depict wondrous artifacts but contextualize the cabinets themselves, all point to a resurgence in the Wunderkammern sensibility.

On March 18 San Francisco's museum of science, art, and human perception opened an exhibit analyzing how representation technologies have influenced historical perceptions of the human body. Numerous pieces in the exhibit—the dried human hands, belonging to anonymous 19th-century donors, skinned to reveal nerves and arteries, and Aztec paper dolls used to represent different diseases--would undeniably be at home in a vintage Wunderkammer. Even the centerpiece of the exhibition, an 18th-century wax anatomical model known as the Medical Venus, depicting a supine female, her abdomen opened to reveal exquisitely lifelike internal organs, on loan from the Museo La Specola in Florence, is reminiscent of the vast collection of Dutch anatomist Frederik Ruysch, purchased by Russian tsar Peter the Great in 1717 to quickly create his own Wunderkammer.

Is it the natural ebb and flow of culture, as Beasley and other collectors believe, that causes obscure interests to bubble up from the underground with the swinging of time's now-postmodern pendulum.

The last twenty years have seen a deep questioning of ideals of order, rationality, and good taste," writers Lorraine Daston and Katharine Park argue in their recent tome, Wonders and the Order of Nature.

"Wonder and wonders have risen to prominence on a wave of suspicion and self-doubt concerning the standards and sensibilities that had long excluded them from respectable intellectual endeavors," they argue.

Or is the resurgence of wonder a subconscious reaction by a mediated culture yearning for realness? What makes us seek out visceral experiences, whether it is the thrill of an extreme sport, the rush of a roller coaster, or the "ooh gross" reaction triggered by seeing one of Damien Hirst's animals suspended in formaldehyde in last year's controversial exhibit? We cover our eyes, but still find ourselves peeking.

Most likely, it is a combination of all those forces, spiced with a healthy dose of insatiability. The more we see, the more we want to see.

Fortunately, "just looking carefully at what's right in front of you can be quite startling," adds Rosamond Purcell, a renowned photographer of Wunderkammern who was commissioned to shoot several images for the "Revealing Bodies" exhibition. "And these collections are crying out to be looked at it."

—Encyclopedia Britannica Online (April 2000)