A reader found inspiration in my article about a successful donation of a hammer to the Zagreb Museum of Broken Relationships. GG wants to donate a miniature haunted spirit house. But where?
I suggested the Museum of Jurassic Technology on Venice Blvd in Culver City. The museum’s website claims it’s dedicated to “incongruity in the face of unfathomable phenomena.”
Do they accept objects as donations? Submit a proposal in writing to the curatorial staff, who seek small unique curios, specialized dioramas. GG will write a provenance with references, the more obscure the better, tongue in cheekily scientific.
The Museum of Jurassic Technology isn’t a mainstream institution with a huge public presence. It’s a hole in the wall storefront where truth, illusion, and collecting mania sit on display. When I took my mother her mathematician’s logical brain exploded with annoyance. “This isn’t real; none of this is true—and this is supposed to be a museum. It is not rational, it makes no sense!” She said this of the display of Horned Ants, the display of tiny wizard’s hats, and 10th century ossified tears.
GG’s haunted spirit house might fit in well:
A hand carved teak san phra phum, a miniature temple housing good spirits who come out to battle bad spirits. The good spirits eat flowers and sweets. Propitiated, they will protect. The dragons on the multitiered roof come to life at night, hear them roar. Of course they’re not “real,” hauntings aren’t truth. Or are they? What is the truth, fluid, subjective? What is a ‘real’ presentation? And in fact, what is a spirit, and what is a museum?
The Museum might sell the house in the Jurassic Technology Museum Shop. Unlike any other, it’s an extension of the museum, in all its absurdity and scientific jargon. Objects for purchase are couched in pre-modern alchemical terms, strange and beautiful, eerie and absurd. Choose from the shop’s collection of books of eclectic creators, unheard of artists, pseudo-scientists, “real” people who never made the mainstream; idiosyncratic, defying categorization. The gift shop offers works created by the founder of the museum David Wilson. Pick up a brilliant book, Lawrence Weschler’s finalist for the Pulitzer Prize: Mr Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and other Marvels of Jurassic Technology.
What is Jurassic Technology?
Didn’t the Jurassic period happen about 200 million years ago? When dinosaurs roamed the Earth and the Colorado Plateau of Southeastern Utah formed? The Museum website unabashedly states the institution is dedicated to relics from the LOWER Jurassic eras, those of curious, unusual technological qualities, significant to the scholar and general public. The emphasis is on an ancient mythical time before categories, before the world became a composite of systems separating science from art, imagination from fact. For example: the website states the theme for the Museum is the most complete museum of Natural History the world has ever seen: Noah’s Ark, not to mention the Great Institution of the library at Alexandria third century BCE. As if a storefront in Culver City stands second only to Alexandria! And that Noah’s Ark existed as a museum.
In the 16th and 17th century wealthy men built Wunderkammer; cabinets to house strange objects gathered to impress, or baffle, or amuse: the world’s first museums. The new concept of a public institution to promulgate truth in nature absorbed these Wonder Cabinets. Artist Charles Willson Peale established the famous Philadelphia Museum out of his family home in 1784, calling it “A Repository for Natural Curiosities.” This became the Nation’s first Natural History museum. By the 20th century noble ideas such as those which founded Peale’s museum culminated in American Tawdriness, such as the displays of tattooed ladies and Tom Thumbs by PT Barnum.
A New Home for the Thai Spirit House
A donation value of $2,000 for this work, neither spirit nor matter. Visit the Museum of Jurassic Technology: don’t bring your logical mother.
Readers, I help with donations by writing a valuation to take “against” your income taxes, in many cases.