Museum of Jurassic Technology

The setting of the Museum of Jurassic Technology on Venice Boulevard in Culver City, California

The Museum of Jurassic Technology is an educational institution dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the lower jurassic. Located at 9341 Venice Boulevard in the Palms district of Los Angeles, California, the Museum holds a specialized repository of relics and artifacts evoking some of the more obscure and poetic aspects of natural history, the history of technology and science, and their entwined realizations in human artistry and ingenuity. It was founded by David Hildebrand Wilson and Diana Drake Wilson (husband and wife) in 1987.

Overview

Mice on toast, from an exhibit "Mouse Cures" at the MJT. This exhibit is referenced in the subtitle of Weschler's book about the museum.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology traces its inspiration to the earliest days of the institution of the museum, which it dates back to Noah's Ark, the first and most complete Museum of Natural History known to man. The Museum's catalog includes a mixture of artistic, scientific as well as some unclassifiable exhibits, and evokes the cabinets of curiosities that were the 18th century predecessors of modern natural history museums. The factual claims of many of the Museum's exhibits strain credibility, provoking a rich array of interpretations from commentators. The Museum was the subject of a book by Lawrence Weschler in 1995 entitled Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, And Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology, which describes in detail many of its exhibits.

The Museum's introductory slideshow recounts that, "In its original sense, the term, "museum" meant "a spot dedicated to the Muses, a place where man's mind could attain a mood of aloofness above everyday affairs." In this spirit, the Museum of Jurassic Technology's dimly lit atmosphere, wood and glass vitrines and labyrinthine floorplan lead visitors through an eclectic range of exhibits on art, natural history, history of science, philosophy, and anthropology with a special focus on the history of museums, and the varieties of paths to knowledge. The Museum attracts approximately 18,000 visitors per year.

Over the years, the Museum has expanded both in terms of its exhibitions as well as other public offerings. In 2005, the Museum opened its Tula Tea Room, a Russian-style tea room where Georgian tea, cookies, and crackers are served to patrons. This room is a miniature reconstruction of the study of Tsar Nicolas II from the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, Russia. The Borzoi Kabinet Theater screens a series of poetic documentaries produced by the Museum of Jurassic Technology in collaboration with St. Petersburg-based arts and science collective, Kabinet. The series of films entitled A Chain of Flowers draws its name from the quote by Charles Willson Peale: The Learner must be led always from familiar objects toward the unfamiliar, guided along, as it were, a chain of flowers into the mysteries of life. The titles of the films are Levsha: The Cross-eyed Lefty from Tula and the Steel Flea, Obshee Delo: The Common Task, and Bol'shoe Sovietskaia Zatmenie: The Great Soviet Eclipse.

The Museum's founder David Wilson received a MacArthur Foundation fellowship in 2001.^[1]

Publications

The Museum also produces a series of leaflets and books about museum exhibits including:

• On the Foundation of the Museum The Thums Gardeners & Botanists
• The Eye of the Needle: The Unique World of Microminiatures of Hagop Sandaldjian, with an essay by Ralph Rugoff
• Geoffrey Sonnabend: Obliscence: Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter
• Bernard Maston, Donald R. Griffith and the Deprong Mori of the Tripsicum Plateau,
• Garden of Eden on Wheels: Selected Collections from Los Angeles Area Mobile Home and Trailer Parks
• No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again: Letters to Mt. Wilson Observatory, 1915-1935
• Das Museum Kircherianum: Die Welt besteht aus geheimen Verknüpfungen
• Napoleona
• The Museum of Jurassic Technology: Jubilee Catalog: Primi Decem Anni

Many of these books are published in conjunction with the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Information.

Exhibitions

The Museum maintains over 30 permanent exhibits including:

• The Delani/Sonnabend Halls - recalling the intertwining story of an ill-fated opera singer, Madalena Delani, with a theoretician of memory, Geoffrey Sonnabend, whose 3-part work Obliscence: Theories of Forgetting and the Problem of Matter suggests that memory is an elaborate construction that humankind has created, "to buffer ourselves against the intolerable knowledge of the irreversible passage of time and the irretrievability of its moments and events." There is only experience and the decay of experience, an idea he illustrates with a complex diagram of a plane intersecting a cone.
• Tell the Bees: Belief, Knowledge, and Hypersymbolic Cognition: An exhibit of pre-scientific cures and remedies
• The Garden of Eden on Wheels: Collections from Los Angeles Area Trailer Parks
• The Unique World of Microminiatures of Hagop Sandaljian : A collection of micro-miniature sculptures, each carved from a single human hair and placed within the eye of a needle. Currently on display: Goofy, Pope John Paul II and Napoleon I. Other microminiatures include violins, dancers, a crucifix (made of a single strand of the artist's hair and gold); characters like Donald Duck, Pinocchio, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs; a self-portrait; a golf player and a baseball player swinging his bat.
• Micromosaics of Harold "Henry" Dalton: Microscopic mosaics from the 19th century depicting flowers, animals and other objects, made entirely from individual butterfly wing scales and diatoms.
• The Stereofloral Radiographs of Albert G. Richards: A collection of stereographic radiographs of flowers.
• Rotten Luck: The Decaying Dice of Ricky Jay: A collection of decomposing antique dice once owned by magician Ricky Jay and documented in his book Dice: Deception, Fate, and Rotten Luck
• No One May Ever Have the Same Knowledge Again: Letters to Mt. Wilson Observatory : A small room dedicated to unusual letters and theories received by the Mount Wilson Observatory circa 1915–1935.
• The World is Bound with Secret Knots : The Life and Works of Athanasius Kircher : A survey of the fields of study, writings and inventions of 17th century Jesuit polymath who was the founder of the Museum Kircherianum in Rome
• The Lives of Perfect Creatures: The Dogs of the Soviet Space Program : An oil portrait gallery of the heroic cosmonaut canines
• Fairly Safely Venture: String Figures from Many Lands and their Venerable Collectors

From 1992 to 2006, the Museum of Jurassic Technology's Foundation Collection was on display in their Tochtermuseum at the Karl Ernst Osthaus-Museum in Hagen, Germany. This exhibition was part of the Museum of Museums wing at the KEOM, which came into being under the stewardship of then-director Michael Fehr.^{[citation needed]}

References

1. ^ MacArthur Foundation Fellows List, 2001

External links

• Museum website
• Public Events at the Museum
• Roadtrip America: A Separate Reality
• NPR Archives: Macarthur Genius Grant for Museum of Jurassic Technology (Ed Heil)
• Corporeal Reality radio interview with David Wilson and author Aimee Bender, 2006
• Jeanne Scheper, Interview with David Wilson, Other Voices, vol. 3, no. 1
• Mark Edward's Skeptiblog "A Museum that makes you think" 2010

Coordinates: 34°01′32.16″N 118°23′43.44″W / 34.0256°N 118.3954°W / 34.0256; -118.3954