Bill Graner

The Museum did not hold up so well upon a second visit. That is, I missed the thrill of confusion that I’d first experienced in that space, and felt a nostalgia for the unhinging of certain categorizations of truth and falsehood which had marked my first encounter with the space. Now I was in on the joke, having had time to reflect upon and research the experience, and I found myself in the role of the tour guide, showing my friend around on her first walk through the wonders of Jurassic Technology.

As we navigated the Museum, I could see the falseness around me, felt pity and some envy for my friend, who believed every plaque and label which I innocently pointed out. Even so, the Museum did offer me a surprise or two. I suppose my friend registered the change in my tone when, by studying the fall of the shadows from my fingers over the exhibit, I found the microminiature needle-top sculptures of Hagop Sandaldjian to in fact be legitimate.

In a sense, there is no opportunity for resistant navigation of the Museum, since the environment welcomes the visitor as as believer and skeptic. The exhibits are designed to balance precariously between believability and ridiculousness, as if pushing to see just how far they can lead us on. The mission of the Museum seems dual-purpose, and antithetical: to inspire both critical thought and a giddy sense of wonder.

Certain loose themes are woven into the Museum’s seemingly haphazard “collection.” One of these is Noah’s ark, which the Museum’s Introduction and Background calls the “most complete Museum of Natural History the world has ever seen,” and which is referenced with varying degrees of explicitness in many exhibits, even as a metaphor for the first mobile home, itself an ark containing “all such as was necessary to withstand the economic apocalypse of the 1930’s.” A theme of horns and their strange placement as organs also resurfaces from time to time, from the Horn of Mary Davis of Saughall to Geoffrey Sonnabend’s theoretical Cone of Obliscense, which is described as “an organ like the pancreas or spleen” and is “occasionally referred to as a horn.” The meaning of such continuities is unclear, and these loose themes may exist only to give the exhibits some vague sense of relation.

The Museum’s celebrates falsehood and confusion as tools of learning. The Introduction and Background identifies a museum as “a place where man’s mind could attain a mood of aloofness above everyday affairs,” and favorably references a historical church exhibit in which curiosities “which cause admiration and which are rarely seen, are accustomed to be suspended, that by their means the people may be drawn and have their minds the more affected.” The exhibit Tell the Bees describes the worth of superstitious and folk knowledge: “Like the bees from which this exhibition has drawn its name, we are individuals, yet we are, most surely, like the bees, a group, and as a group we have, over the millennia, built ourselves a hive, our home. We would be foolish, to say the least, to turn our backs on this carefully and beautifully constructed home especially now, in these uncertain and unsettling times.” Such endorsements reveal the true educational intention of the Museum, as most succinctly described in the section of the Introduction which also provides the establishment’s motto: “[T]he 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.”