The Magician of Walker Hall

I stopped in today to see Dolph Gotelli’s installation at the Design Museum on campus, entitled “34 Years of Fantasy and Play”. Gotelli is a design professor here who is noted for teaching his students the role of fantasy and imagination. The midterm assignment in a course he taught this spring involved aliens invading the quad north of the administration building; each student’s alien was to be at least three feet tall, resemble nothing at all seen in Star Wars or Star Trek, and had to leave Earth by 5 PM the day of the installation. Gotelli is also a collector who would be the envy of any woodrat. He has what is likely the world’s largest collection of Christmas memorabilia, including a suitably ancient fruitcake, and he saves almost all his correspondence, a sampling of which, entitled “Forest of Bureaucracy”, was pinned onto the center columns of his installation.

His motto is “To know is nothing; to imagine is everything.” His students design toys, pop-up books, edible tablescapes, read fairy tales, and profoundly engage their sense of whimsy. And judging from his students’ correspondence, sandwiched between notes from deans and recalcitrant department chairs, some carry this sense with them long after they leave college.

The question I have is why is this sense of whimsy and imagination so rare in the material designs expressed in our culture? Why don’t the sides of automobiles sport gargoyles, or at least something other than a monochromatic paint scheme? Why is there a trend towards ever more restrictive deeds and CC&Rs in housing developments—heaven help if you paint your house in burnt sienna and goldenrod, let alone hang your skirts on the laundry line? Occasionally exceptions break through, such as the 1999 cow sculptures in Chicago, but the exceptions prove the rule.

After all, if you met a large visiting papier-mch dragon or perhaps even a giant squid on your path to work, wouldn’t your heart be lightened a bit?