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

Year 2020, Issue: 53, 111 - 135, 01.05.2020

Ece Saatçıoğlu

Abstract

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.

Keywords

The Museum of Jurassic Technology, David H. Wilson, American Culture, Museum Studies, Postmodernity

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