Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (7 page)

David was the kind of student who excelled when challenged but whose performance fell off markedly when he grew bored. From early on he displayed a passion for display—for instance, for building shoebox dioramas of Neolithic or American Indian scenes. He loved the false perspectives, and he especially loved anything to do with miniature light sources or optical instruments. But he was hardly a recluse. In fact his mother recalls how in his early years he was enormously gregarious, extroverted, and social—a regular party animal.

Then something happened, although Wilson is loath to talk about it; he gets all shy and hesitant (as opposed to rhetorically opaque) at the prospect. “I really don't know if I want to get into this,” he says. “It's embarrassing, and it's hard to put into words without sounding insipid or grandiose. But since you ask.… Sometime late in high school—I was maybe seventeen or eighteen—my
parents and brothers were away for a week and I was home by myself, when out of the blue, for no reason, I underwent this incredibly intense psychological—how should I say?—well, like a conversion experience. It's just that I came to understand the course of my life and the meaning of life in general. Like that: as if in a flash. For instance, I knew that there would be no purpose for me in pursuing the world of acquisition. The experience had religious overtones to it, but not in any specific way. It was the most intense experience I've ever had—an entire week in awe and euphoria. It was as if I was receiving instructions. God—do I want to be talking like this? It's not so much that it's embarrassing, I just don't want to be doing the forces behind it a disservice. And I definitely don't want to claim any specialness. It was like something was being given to me—somewhere between a gift and an assignment—and one wants to be incredibly careful how one treats of such things.

“All at once it was made completely apparent to me, though without any detail, how my life would have to follow the course that has led to … well”—he gestured to the walls around him—”to this. I mean, I see running this museum as a service job, and that service consists in—I can't believe I'm saying these things—in providing people a situation … in fostering an environment in which people can change. And it happens. I've seen it happen.

“But without a doubt, that task was laid out for me in those days—the general structure was clear, even if it then took an extremely long time for me to be able to realize it; and that whole while, I sensed myself waiting, stumbling around on the forest floor, confused—like that ant.”

He was quiet for a moment, then asked me not to publish any of the foregoing, or anyway not until he'd had time to reconsider. Of course I promised to defer to his wishes. (Eventually, if somewhat reluctantly, he did extend his permission.) I pointed out to him that I wasn't interested in performing any kind of expose. After all, I said, it wasn't as if he were some kind of imminent danger to the body politic—

“Oh, I don't know,” he interrupted me, smiling but at the same time deadly serious. “I like to think I am.”

His mother confirms how somewhere late in his high school years David changed, became more serious, and she even lets on how maybe she preferred him the old way: “He was a lot more fun as a party boy than as a Chinese philosopher.”

Soon thereafter he enrolled at Michigan's Kalamazoo College—a small, independent school patterned along the lines of Antioch, Oberlin, or Reed—where he ended up majoring in urban entomology with a minor in art. His first night there he met Diana at a square-dance mixer.

“I really get tired of all the leprechaun stuff,” Diana once told me, referring to the press's penchant for dwelling on David's elfin, puckish, pixie aspects. “So I hesitate before abetting it any further. But what can I say? That first night—I was seventeen, and it was the end of my first full day at college, and we were all there square-dancing, and I do-si-do'd and turned to my left and there, facing me, was … well, this
gnome.
This old, small man. It was
scary
: he was only nineteen, but he was kind of ageless—or rather,
aged.
Still, I overcame that initial shock, and within a few days I could tell that he
was also the most interesting guy there, and within a month I knew he was the man I would marry.”

They were in fact married a few years later, in 1969, during the last weeks before their graduation. “Yeah,” David acknowledges, “we've been married for twenty-five years. It's amazing—and believe me, every bit as amazing to us. We ought to be in one of our vitrines. But she's incredible,” he continues, the ironylessness cracking just the slightest bit: “I can't believe
how she puts up with all this.”
¹

After college, David and Diana moved to Chicago, where almost immediately David was called up by his draft board. He applied for conscientious objector status, which, he says, “was granted in record time. They just looked at me and, no questions asked, I was like the dictionary definition. Diana says I really had the air of a religious fanatic in those days.” He spent the next few years doing alternative service as an orderly in a mental ward and then in the emergency ward at the University of Colorado Hospital.

After that stint ended, he and Diana bought a lot in an extremely remote section of Colorado mountain country, and proceeded to build themselves a cabin in which they then managed to live for several years—no electricity, no water, a miles-long trek to the nearest road, necessities lugged in by ski over snow yards-deep during the winter months. (“We were desperately trying to avoid becoming yuppies,” David recalls, “which was already a
distinct possibility.”) And yet somehow, despite such primitive conditions, they managed, frame by frame, panel by panel, to eke out an entire animated film (David had become interested in film his last year at Kalamazoo), on the basis of which David was admitted to the newly opened California Institute of the Arts in 1974. (Within weeks of their reporting there, the Wilsons received word that the tenant to whom they'd rented their cabin had accidentally burned it to the ground. “Probably the best thing that ever happened to us,” Diana acknowledges. “It meant we didn't have to go back.”)

