Crossing the Boundaries, Blurring the Boundaries: The Museum of Jurassic Technology as a Postmodern American Space

The Museum of Jurassic Technology, located in Los Angeles, California, is one of the weirdest, yet thought provoking, museums in the world. Visitors encounter objects mainly taken from nature, science, and art, clearly labeled and explained with Latin terminology and detailed scholarly descriptions, which, at second glance, invite the questioning of reality, actuality, and plausibility, as well as history, science, art, culture, and ultimately, the museum as a concept. The museum looks like a typical museum: banners, signs with gilded letters, polite reminders concerning museum etiquette, thematically-curated exhibit halls with subdued lightning, glass and wooden showcases, velvet display cloths, microscopes, explanatory labels, backlit graphics, diagrams or audiovisual presentations, catalogues, apology cards for temporarily missing objects, the labyrinthine architecture, a rest room, and a museum shop. As this article argues, despite the fact that the Museum of Jurassic Technology satisfies all conventional stylistic expectations, it is subversive, blurry, amusing, and tricky. A postmodern space which displays the merging of subjective and objective knowledge, it transforms ephemeral artifacts into valuable sources of American history, science, art, and culture, blurring the line between enlightenment and entertainment as well as constantly 112 crossing the boundaries between reality and fiction/imagination/play/ fantasy, regardless of being unsure of their borders.