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EGG: How did you discover the Museum of Jurassic Technology? LW: A long time ago, people would say to me, when I would visit L.A., if I had seen the Museum of Jurassic Technology. And at first I thought that they were just making it up. But one day I happened to be driving by and there, between the Thai Restaurant and the forensics lab and the real-estate office and the carpet store, was the Museum of Jurassic Technology. And I stopped, pulled over, and knocked on the door. Nobody was there. I made a point thereafter of going and knocking on the door, and for several visits nobody was there. Then one day the door opened, and this man emerged and introduced himself as David Wilson and bid me enter. And I fell in the rabbit hole. There is a sense of the trap door at this place, of labyrinths and trap doors. And over a period of months and years I returned and became more and more curious. I eventually ended up writing a book CALLED MR. WILSON'S CABINET OF WONDERS. EGG: What is the Museum of Jurassic Technology like? LW: When you come in there, it's dark, it's labyrinthine. There are all the trappings of a kind of Victorian natural history museum -- the oak tables, the glass latrines, the lore, table tops, the labels, and so forth; the acoustic guides are the telephones that come off the wall. At first, you kind of have that expectation of having that sort of experience. But, little by little, a kind of sense of slippage begins to occur. You're not quite sure what sort of place this is. The acoustic guides have a voice of institutional authority, the voice you have heard a thousand times, but you begin seeing things that seem a little off. And then some of the exhibits look like typical natural history exhibits; but suddenly, for example on the wall behind me, among the horns, you'll notice what purports to be a human horn -- all this done completely straight-facedly. But time and again, you have this sense of a kind of slippage, of quicksand, that feeling that you get sometimes when you're on the beach and the wave is going out and you can't quite figure out where you stand. Indeed, you begin to question everything, and at a certain point you get suspended. It's clearly kind of a throwback to wonder cabinets, the 16th-century origins of museums. You find yourself suspended in wonder, between wondering at the marvels of nature and wondering whether any of this can possibly be true. And, this kind of suspension is alternatively maddening and delicious. And different kinds of people leave this place in terror, in horror, or don't leave it at all, in some sense. EGG: Who created the Museum of Jurassic Technology? LW: David Wilson is kind of the mastermind of this place. He would insist that he is only one of many, and it is indeed the case that he has drawn to himself many like-minded missionaries who do this as a cooperative now; that is very much David Wilson's mission. And David is an incredibly sweet man. He is wonderfully earnest. He never breaks irony. He is definitely like one of the characters in his latrines. It seems to me he is in dead earnest about bringing wonder, amazement, and marvel into people's lives. Of course, all museums should bring out that sense. And there was a time, arguably, when they all did. You know, in the origins of museums, you had this kind of devotion to wonder and amazement. But in the 16th and the 17th centuries, as you entered the age of reason, the scientific revolution and so forth, museums begin to professionalize, and you get the Natural History Museum, the Art Museum, you get the Technology museum. And the sense of the marvelous becomes suspect. And it falls away and you get the professional and the rigorous and this glaze of intimidation by all the authority of the institution. In some way, David's museum is a critique of all that. I mean, what's so funny about David's museum is that it is simultaneously a critique and a celebration of the museum, of the idea of the museum. EGG: What the spirit of the museum? LW: The spirit of David's museum is one simultaneously of parody and of reverence. And the way this is braided together is absolutely the essence of this place. In many ways, the greatest marvel that is being plumbed here, that is explored here, that is being invoked here, is the human capacity for marvel, the human capacity for wonder. This is the chord that David keeps hitting, that keeps reverberating out of this place. And it is an enormous gift, so people come here. EGG: But is it a parody? Or are these things true? LW: So many things here seem so obviously a parody, just obviously bogus. I just assumed that they were wonderful put-ons, but David (who never breaks irony) took them all seriously. And at a certain point, I began to occasionally look things up and found out that there was this kind of trap door within the trap door. For example, the horn on this wall purports to be the horn taken from the head of a woman named Mary David, of Soho, in 1560. It looks fake. But it turns out that the museum that was to become the Ashmolian, now at Oxford, indeed had a horn from Mary David of Soho with exactly that caption. In fact, almost every wonder cabinet and collection in the 16th century had a human horn. They turned out to have once been quite common. It's only relatively recently that we don't have them anymore. I eventually called a dermatologist, the head of the American Association of Dermatologists, who said, "Oh yeah, we used to get them all the time, human horns. Nowadays, with better hygiene, people knock them off before they get formed. Or we surgically remove them before even get going." Then he said, "I remember once when I was an intern 50 years ago, this woman came in and she had a wonderful horn curling out of the side of her head." And then he stopped for a second and he said, "Or am I just imagining this?" I mean, go figure. It's just this wonderful kind of vertigo that you fall through, which is the vertigo of wonder. EGG: What is so important about this museum? LW: Well, I'll just say that I interviewed a lot of museum people all over the world, in Europe, in New York, who consider what's going on here to be some of the most important stuff going on anywhere in the museum world today. It is an investigative kind of an archeology of the foundations of museology. I mean both in the sense of the pre-history of the modern museum, but also at the foundations of the modern museums. Today, this has been completely crusted over so, we don't see it any more. But this is worth peeling away, and some of the biggest fans of this museum see the extraordinary work that's going on here. Yet the budget for the whole museum is the cost of one extremely lousy painting at any traditional museum. And that's part of what makes it amazing. |
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