Not far from
Sony Studios, there's a little spot of genius at 9341 Venice Boulevard. Perhaps
some of you have seen it-- maybe even been there-- The museum of Jurassic Technology.
It's a small, unobtrusive storefront without windows. At the door there's a
tiny empty case and fountain, which remain a mystery.
On my first visit to the museum many years ago, Mr. Wilson, the proprietor
and artist behind the museum, was outside playing the accordion. He wearing
hornrimmed glasses and a wool sweater in the L.A. sun, he greeted my friend
and me as if he knew we'd be coming all along, and welcomed us into his dim
little wonder cabinet of a museum. 
An interesting biographical note, Mr. Wilson worked in The Industry, and at one time lived in a small house out someplace rural, with no electricity. He and his wife used their earnings to fund the museum. This is the kind of brave single-mindedness that inspires me, and I have been back to the museum over and over for the past seven years, tracking each new exhibit, each elaboration on the many themes Mr. Wilson explores.
One of the first themes
I noticed at running through the museum was that of the arc, the biblical arc;
Noah's archiving two by two, a metaphor for the curatorial project. There's
a small scale model of the arc in gallery one, a compartmentalized box looking
very unseaworthly, and this theme is continued in another room, in "The
Garden of Eden on Wheels," devoted entirely to trailers and their mobile
collections of pincushions, bottles and other domestic objects collected by
people who live in trailers. Having lived in an old trailer myself for many
years, where your habitation is miniaturized and portable, I understand this
project completely.
It's fitting then that the next room would take the idea of the miniature to the realm of absurdity-- in the exhibit titled "The Eye of the Needle, the Unique World of the Micro Miniatures of Hagop Sandaljian," where the Pope and characters from Disney, like Mickey Mouse, Snow White and the dwarves (of course) have been sculpted on heads of pins, painted between heartbeats.
Back in Gallery 1, the theme of the cone or horn persists. This shape continues through all the exhibits of this gallery. The deprong mori, or little bat, a.k.a myotis lucifugus or "piercing devil," emits a cone shaped sound that enables it to travel through thatched lean-tos and metal. There's also the horn of a Mary Davis Saughall mounted on the wall, looking very much like a calcified dread lock. In the Sonnabend-Delani rooms, Sonnabend's "cone of memory" is a convincing but possibly bunk explanation of remembrance and forgetting. An etching of a conical Tower of Babel decorates one wall.
The Tower of Babel itself is a theme-- there's the Misch/Webster Gallery, featuring "No One May Every Have the Same Knowledge Again: Letters to the Mt. Wilson Observatory, 1915-1935." These letters, scrawled on Christmas postcards or carefully typed, are moving and comical in their certainty. One letter by "Edward" insists, " I have found the Key to all Existance.[sic]" and "the Moon Is practically all Water…" I've guessed at the authenticity of the letters-- they all seem so perfectly absurd and poetic. One can see where David Wilson's sympathies lie: with the quacks and fervent guessers, these paranoid wonderers.
The new exhibit,
"The World is Bound With Secret Knots" is devoted to one such wonderer, Athanasius
Kircher, a 17th century monk who studied magnetism and conjectured
on the shape and order of the universe. The exhibit features beautiful dioramas
of his ideas, and a bell wheel. A Tower of Babel appears here again in a horned
shape, Kircher's vision spindling to the heavens. This exhibit is the most seductive
yet. As you enter, you first hear the ethereal, insistent sound of the bell
wheel, but the ringing remains a mystery until you are in the main room where
the bell rings and wanes over and over as you view the dioramas and "magnetized"
wax figures suspended in glass globes of water.
What becomes clear while looking at the Kircher exhibit is that the dioramas do not exist to teach history or concepts, as in other museums, but to concretize the poetry of mistakes, the convincing fictions. That is what I love about this place-- it has shunned objective truth and "factual" history and made these principles subject to narrative, and these "lies" are often more profound and precise metaphors than the ones we are given with scientific "realities" today. It's not the archaic ideas themselves that do this, it is David Wilson's way of presenting them that makes them so fascinating.
I love to go to the museum with friends and conjecture about which exhibits are based in fact and which are fabrications of David Wilson. There's a wonderful Book called Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder, by Lawrence Weschler, which you can consult if the ambiguity of the place is really bothering you (or if you live too far away to visit). Weschler did quite a bit of research and concludes that some of the most improbable displays in the museum are in fact true-- like the ant which scales a high tree and impales itself after inhaling a spore. But I insist that deciphering the fact from fiction is not necessary to get this place, and in fact, a preoccupation regarding the exhibit's factual validity fully misses the point. One must look at the museum as an examination of wonder itself.
It recalls
the fantastical and often misguided project of the 17th century wonder
cabinets-- collections of curiosities and oddities collected through travels
and trade, belonging to noblemen who supplied curator's narratives that are
often humorous and poetic. The photographer Rosamund Purcell has often explored
these collections in her photographs, and indeed, the museum has a room devoted
to her work featured in her book, Special Cases.
In the same vein as these 17th century collectors, the Thum Room's "Tell the Bees…Belief Knowledge and Hypersymbolic Cognition," my favorite, seeks to document superstitions. The room is very dark, the small cases spot lit, barely illuminated. It's spooky and intimate, the accompanying plaques strain the eyes, but it's worth the effort. Here are the poetics of post-hoc reasoning: a mother's tears will keep a dead infant from heaven, after a death in the house you must tell the bees of the passing, a duck breath's a curative, a sprinkle of matriarch urine will bring luck on New Years Day.
After you
emerge from the final exhibit, you can go to the small library, a civilized
corner where you can browse a collection of books as diverse and strange as
the exhibits themselves. You'll forget you're in Culver City. I always take
time to look at the books on sea monsters and medieval orphans.
The museum is branching out and has recently acquired the entire building where it is housed. To find out more about the museum and its future plans, go to http://www.mjt.org