SWINDLE ISSUE 19
The Museum of
Jurassic Technology
Visitors fall down the rabbit hole at the Los Angeles’ anti-institution
by Drew Tewksbury
Photos by Ryan Schude
On November 3, 1953, as Soviet scientists pulled the leather straps
tightly around her body, slipped her legs and tail into the body
sheath, and affixed the clear plastic helmet and black breathing
tubes to her muzzle, Laika could have never known that she was
about to be sacrificed to space. Laika, a butterscotch brown mutt,
was launched into orbit on Sputnik 2, as the first living creature to
leave the Earth’s atmosphere.
Laika was brought to the English-speaking world in a 1953 article
in the New York Times. “Moscow Radio last week announced
that an animal-carrying satellite soon would be launched… The
radio audience was introduced to a ‘small, shaggy dog named
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laika
Kudryavka,’ which barked into the microphone.” A few days after,
Laika—Kudryavka’s nickname, which translates to “barker”—was
placed into a small spacecraft.
For Laika, it was to be a one-way flight. Soviet scientists said they
poisoned her last ration of food so that she would simply fall asleep
instead of starving. (It was later revealed that Laika probably did
not live past the lift-off stage.) In 1998, Oleg Gazenko, the scientist
who pulled the stray from the Moscow streets, reflected on his
experience: “The more time passes, the more I’m sorry about it. We
shouldn’t have done it. We did not learn enough from the mission
to justify the death of the dog.”
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***

In a darkened room at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Laika’s

portrait stands alone. Framed and oil-painted, it hangs in an ex-
hibition room that toes the line between Victorian salon and Old
West funeral parlor. Titled “Lives of Perfect Creatures: Dogs of the
Soviet Space Program,” the exhibit displays 10 paintings as a tribute
to the dogs used in prototypic space flight.

Housed in an unassuming building in the Los Angeles enclave of

Culver City, the Museum of Jurassic Technology challenges the
traditional museum. Instead of acting as a source of knowledge, the
museum raises more questions than answers: Is it a repository for
the obscure, the ephemeral and the unfathomable, encapsulated in
a post-modern Victorian salon of the 21st century? Or is it an ex-
periment in the paradoxical and the sublimely wondrous? Perhaps.

If you’re not looking, you may miss it. The strip-mall flotsam of Los
Angeles urban sprawl—an In-N-Out Burger, Blockbuster Video
and India Sweets & Spices—camouflages the anonymous facade
of the museum. From the street, there is little evidence of the mu-
seum’s existence; people waiting for the bus turn their backs to the
museum’s crimson-and-gold sign. There is nothing extraordinary
about it.

But inside, the exhibits are as mysterious as the museum’s name.

Instead of dinosaur bones, the dark, byzantine halls of the museum
display bizarre collections. Often referred to as a cabinet of curios-
ity, the museum lies somewhere between artistic and historical,
narrative and interpretative, and the false and the real.

Around the corner from the gift shop, an automated slide show
explains the history of museums. An anonymous voice—the
same anonymous voice speaking from museum headsets around
the world—calls Noah’s ark the first natural history museum,
follows the lineage to the wunderkammers (wonder cabinets) of
Renaissance Europe, and culminates with the stodgy institutions
of today. The Museum of Jurassic Technology marries the details
of established institutions—the placards, carefully lit displays,
dioramas—with the mystique of P.T. Barnum’s collection of curios,
or maybe a Coney Island freak show.
“This is one of the only places
in the world where you’re
One room is dedicated to artifacts culled from Los Angeles
mobile-home parks, where dioramas depict different trailers not told what to think.”
in small synthetic habitats. “Tell the Bees: Belief, Knowledge &
Hypersymbolic Cognition” displays folk remedies from a pre-
science America committed to the transformative powers of mice
on toast and sewing pins stuck into wooden cemetery gates. “The
Eye of the Needle: The Unique World of Microminiatures of Hagop
Sandaldjian” showcases nearly invisible sculptures—only visible by
microscope—by the Egyptian ex-pat Sandaldjian.

On the second floor, just adjacent to Laika and her Soviet comrades,
the 29-year-old Georgian ex-pat Nanuka Tchitchou sits in the tea-
room with her ghostlike Windhound, Tula. Nana, as she likes to be
called, serves tea from a 100-year-old samovar, a large coal-heated
teapot. She uses only Georgian black tea, which she smuggles
back from her home country. Nana and the tearoom complete an
interpretive arc that starts with the space dogs and Borzoi Cabinet
Theatre, which screens films of slow-motion Soviet rocket launches,

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SWINDLE ISSUE 19

and ends in a hot glass of tea with lemon. Nana says she does feel
like a part of the museum, and that her tearoom is a place for intro-
spection. “Here, tea always opens up a conversation,” she says.

***

The museum is held together by the vision and commitment of a

group of artists who breathe their dreams and passions into the
collection. “This is one of the only places in the world where you’re
not told what to think,” Rachel Portenstein, the commemorative
objects curator, says. She puts her hand into a small bowl of water,
fishes out a piece of adhesive plastic, and adheres it to a ceramic
bowl that will soon be placed into a kiln. She sits on a high stool,
surrounded by various ceramics and eclectic ephemera that have
collected on the shelves in the museum’s back rooms. Behind her
is a plastic model of a Russian rocket; to her right a plaster skull.
Whereas the interior of the museum is strictly controlled with the-
atrical lighting and thick curtains, the private backrooms reveal the
parts that keep the museum alive.

Sometimes the museum’s founder, David Wilson, with his white

hair and horn-rimmed glasses, will emerge from a storage room
still painted green from its time as a coroner’s office. Wilson stud-
ied film at CalArts in the 1970s, and his mastery of lighting and
optical illusion appear in the Athanasius Kircher exhibit, which
displays the ideas of the 17th-century Jesuit thinker. Through a
viewing apparatus, holograms appear inside each ornately con-
structed environment, revealing an image that was previously
invisible.

Like the Kircher exhibit, the museum began as collection of

Wilson’s ideas. Founded in 1989, the museum grew as enthusiasts
donated their collections and expertise to Wilson. In 1995, writer
Lawrence Weschler wrote the book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder,
a Pulitzer Prize finalist, which brought the museum to the public’s
attention. In 2001, Wilson won a MacArthur grant, more com-
monly known as a “genius grant.”

For those who tend to the museum, the answers still don’t come
easy. Since she started at the museum in 2001, finance and develop-
ment director Anitra Menning says that her view of the museum
has changed. It is an ever-evolving piece of conceptual art, she says,
and somewhere between Laika’s portrait, mice on toast, and even
Nana and Tula in the tearoom, the museum forever orbits the outer
edge of the ordinary, challenging the way we perceive the world.

“Lately, I have been thinking about the motto of the museum,”

she says. “It states, ‘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.’ Here you’re not forced, but
you’re guided along. This has made me think a lot about the addi-
tive nature of learning and how learning is like a house of cards.
To build the house of cards, you always have to find a card to lean
against.”

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