May 06, 2008
Anyone familiar with Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology, the popular, Pulitzer Prize-nominated book by New Yorker writer Lawrence Weschler, will have at least read about The Museum of Jurassic Technology. However one really needs to visit this incomparable repository of Otherness to appreciate what an experiential conundrum the place really is. Although concepts such as "real" have, at best, only nominal application in the case of the MJT.
As the visitor moves tentatively through the near-total darkness of this pocket-sized museum, from one pin-lighted exhibit to another, and from one or another way of viewing them—through a row of donated microscopes, an array of calibrated, brass-fitted magnifiers, or by way of recessed and canted mirrors—questions about what one is seeing, exactly, aren't much resolved beyond a dodgy ambiguity. Are these objects with their apparent actuality, their convincing histories and elaborate documentation... are they real? Is this epistemological funhouse "factual" in any qualitative, familiar, or just reassuring way at all? Are these even the right questions?
Buried somewhere in Thomas Pynchon's magnificent novel Against the Day—itself a disarmingly inventive collusion between the known historical and the imagined possible—there's an off-hand reference to a "Museum of Museumology," and this reader, for one, has speculated about it being an appreciative nod in the direction of the MJT. And doesn't the museum embody in its unique way, Pynchon's description of his fabulating novel?: "Maybe it's not the world, but with a minor adjustment or two, it's what the world might be."
The Museum of Jurassic Technology either is or isn't of the world as we know it, factual or fabulous, but all efforts to resolve the puzzle are strictly beside the point. Among the museum's holdings are the mind-boggling microminiature artworks of Hagop Sandaldjianf, which include a veritable zoo of animals painted in procession upon a single strand of hair; sculptures of Pope John Paul ll or of "Goofy" (among others) perched inside or atop the eye of a needle. There are documents detailing Theories of Forgetting; accounts of the dogs of the Soviet space program; stunning mosaics made entirely from the infinitesimal scales of butterfly wings; and then there's the Deprong Mori, a bat said to've been captured in mid-flight as it passed through a block of solid lead...
Recipient of a 2003 MacArthur Foundation grant, The Museum of Jurassic Technology is like some baffling time-capsule from a parallel universe, fallen to earth intact and at the unlikeliest of coordinates on our more or less substantial reality: Culver City, California. "The Heart of Screenland!"
If you're in the area, take a tumble down this rarest of rabbit holes to a singularly curious and confounding Wonderland. Be sure to have your thinking-cap on. Or maybe your night-cap.
Tags: exhibits, museums, the inexplicable
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