Max Hooper Schneider on the Museum that Exhibits Its Messes

The Museum of Jurassic Technology (MOJT) was co-founded in 1988 by Diana Drake Wilson and David Hildebrand Wilson. Established with a critical intent, the MOJT has remained committed to foregrounding subaltern ways of comprehending and thinking about the world. The exhibits and manuscripts housed therein cannot be fitted into modern, disciplined knowledge and its associated cultural productions, which have left behind medieval mystery and enchantment to become increasingly specialized and reductive in terms of what they investigate and count as knowledge—and art.

This subversive approach is instantly palpable in the MOJT’s dramaturgy, with its tenebrific lighting and the selfconsciously prosaic technics of its dioramic displays, cloistered curations and tearoom—the latter rife with publications on subjects ranging from the nature of the cosmos to hypersymbolic cognition. Entering the museum is like walking into an enormous, smoky-quartz crystal ball aswirl with dried sperm, butterfly scales and chicken-sized RVs or, alternatively, a mausoleum behind a diner on Route 66. There is something playfully damning about this place, as if we were wandering among ghosts in the scrapyard of a failed positivism—an intentional haunting that is the museum’s unmistakable gestalt or vibe.

The valorization of the ambiguous and incongruent is evident before one even enters the museum: it is signaled in its name. The Jurassic period was characterized by magnificent vegetal lushness, oceanic flourishing and the formation of new seas, and the advent of droves of new species and classes of life. The MOJT, however, has little to do with this 200-million-year-old ecological proliferation and the behemothic reptilian parade that followed, other than the fact that the Lower Jurassic epoch remains somewhat opaque to the reasoned calculus of science. Effectively, the name of the institution functions as a neologism with more than a scintilla of sardonic wit and the occult thrown in, as well as pointing to its exact opposite—the contemporary Holocene’s theater of planetary destruction. The conceit of the “Jurassic,” moreover, operates as a parable. It was a marked climactic shift that became the tableau for invention, which is reflected in the museum’s quixotic wares and maverick exhibitions.

Mrs Alice May Williams, whose 1931 letter to astronomers at the Mount Wilson Observatory near Pasadena is preserved in the museum’s collection, writes that she possesses valuable knowledge that no one may have again. This idiosyncratic perception is not part of the repertoire of contemporary thought. Knowledge must be reproducible and functional, capable of being instrumentalized, transformable into an algorithm or, alternatively, a story. It has become hegemonic across disciplines that telling a story is the most efficacious mode of not only communicating meaning but having it. While algorithms work behind the scenes to shape perception into a highly functional, readily brandable, conformity, the story performs the same function while softening the blow.

In short, the MOJT stands in opposition to today’s standards of aesthetic and intellectual production, whereby creation and interpretation are expected to obey the authorized model of marketable messaging. To be considered relevant (marketable), cultural products, including artworks, must present a message and this message must be clear. Ambiguity is considered not only useless but disturbing. Like a mess, it can only be cleaned up. The MOJT, rather than hiding messes, exhibits them.

As a practicing artist, I have remained an avid fan of the museum’s deconstructive project as well as its utilization of the dioramic mode across multiple scales, its penchant for cryptobiology and its presentation of worlds in boxes. To this day, I have retained my boyhood dream of creating something inside this darkened sanctum.

The contemporary relevance of the museum, however, exceeds far beyond any personal preference. The MOJT exists as a bulwark against conformity, providing a rare opening into the world of the intentionally obscured and purposely marginalized. In its championing of the creative importance of messiness and ambiguity, the museum provides an important counter to the present zeitgeist with its insistence on market-driven homogeneity. Within the museum, meanings multiply in outlawed splendor and classificatory regimes collide, expanding comprehension and spawning fecund confusions. To visit the MOJT is to experience the excitements and wonders of the uncategorizable and incongruent, of all that dwells permanently in the magic of the margins.

Museum of Jurassic Technology, 9341 Venice Boulevard, Culver City, CA 90232, USA

This article first appeared in Frieze Week Los Angeles 2024 under the title “Tales of the Unexpected.”

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^{Main image: Divination Table from the exhibit "The World Is Bound with Secret Knots—The Life and Works of Athanasius Kircher, 1602–1680." Courtesy: The Museum of Jurassic Technology, Culver City}