Museum of Jurassic Technology

Based on everyone's descriptions of the Museum of Jurassic Technologies, what I had been imagining prior to my visit was a large, airy museum full of colorful things that bordered on cartoonish in my mind. Upon arriving, however, I was met with pretty much the exact opposite. The museum looks small from the outside, tucked away behind a tree on a busy street in Los Angeles. Walking through the door, visitors are thrust into the hybrid gift shop welcome desk and require at least five minutes to let their eyes adjust. Once adjusted, I became aware that the airy and colorful essence I had previously envisioned was replaced by borderline dusty earth tones and a distinct "building" smell in the air. Maybe cardboard? Or old carpet? Some beaten but plush carpet welcomes visitors' feet as we enter the exhibit area. To the left is a historic-seeming welcome video detailing what could either be the story of how the collection came to be, or some absurd mishmash of tales from the books in the back library. Who knows, maybe it's a little bit of both! The first area of the museum, so I'm told, is the permanent collection, my favorite of which is what looks like a microscope zoomed in to one of five glass dishes of some mysterious white powder, to the point that the glass is shattered and the powder is spilled across the mirrored plate the dishes are resting on. Above a black button, a small paper tag on the glass case states something along the lines of "this exhibit is out of order." Such a statement forces the viewer to wonder if this exhibit is truly momentarily unviewable or if it ever worked to begin with. the way the glass dish is shattered it seems as though the microscope malfunctioned and violently fell into the dish, and the viewer wonders what pushing the button would have done when-- or if-- the exhibit worked before. 

It's worth noting that the museum is 100% definitely not disability-friendly, especially for this newly becrutched woman still trying to figure out how to operate with one less natural limb and two additional artificial ones. All of the exhibits are packed into each of the small rooms and the wooden stairway railings seemed untrustworthy in their ability to sustain my body weight as I hobbled up the steps. The struggles and near-catastrophes I faced in swinging my crutches around through the museum were well worth it, though, because each item in the collection was accompanied by interesting placards detailed with information leaving viewers wondering if the items are what they are claiming to be or not. Among all of the rooms dedicated to things like drinking tea, the Soviet space dogs, cat's cradles, and live-in rockets, my favorite was the Tell The Bees exhibit. Presenting itself as a room of old school remedies and superstitious procedures, this room had everything from rules about cutting children's' fingernails to mice on toast. Some curiosities sound almost believable, like the 18th century use of duck's breath to cure children of ailments, while others seem to be there just for the silliness of it, like the scissors said to be usable for humiliating a grooms bride by holding them behind him and snapping them shut when he turns around, thus rendering him unable to consummate the marriage. 

Overall, I loved the uncertainty that the museum brought; it wasn't the individual works that were to be considered the art but rather the museum as a whole. Every piece and placard had every indication of being legitimate and real, but had a twinge of absurdity left for the viewer to either accept or move on from. The descriptions remind of unconventional things from times when humans knew less, and thus create the possibility of validity. My theory is that each blurb was directly taken from one of the books in the museum's library and applied to an assortment of objects, both related and not. I would love to go through again with a clearer vision of the reality (or nonreality I suppose) of the museum and a freshly relevant perspective. Aside from the stairs and smaller-than-average passageways, I loved it.