8/9/2019 Museum of Jurassic Technology Feature - Swindle Magazine

1/3

SWIND LE ISSU E 1 9

64/65

On November 3, 1953, as Soviet scientists pulled the leather straps

tightly around her body, slipped her legs and tai l into the body

sheath, and axed the clear plastic helmet and black breathing

tubes to her muzzle, Laika could have never known that she was

about to be sacriced to space. Laika, a butterscotch brown mutt,

was launched into orbit on Sputnik 2, as the rst living creature to

leave the Earth s atmosphere.

Laika was brought to the Engl ish-speaking world in a 1953 article

in the New York Times. Moscow Radio last week announced

that an animal-carrying satell ite soon would be launched Te

radio audience was introduced to a small, shaggy dog named

Kudryavka, which barke

LaikaKudryavkas nic

placed into a small space

For Laika, it was to be a

poisoned her last ration

instead o starving. (It w

not live past the li-of s

who pulled the stray rom

experience: Te more ti

shouldnt have done it. W

to justiy the death o t h

Viior f dow te abbi oe a te o Agee

by Drew Tewksbury

PhoTos by ryan schuDe

The Museum ofJurassic Technology

8/9/2019 Museum of Jurassic Technology Feature - Swindle Magazine

2/3

SWIND LE ISSU E 1 9

66/67

***

In a darkened room at t he Museum o Jurassic echnology, Laikas

portrait stands alone. Framed and oil-painted, it hangs in an ex-

hibition room that toes the line between Victorian salon and Old

West uneral parlor. itled Lives o Perect Creatures: Dogs o the

Soviet Space Program, the exhibit displays 10 paintings as a tribute

to the dogs used in prototypic space ight.

Housed in an unassuming building in the Los Angeles enclave o

Culver City, the Museum o Jurassic echnology challenges the

traditional museum. Instead o acting as a source o knowledge, the

museum raises more questions than answers: Is it a repository or

the obscure, the ephemeral and the unathomable, encapsulated in

a post-modern Victorian salon o the 21st century? O r is it an ex-

periment in the paradoxical a nd the sublimely wondrous? Perhaps.

I youre not looking, you may miss it. Te strip-mall otsam o Los

Angeles urban sprawlan In-N-Out Burger, Blockbuster Video

and India Sweets & Spicescamouages the anonymous acade

o the museum. From the street, there is little evidence o the mu-

seums existence; people waiting or the bus turn their backs to the

museums crimson-and-gold sign. Tere is nothing extraordinary

about it.

But inside, the exhibits are as mysterious as the museums name.

Instead o dinosaur bones, the dark, byzantine halls o the museum

display bizarre collections. Oen reerred to as a cabinet o curios-

ity, the museum lies somewhere between artistic and historical,

narrative and interpretative, and the alse and the real.

Around the corner rom the gi shop, an automated slide show

explains the history o museums. An anonymous voicethe

same anonymous voice speaking rom museum headsets around

the worldcalls Noahs ark the rst natural history museum,

ollows the lineage to the wunderkammers (wonder cabinets) o

Renaissance Europe, and culminates with the stodgy institutions

o today. Te Museum o Jurassic echnology marries the details

o established institutionsthe placards, careully lit displays,

dioramaswith the mystique o P.. Barnums collection o curios,

or maybe a Coney Island reak show.

One room is dedicated to artiacts culled rom Los Angeles

mobile-home parks, where dioramas depict diferent trailers

in small synthetic habitats. ell the Bees: Belie, K nowledge &

Hypersymbolic Cognition displays olk remedies rom a pre-

science America committed to the transormative powers o mice

on toast and sewing pins stuck into wooden cemetery gates. Te

Eye o the Need le: Te Unique World o Microminiatures o Hagop

Sandaldjian showcases nearly invisible sculpturesonly visible by

microscopeby the Egyptian ex-pat Sandaldjian.

On the second oor, just adjacent to Laika and her Soviet comrades,

the 29-year-old Georgian ex-pat Nanuka chitchou sits in the tea-

room with her ghostlike Windhound, ula. Nana, as she likes to be

called, serves tea rom a 100-year-old samovar, a large coal-heated

teapot. She uses only Georgian black tea, which she smugglesback rom her home country. Nana and t he tearoom complete an

interpretive arc that starts with the space dogs and Borzoi Cabinet

Teatre, which screens lms o slow-motion Soviet rocket launches,

ti i o o te ol pacei te wod whe youeo od wa o tin.

8/9/2019 Museum of Jurassic Technology Feature - Swindle Magazine

3/3

SWIND LE ISSU E 1 9

68/69

and ends in a hot glass o tea with lemon. Nana says she does eel

like a part o the museum, and that her tearoom is a place or intro-

spection. Here, tea always opens up a conversation, she says.

***

Te museum is held together by the vision and commitment o a

group o artists who breathe their dreams and passions into the

collection. Tis is one o the only places in the world where youre

not told what to think, Rachel Portenstein, the commemorative

objects curator, says. She puts her ha nd into a small bowl o water,

shes out a piece o adhesive plastic, and adheres it to a ce ramic

bowl that will soon be placed into a kil n. She sits on a high stool,

surrounded by various ceramics and eclectic ephemera that have

collected on the shelves in t he museums back rooms. Behind her

is a plastic model o a Russian rocket; to her right a plaster skul l.Whereas the interior o the museum is strictly controlled with t he-

atrical lighting and thick curtains, the private backrooms reveal the

parts that keep the museum alive.

Sometimes the museums ounder, David Wilson, with his white

hair and horn-rimmed glasses, will emerge rom a storage room

still painted green rom its time as a coroners oce. Wilson stud-

ied lm at CalArts in the 1970s, and his mastery o lighting and

optical illusion appear in the Athanasius Kircher exhibit, which

displays the ideas o the 17th-century Jesuit thinker. Trough a

viewing apparatus, holograms appear inside each ornately con-

structed environment, revealing an image that was previously

invisible.

Like the Kircher ex hibit, the museum began as collection o

Wilsons ideas. Founded in 1989, the museum grew as enthusiasts

donated their collections and expertise to Wilson. In 1995, writer

Lawrence Weschler wrote the bookMr. Wilsons Cabinet of Wonder,

a Pulitzer Prize nalist, which brought the museum to the publics

attention. In 2001, Wilson won a MacArthur grant, more com-

monly known as a genius g rant.

For those who tend to the museum, the answers still dont come

easy. Since she started at the museum in 2001, nance and develop-

ment director Anitra Menning says that her view o the museum

has changed. It is an ever-evolving piece o conceptual art, she says,

and somewhere between Laikas portrait, mice on toast, and even

Nana and ula in the tearoom, the museum orever orbits the outer

edge o the ordinary, challenging t he way we perceive the world.

Lately, I have been thinking about the motto o the museum,

she says. It states, Te learner must be led always rom amiliar

objects toward the unamiliar; guided along, as it were, a chain

o owers into the mysteries o lie. Here youre not orced, but

youre guided along. Tis has made me think a lot about the addi-

tive nature o learning and how learning is li ke a house o cards.

o build the house o cards, you always have to nd a card to lea n

against.