I had a scheme, but places like the Walker Art Center are making it awfully hard for me to enact it. My scheme was to contact local museums and ask what they have hidden in their basement that's just too weird or too inappropriate to be part of a regular gallery show but too interesting and valuable to get rid of. Most museums only have a small selection of their permanent collections on display, and most have some really wild stuff in their basements, or in unused rooms, or in other surprising places.

But the Walker has gone and put it on display — or at least a healthy amount of it — in their show "Midnight Party," which has to be one of the most appealing names I have ever heard for a show. It sounds like a cable access television program Andy Warhol might have produced, but is, in fact, drawn from a four-minute film by Joseph Cornell. He tended to make art by assembling things he had found, and made a whole series of films stitched together from various film stock discovered in New Jersey warehouses. This one is mostly composed of silent black-and-white images, including a hirsute Thor with the body of a 1930s professional wrestler flinging bolts of lightning from a heavenly throne.

So the exhibit is likewise a sort of an assemblage of bric-a-brac, odds and ends, and some very famous works, mostly pieced together by curator Joan Rothfuss from what she found interesting. They are very loosely organized into themed rooms, although the themes are unstated and evocative instead of marked and literal: A room might be organized around the theme "night," while another might be organized around "obsession," or "uncanny domestics," or, simply enough, "party." Much of the art, Rothfuss says, is too idiosyncratic or personal to really fall into an established artistic genre and so tends to get overlooked; she borrows the phrase "a shadow history of modern art" to describe it.

That's not to say it's all terribly obscure. If you're a regular visitor to the Walker, some of the pieces will be familiar. There's a terrific untitled piece by Cindy Sherman showing the photographer, visible only from her legs down, seated on a floor, surrounded by opened condom packages, limp condoms, and fruit and vegetables, as though she's been trying to figure out how rubbers work, but has failed definitively and catastrophically. And there's Matthew Barney's video, "Drawing Restraint 7" from 1993, in which the artist presents a number of satyrs wrestling in the back of a limo. And in a room called "Wunderkammer," which I shall detail more in a moment, there are a number of wooden masks Cameron Jamie created for his film "Kranky Klaus," and seeing them is sort of like seeing old friends. Albeit, since Jamie's film details the Scandinavian Christmas tradition of the krampus, these are friends who will show up at your house during Yule and beat you insensible.

There's really too much going on at this show to detail in one article. I might peek in now and then to discuss a few more pieces — hooray for daily arts columns! — but for now I'd like to focus on an artist named Eugene Von Bruenchenhein, who worked, without any notice, in Wisconsin, on a series of paintings and photographs that went undiscovered until his death. "Midnight Party" has a selection of about a dozen of his photographs, tucked away in its own little room with the walls painted a vivid green, the floor neatly carpeted, and a salmon-colored love-seat in the center, like some prim mid-20th century viewing gallery. Von Bruenchenhein almost exclusively took photos of his wife, Marie, and they sort of feel like pin-up images, especially as she is occasionally topless in them. But "pin-up" isn't quite right — Marie is often dressed in dime-store costume jewelry, such as plastic tiaras, and is almost always posed in front of elaborate floral wallpaper, and the resulting photos, with their odd formality and supersaturated colors, are somewhere between high-fashion glamour and Hollywood kitsch.

For my tastes, by far the most interesting presentation of the exhibit's material is the Wunderkammer room, which superimposes the sensibilities of a Victorian museum of natural history onto art. A Wunderkammer is a "cabinet of curiosities," in which Victorians would simply place anything they found interesting as a sort of locus for meditation. You'd look at the thing, which might be filled with specimens from the natural world or folk art or what-have-you, and allow it to perk your curiosity and sense of wonder. And so the Walker's Wunderkammer is made to look like a stained-wood walled room, and is filled with glass cases that are, in turned, filled with fascinating objects. There's Man Ray's "Cadeau" from 1921, a household iron with spikes affixed to its bottom, next to a rubber breast, next to several pieces by Joseph Beuys, which always looked sort of like something you might find in a science lab, next to a group of Japanese tins. None of them are directly labeled, and you'll have actual images from the natural world — Hollis Frampton's collection of images of a depilated mouse corpse and a grinning chimaera fish — near Paul Thek's "Hippopotamus from Technological Reliquaries," a beeswax-and-rubber sculpture meant to look like a hunk of animal flesh. And near this is Jana Sterbak's "Vanitas: Flesh Dress for a Albino Anorexic," a simple and rather elegant evening dress made out of salted flank steak.

All this is overseen by a bust of Thomas Barlow Walker, a timber baron who was one of the 10 wealthiest men in the world in the 1920s, and who, if the bust by Paul Fjelde is right, was a bearded, natty man with kind eyes. Walker left quite a legacy on the Twin Cities — we have a public library system thanks to him. He was also an avid art collector and built a mansion to house his collection, which he opened to the public. Eventually this turned into the Walker Art Center, although most of Walker's own collection is gone. You can go across the street to the Hennepin Avenue United Methodist Church if you like — they still have some pieces from his original collection, which he gave to them to decorate their Sunday school, if you can believe it. As I said, sometimes you'll find unexpected collections in surprising places.

Through Saturday, the Walker is presenting "Woyzeck on the Highveld" as part of their Adventured in New Puppetry series. This piece isn't precisely new — director William Kentridge and South Africa's Handspring Puppet Company first staged it in 1992 — but it's certainly an adventure.

Some of you already know "Woyzeck" by Georg Büchner, a writer who managed very little output and enjoyed almost no productions before his death at age 23 in 1837. But Büchner's fragmentary and incomplete tale of a soldier who is subjected to a variety of military medical experiments and then murders his wife eventually became one of the primary texts of modern theater. Kentridge and Handspring have staged the play as an interaction between heartbreakingly realistic puppets (but for their eyes, which seem to be made of reflective stones) and Kentridge's own fastidious, laborious black-and-white animation, projected behind them and made from charcoal drawings. This production's main character is obviously, and tragically, mad — he's haunted by visions in the night sky, and music causes him to shake uncontrollably in a grim pantomime of a dance. The action of the play is frequently interrupted by a grinning carnival barker, and the whole of it is accompanied by plaintive accordion music, with a singer repeating a chorus of the word "Hallelujah" in a high, exquisite, quavering voice.

This production find all the mournfulness in Büchner's story, and the viciousness in his satire. It's a really stinging production, almost unbearable, really. The character Woyzeck is so pained, and so mad, and it seems like somebody should notice and help him before the inevitable. This production obviously saw something in this story that reflected on South Africa at the time — their relocation of the play to their native land is explicit in its title. But, then, how often do the mad go unnoticed here, working their way to their own equally certain tragedies, in which they are most often the victims? It's no wonder Büchner's play keeps finding an audience. Off the stage, it's a tragedy that reenacts itself almost daily, almost everywhere.