The Wunderkammer

(Drafted Feb 15, 2020, completed 25 May, 2020)

I tweeted a while back that I will do with Warhammer what Liturgy did with Black Metal. Now while this has a certain degree of humor to it, it’s not untrue that part of my artistic thrust really is in that direction. What would it then mean to repeat Liturgy in Warhammer?

First of all, what I really mean with “Warhammer” is more widely fantasy / sci-fi world building that bridges sculpture and painting and diorama construction with rule-bound complex strategy and roleplaying games. In this it can be taken to touch on things like D&D, with a historical background in tin soldiers, bottle ships, model railroads etc. Now, as D&D is something like the culmination of the drama-aspect of this hobby-tradition as it leans into world-building, Warhammer is taken as it’s culmination in its figurine-diorama aspect, with wargame leaning into world-building. These are other faces of the nexus that also includes RPG video games and Black Metal - the often atrophic and escapist culture of the socially alienated young predominantly white males.

And of course Warhammer is a brand and as such only a contingent player that happened to corner the market for a broader cultural form, so ideally we would want to use another term. What Warhammer has over historical wargaming is the fantastical world - which is grounded in an official lore, but which is open and quite maleable, with idiosyncratic influence drawn from history and classical literature (such as H.P Lovecraft). Comparing to model railroads Warhammer is not so much about building a static diorama that can run and look like a little world - model railroads tend towards the quaint, something like a doll house. Railroads does not have the game aspect, but the electronic-mechanical aspect allows for interaction / playing and is a dimension lacking from Warhammer and wargaming.

The question to ponder when attempting to sublimate these phenomena into art is which aspects to keep - is it a pure static diorama - sculpture - installation? Does it have an interactive aspect? Does it have any sort of game aspect? Does it have a mechanical-electrical kind of functioning? Most urgently is the question of what to do with these different aspects in the service of artistic expression, so they are in their form expressive and essential for the art work and not simply a popular form clothed in an artistic garb. There is a big risk of gimmick here, especially with the game aspect.

There are prefigurings of this within the art context: the Chapman brothers make large dioramas in the style of what you see in a Games Workshop window, with the imagery of a black-pilled Banksy. These are static, and the technique is purely that of miniature model painting - there’s no clear carry over or synthesis with techniques from the art tradition.

Artists such as Öyvind Falhström experimented with on the one hand paintings with moveable parts, and on the other hand board games. Quoting from Moderna Museets website:

“When [Falhström] developed a series of paintings with variable parts in the 1960s, his intention was not merely to make the content of the painting moveable, but also to express an approach to society and politics. Fahlström was part of a zeitgeist that sought to do away with static and authoritarian narratives. He wanted to demonstrate that the world can be “manipulated” by anyone and shaped by participation and play.This exhibition asks what manipulative potential art has today.”[1]

There’s a lot to be pursued here: the game as an abstracted representation of the world, which expresses the malleability of the state of things. The question here is if this manipulable “microcosm” is simply a representation that is meant to awaken us to the possibility to go out and change the world, or if the game more of an interface which is a part of the world and can affect the world through our interaction with it? There seems to be a missing aspect of ritualism to Fahlströms idea of the art game: our engaging with the game aught to be properly magical, with effects in the real world. The potential for this was already seen by conservatives in America who were afraid that D&D players were engaging in dark arts. Now, the arts do not have to be dark, and they do well to be informed by the traditions of ritual not only of the occult variety but of more “mainstream” religious practice.

The aspect of electro-mechanical function seems to me at this point to easily turn into a matter of “effect”, without much conceptual weight. Now one can for sure do something sublime and interesting with these technologies, but for the moment I will leave them aside.

Dioramic art has an unsurprising historical connection to romantic artists, quoting from Wikipedia:

“Painters of the Romantic era like John Martin and Francis Danby were influenced to create large and highly dramatic pictures by the sensational dioramas and panoramas of their day.” [2]

The art of diorama-making seems to have originated among museums in France in the early 19th century. If you trace the history of miniature painting and war game as a hobby it is apparent as a development out of the general hobby of collecting, which it turns out is a modern descendant of what is termed the ‘cabinet of curiosities’.

“The classic cabinet of curiosities emerged in the sixteenth century, although more rudimentary collections had existed earlier. In addition to the most famous and best documented cabinets of rulers and aristocrats, members of the merchant class and early practitioners of science in Europe formed collections that were precursors to museums.” [3]

This indicates the common history of the modern museum and the collecting hobby, which can be argued to be the precedent to miniature modelling, diorama construction and wargaming. Actual war strategy is of course also a clear precedent, with maps of battlefields with figurines representing legions etc., and this is an interesting line to pursue, but let us for now dwell on the Cabinet of Curiosities.

The Cabinet of Curiosities is also known under the German loanwords Kunstkabinett, Kunstkammer or Wunderkammer. In line with term Gesamtkunstwerk, and the fact that these words are more handy, I’ll be using them from now on - Wunderkammer specifically, on aesthetic grounds.

The Wunderkammer as a wonderful room of rare and strange items, artworks which on the one hand transmutes into dioramic sculpture, and on the other evolves into the institution of the museum shows the possibility of a kind of synthesizing reversal: of a dioramic sculpture which is an institution.

This modern conception of a Wunderkammer should be taken to incorporate an esotericized Fahlströmian art game aspect - that is to say not only is the institution an artwork which visitors enter and experience, but the very event of engaging with the Wunderkammer is an interactive to some degree ritualized happening. The connection to Fluxus here is obvious and remains to be elaborated, but this post is getting excessively long as it is.

The Wunderkammer is something I have pursued, though not in such a clear formulation, alongside other ideas such as the Theandric (or Theanthric) Combine. The Wunderkammer is more encompassing, but the relation between these and whether the Theanthric Combine and the idea of Altarworks are subsumed into the Wunderkammer is something to explore in the future. The Wunderkammer as a term also might indicate something a little to static, when the evental and process aspect is equally important. The most important elaboration that remains is this - the incorporation of Beuys. The Wunderkammer is also a part of Ark Work and it’s precise position in the Transcendental Qabala is to be elaborated, in fact this very self-accounting and theorizing is also an integral part of it. With being Ark Work proper also comes the aspect of formulating a vision of the Kingdom of Heaven, so how the narrativization of history and cultivation of transformative vision fit into the Wunderkammer - in other words the way in which the Wunderkammer is a Church, where the worldbuilding concerns the actual founding of a world and not a fantastical mirage - also remains to be elaborated. Of course, it’s not strange that the Wunderkammer is also a church, for what was the first Wunderkammer if not the temple with it’s art and it’s relics? Anyway, I digress.

[1] https://www.modernamuseet.se/stockholm/en/exhibitions/manipulate-the-world/

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diorama

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabinet_of_curiosities