Cal Arts at the time was a hotbed of the coolest and most austere in formalist, avant-garde filmmaking, and David Wilson soon earned a reputation as one of the coolest, most austere filmmakers there. In the years thereafter, he became an important member of L.A.'s Film Oasis collective, regularly producing short films of an almost excruciating purity. It happens I even saw one of them, years ago, at an Oasis screening. I was utterly bowled over when, during the course of one of our recent conversations, I learned that David had been its creator, for it was a film that lived with me for a long, long time. It was called
Stasis
and lasted a bare thirteen minutes. What Wilson had apparently done was go out into the countryside and film a single long shot of a distant mountain stream. The camera started in tight, through a telephoto zoom lens, the stream and some overhanging trees filling the frame. Over the next thirteen minutes the camera pulled back, infinitesimally slowly, until by the end the lens probably took in the entire wide horizon, with the original stream and trees a tiny, indistinguishable
speck in the middle of the image. Back in the lab, however, over what must have been a period of many months maniacally hunched over the optical printer, David recut every single frame back to the original composition of stream and tree, blowing the image up as much as was necessary to fill the screen. The effect, in the finished version of the film, was to watch as this very crisp, clear,
substantive
image slowly, indefinably, dematerialized into pure light and grain—and it was mesmerizing.

First and last frames of David Wilson's film
Stasis (
illustration credit 1.2
)

David was as surprised as I was that I'd seen it. “Well,” he said, “it was the kind of thing that was moderately meaningful to a microscopically small percentage of the population at a particular moment. But clearly, in the end, it wasn't fulfilling the mandate I'd received.” Diana, for her part, says flatly, “Those films were not David.” For one thing they languished in the self-selecting ghetto of an elite formalist audience, whereas David was busy trying to interact with (“to service”) a far wider and more diversified clientele. (One of the things David most treasured about those Denver museums was their
public
character, the way they were open to any- and
everyone.) Still, from this distance, it's possible to sense a certain continuity between those early films and the more recent incarnation of David's vocation. There's the fascination with optical effects and equipment, of course. But more to the point, there's the sense of fascination itself. Only, whereas in his films it was almost purely the form itself that mesmerized, subsequently he's been able to achieve that same level of magnetized, riveting amazement through the manipulation of content. Your jaw drops almost as far whether it's facing
Stasis
or the stink ant vitrine; the difference is that by the time David was producing his museum vitrines, he'd found a way to lace that sense of fascination with a distinct undercurrent of perturbation.

David continued making his formalist films through the seventies and into the early eighties, and though obviously he wasn't making any money off of them, he and Diana were nevertheless able to enjoy a very comfortable lifestyle because they were making so much money on the side doing highly sophisticated and specialized camerawork (for example, with motion-control robotic animation) on the periphery of the film industry (TV commercials, special effects, industrial films, promotional sequences for the network sweeps). “It was the sort of work you could do six months a year and easily coast the rest of the time,” David says, “and I even enjoyed it. Technically, it was quite challenging and interesting. But it wasn't the kind of work where you were adding beans to the right side of the scale. It wasn't even so much who you found yourself working for, though sometimes that could give you pause—at one point we were doing some
industrial work for some of the coal company villains in Harlan County—as the way we were relentlessly contributing to the constriction in people's attention spans, and the sense that thematically … Face it, in that kind of work you can count the themes you engage on the fingers of one hand, even if you don't have any arms.”

His other life, however, was already opening out. In 1980, Terry Cannon, who ran the Pasadena Film Forum, the region's premier avant-garde venue, approached David with a proposition. The theater was going to be dark over the summer, and David could have the place's lobby to do with as he pleased. Rising to the challenge with tremendous enthusiasm, David created a sequence of four exquisitely evocative, dreamlike vitrine-dioramas, each of them fronted by a stereoscopic viewing device modeled on the catoptric (or so-called beam-splitting) camera. The visitor would gaze into the diorama through a viewfinder into which, via an intricate array of prisms and mirrors, David was able (as with the bridge over Iguazú Falls) to seamlessly project a free-floating video loop—of an angel mysteriously appearing and disappearing, for example, amidst the cottony cloudscape of the underlying diorama. The lobby was simply open to the public during daylight hours, and whoever happened to be walking by could partake of the experience, or not. Many people
did, and all kinds of different people: the show had wonderful word of mouth. This was much closer to the mandate, as David quickly realized, and increasingly he began producing other sorts of cabinet splendors and farming them out to various odd venues.

Catoptric camera

And it's here that David's account begins to fog over. His own biography intermeshes with the museum's. The Thums make their appearance, via Terry's wife, Mary Rose Cannon,
who either was or wasn't Gerard Billius's granddaughter.
²
Within a few years David would be occupying his Culver City storefront, but there would be a lot of shape-shifting in between—a catoptric conflation—and it's a bit difficult to achieve a strictly accurate chronological account, at least from him.