World of wonder

David Wilson's wry offerings

September 25, 2007 2:24:42 PM

“WE ARE INTERESTED: in the sense of knowing,” Wilson says.

You’d be surprised at how many people take the wry offerings of David Wilson’s Museum of Jurassic Technology completely seriously, considering that Steven Spielberg went to such trouble to inform us that dinosaurs were around back then, but nary a human being.

Wilson will give a talk on October 5 at 7 pm at the RISD Auditorium, free and open to the public. RISD described it in its announcement as “an evening of investigation, wonderment, and exploration.” That’s a safe bet.

Located on the western edge of Los Angeles, the museum declares in its mission statement that it “provides the academic community with a specialized repository of relics and artifacts from the Lower Jurassic, with an emphasis on those that demonstrate unusual or curious technological qualities” and also familiarizes the general public with “life in the Jurassic.”

The museum prompts both amusement and musing. Wilson serves as its muse-in-chief. The 61-year-old MacArthur Fellow and his wife Diana founded the museum in 1989 as a U-Haul trailer traveling exhibition. About five years later they settled into their present location, which has expanded considerably.

The presentations, exhibitions, and “relics” are wide-ranging. There are the microminiature carvings of Hagop Sandaldjian, which can fit in the eyes of needles; the “Garden of Eden on Wheels,” composed of selected collections from trailer parks; and the elaborate theory of Geoffrey Sonnabend, who maintained that memories are fabrications to maintain our illusion of reality. Early entries in the permanent collection include a bat that purportedly can fly through solid objects by using X-rays instead of sound waves, and a Cameroon “stink ant,” whose life sometimes ends with a large spike emerging from its head to disperse fungal spores. Biographies or elaborate explanations by scientists usually accompany the exhibits. The actual and the imaginary do a dignified gavotte at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, bowing politely to each other.

David Wilson spoke by phone from the museum about his creation. First about its genesis.

“Actually, it came in a kind of thunderbolt,” he said of the day nearly 20 years ago when all that had been gestating was given birth. “I finally sat down and recognized that the thing that I wanted to do more than anything in the world was have a museum. I actually sat in my workshop and wrote and wrote and wrote and had enough ideas to keep me busy for five years.”

He was raised in Denver by parents who traveled a lot but took their kids with them. They liked to visit museums, which Wilson fell in love with. “I remember as a really young kid having an epiphanal experience at the science museum in London,” he said about encountering so much tidy knowledge that inspired awe. His undergraduate degree was in natural science, urban entomology specifically, but Wilson went on to study and work at filmmaking — science documentaries when he could.

So his schooling was in both the tangible and creative examination of the two disciplines. How appropriate. That balance has helped Wilson appreciate the healthy bewilderment that his museum can induce, andd to respect the open-mindedness of uncertainty.

“We find ourselves very drawn to phenomena that hover on the border of believability — we are interested in the sense of knowing,” he said. “What does it mean to know something? What does it mean to understand something? We have found phenomena that are on the very cusps of understandability or believability and have an effect on people to open up the receptive faculties in ways that can be” — he considered that a moment — “lasting and productive.”

I suggested that information that comes to us through wonder can take deeper root, whether it’s standing at the lip of the Grand Canyon or exploring his museum’s exhibitions and their intended ambiguities. “Right,” he replied. “I guess it’s intended ambiguity.”

He continued. “We are participating with our patrons. We are as astonished by the microminiatures of Hagop Sandaldjian as anyone who comes to visit the museum.” Wilson reflected a moment. “Maybe that was not an important distinction. But I think I was trying to remove too much intention in authorship from our endeavors.”

You stand humbly before them, I joke. He laughed. “Yeah. It’s kind of silly and corny but it’s true. It’s absolutely true.”

See what he means at www.mjt.org . While you're at it, check out what it inspired locally, Neil Salley’s Musée Patamécanique at www.museepata.org .