Cabinet of Wonder: The Museum of Jurassic Technology
Before the invention of the institution we know as a “museum,” private collectors displayed their treasures in “wunderkammer” or wonder cabinets. These collections, which could range in size from a small valise-size container to an entire room or wing of a palace, were usually as eclectic as the owner’s imagination with whale bones being exhibited beside pieces of the true cross or something equally as spurious.
For the most part, the wunderkammer ceased to exist to large extent by the Napoleonic age. That is until 1989 when David Wilson and his wife opened the Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT) (www.mjt.org) in Culver City.Part museum, part art installation, part joke, the MJT is as much a state of mind as a place. You can only fully appreciate it if you suspend your disbelief and immerse yourself in the parallel universe that Wilson has created. It’s at once an enchanting and disquieting vision. Permanent exhibits include figures carved out of a single grain of rice, an ode to trailer park culture, disintegrating dice (courtesy of magician Ricky Jay), a library devoted to the study of Napoleon, stereographic x-rays of flowers, folk remedies, and the newest one—portraits of heroic Soviet space dogs.
I first heard about the MJT through a documentary on PBS—but, because I missed the beginning—had no idea where it was. Then I saw an article about it in the late and lamented Westside edition of the Los Angeles Times—it was down the street from me in Culver City. I was on my way almost immediately. And I had a great time in the winding, darkened, weird dreamscape that is the MJT. The museum is filled with small, seemingly endless rooms and short passages that double back on themselves. The descriptions of exhibits are purely poetic and maddingly evasive. Certain exhibits are permanently out of orders and others look like rejects from a second-hand store. But the MJT is an experience—it’s not so much about learning as it’s about being inspired.For me, that inspiration is found each time I visit the exhibit about Athanaseus Kircher, a priest who wrote on numerous esoteric topics ranging from ancient Egypt to Zen to magnetism. Kircher really existed, but how much of what is written in the exhibit is real and how much fabricated is anybody’s guess. And really, I could care less. It’s the idea of the exhibit, that the world and existence is deeper than it seems that is appealing, that inspires. Isn’t that what a museum is supposed to do?
Don’t get me wrong, I love other L.A. institutions like the Getty. I love the academically rigorous, verifiability of these experiences, the wide open corridors, the cleanliness of it all.
But there’s something that drags me back to the MJT time and again. It’s like a dream that you can’t escape, the low light, the unexpectedness around every corner, the other dream walkers visiting at the same time, trying to make their own sense of the experience as they delve further into the twisted folds of their own (or is it Wilson’s) brain.It wasn’t until I read Lawrence Weschler’s Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology, that I really got the joke—this is as much a critique of the museum as it is one itself. Ironically, I bought the book at an exhibit at The Getty (Devices of Wonder, which was when I was first introduced to the concept of wunderkammer). Honestly, I really don’t care if half of the exhibits are fake, and that the entire enterprise is a rebuke of the museum qua museum.Wechsler may have missed the joke himself. The point of the MJT is that it is whatever you want it to be. It’s the meaning that you bring to it that’s the point (obviously, Wilson was making a very post-modern statement with the opening of the MJT). It’s the relativist, artistic underpinnings that make the MJT so much fun.
For me, what the MJT shows is that the world isn’t as boring as it pretends to be. Kircher is right (or is it Wilson whose instructing here) when he writes that “the world is bound with secret knots.” When I walk out of the dream that is the MJT into the post-industrial wasteland of Venice Ave, it seems as if I’ve just awakened and the world looks a bit more vibrant. And if that’s a joke or a con—I’ll be happy to be tricked time and again.
