Лоуренс Уэшлер — новинки

Mr. Wilson's Cabinet Of Wonder

What is the role of the museum in contemporary society? Using the Oakland Museum of California as a case study, artist Mark Dion examines how museum practices have shifted over time, what these changes mean for objects in museum collections, and what we can learn about our culture from what's included and what's abandoned. Enclosed in a clamshell case and featuring fourteen specimen cards, this deluxe volume brings the reader into Dion's process and reveals how the order of images can change one's perception of objects. Contributions from celebrated writers, including Lawrence Weschler and D. Graham Burnett, articulate Dion's unique power of examination.

From a cuneiform tablet to a Chicago prison, from the depths of the cosmos to the text on our T-shirts, Lawrence Weschler finds strange connections wherever he looks. The farther one travels (through geography, through art, through science, through time), the more everything seems to converge — at least, it does if you're looking through Weschler's giddy, brilliant eyes. Weschler combines his keen insights into art, his years of experience as a chronicler of the fall of Communism, and his triumphs and failures as the father of a teenage girl into a series of essays sure to illuminate, educate, and astound.

Book DescriptionThere are writers who specialize in the strange and others whose genius is to find the strangeness in the familiar, the unexpected meanings in stories we thought we knew. Of that second category, Lawrence Weschler is the master.

In this highly entertaining book, Lawrence Weschler chronicles the antics of J. S. G. Boggs, an artist whose consuming passion is money, or perhaps more precisely, value. Boggs draws money-paper notes in standard currencies from all over the world-and tries to spend his drawings. It is a practice that regularly lands him in trouble with treasury police around the globe and provokes fundamental questions regarding the value of art and the value of money.

An African stink ant with a horn sprouting from its tiny head. A microminiature sculpture of Pope John Paul II, painstakingly carved from a human hair and mounted inside the eye of a needle. A rare specimen of the bat known as the “piercing devil,” embedded in a wall of solid lead. These are some of the things you’ll find at David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology, a storefront operation on the West Side of Los Angeles that seeks to reacquaint patrons with their innate sense of wonder — not least of all by making them question which of its exhibits is in fact real.

That same juxtaposition of the genuine and the fantastic informs every page of this irresistible book. For in the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Lawrence Weschler sees echoes of the “wonder cabinets” that were in first museums, as well as clues to the imaginative origins of both art and science in the human capacity for amazement. In Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder Weschler gives us a work of nonfiction that is as allusive, as dizzying, and as urbanely astonishing as anything by Borges or Calvino.

Writing with great style and humor, Weschler guides the readers through the Museum of Jurassic Technology and through the mind of its curator, David Wilson, a man of unusual imagination who mounts exhibits such as spore-inhaling ants, bats deploying ultraviolet frequencies, peach-pit carvings, and other exhibits that seem the manifest definition of bizarre. Illustrations.