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On November 3, 1953, as Soviet scientists pulled the leather straps
tightly around her body, slipped her legs and tai l into the body
sheath, and axed the clear plastic helmet and black breathing
tubes to her muzzle, Laika could have never known that she was
about to be sacriced to space. Laika, a butterscotch brown mutt,
was launched into orbit on Sputnik 2, as the rst living creature to
leave the Earth s atmosphere.
Laika was brought to the Engl ish-speaking world in a 1953 article
in the New York Times. Moscow Radio last week announced
that an animal-carrying satell ite soon would be launched Te
radio audience was introduced to a small, shaggy dog named
Kudryavka, which barke
LaikaKudryavkas nic
placed into a small space
For Laika, it was to be a
poisoned her last ration
instead o starving. (It w
not live past the li-of s
who pulled the stray rom
experience: Te more ti
shouldnt have done it. W
to justiy the death o t h
Viior f dow te abbi oe a te o Agee
by Drew Tewksbury
PhoTos by ryan schuDe
The Museum ofJurassic Technology
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***
In a darkened room at t he Museum o Jurassic echnology, Laikas
portrait stands alone. Framed and oil-painted, it hangs in an ex-
hibition room that toes the line between Victorian salon and Old
West uneral parlor. itled Lives o Perect Creatures: Dogs o the
Soviet Space Program, the exhibit displays 10 paintings as a tribute
to the dogs used in prototypic space ight.
Housed in an unassuming building in the Los Angeles enclave o
Culver City, the Museum o Jurassic echnology challenges the
traditional museum. Instead o acting as a source o knowledge, the
museum raises more questions than answers: Is it a repository or
the obscure, the ephemeral and the unathomable, encapsulated in
a post-modern Victorian salon o the 21st century? O r is it an ex-
periment in the paradoxical a nd the sublimely wondrous? Perhaps.
I youre not looking, you may miss it. Te strip-mall otsam o Los
Angeles urban sprawlan In-N-Out Burger, Blockbuster Video
and India Sweets & Spicescamouages the anonymous acade
o the museum. From the street, there is little evidence o the mu-
seums existence; people waiting or the bus turn their backs to the
museums crimson-and-gold sign. Tere is nothing extraordinary
about it.
But inside, the exhibits are as mysterious as the museums name.
Instead o dinosaur bones, the dark, byzantine halls o the museum
display bizarre collections. Oen reerred to as a cabinet o curios-
ity, the museum lies somewhere between artistic and historical,
narrative and interpretative, and the alse and the real.
Around the corner rom the gi shop, an automated slide show
explains the history o museums. An anonymous voicethe
same anonymous voice speaking rom museum headsets around
the worldcalls Noahs ark the rst natural history museum,
ollows the lineage to the wunderkammers (wonder cabinets) o
Renaissance Europe, and culminates with the stodgy institutions
o today. Te Museum o Jurassic echnology marries the details
o established institutionsthe placards, careully lit displays,
dioramaswith the mystique o P.. Barnums collection o curios,
or maybe a Coney Island reak show.
One room is dedicated to artiacts culled rom Los Angeles
mobile-home parks, where dioramas depict diferent trailers
in small synthetic habitats. ell the Bees: Belie, K nowledge &
Hypersymbolic Cognition displays olk remedies rom a pre-
science America committed to the transormative powers o mice
on toast and sewing pins stuck into wooden cemetery gates. Te
Eye o the Need le: Te Unique World o Microminiatures o Hagop
Sandaldjian showcases nearly invisible sculpturesonly visible by
microscopeby the Egyptian ex-pat Sandaldjian.
On the second oor, just adjacent to Laika and her Soviet comrades,
the 29-year-old Georgian ex-pat Nanuka chitchou sits in the tea-
room with her ghostlike Windhound, ula. Nana, as she likes to be
called, serves tea rom a 100-year-old samovar, a large coal-heated
teapot. She uses only Georgian black tea, which she smugglesback rom her home country. Nana and t he tearoom complete an
interpretive arc that starts with the space dogs and Borzoi Cabinet
Teatre, which screens lms o slow-motion Soviet rocket launches,
ti i o o te ol pacei te wod whe youeo od wa o tin.
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and ends in a hot glass o tea with lemon. Nana says she does eel
like a part o the museum, and that her tearoom is a place or intro-
spection. Here, tea always opens up a conversation, she says.
***
Te museum is held together by the vision and commitment o a
group o artists who breathe their dreams and passions into the
collection. Tis is one o the only places in the world where youre
not told what to think, Rachel Portenstein, the commemorative
objects curator, says. She puts her ha nd into a small bowl o water,
shes out a piece o adhesive plastic, and adheres it to a ce ramic
bowl that will soon be placed into a kil n. She sits on a high stool,
surrounded by various ceramics and eclectic ephemera that have
collected on the shelves in t he museums back rooms. Behind her
is a plastic model o a Russian rocket; to her right a plaster skul l.Whereas the interior o the museum is strictly controlled with t he-
atrical lighting and thick curtains, the private backrooms reveal the
parts that keep the museum alive.
Sometimes the museums ounder, David Wilson, with his white
hair and horn-rimmed glasses, will emerge rom a storage room
still painted green rom its time as a coroners oce. Wilson stud-
ied lm at CalArts in the 1970s, and his mastery o lighting and
optical illusion appear in the Athanasius Kircher exhibit, which
displays the ideas o the 17th-century Jesuit thinker. Trough a
viewing apparatus, holograms appear inside each ornately con-
structed environment, revealing an image that was previously
invisible.
Like the Kircher ex hibit, the museum began as collection o
Wilsons ideas. Founded in 1989, the museum grew as enthusiasts
donated their collections and expertise to Wilson. In 1995, writer
Lawrence Weschler wrote the bookMr. Wilsons Cabinet of Wonder,
a Pulitzer Prize nalist, which brought the museum to the publics
attention. In 2001, Wilson won a MacArthur grant, more com-
monly known as a genius g rant.
For those who tend to the museum, the answers still dont come
easy. Since she started at the museum in 2001, nance and develop-
ment director Anitra Menning says that her view o the museum
has changed. It is an ever-evolving piece o conceptual art, she says,
and somewhere between Laikas portrait, mice on toast, and even
Nana and ula in the tearoom, the museum orever orbits the outer
edge o the ordinary, challenging t he way we perceive the world.
Lately, I have been thinking about the motto o the museum,
she says. It states, Te learner must be led always rom amiliar
objects toward the unamiliar; guided along, as it were, a chain
o owers into the mysteries o lie. Here youre not orced, but
youre guided along. Tis has made me think a lot about the addi-
tive nature o learning and how learning is li ke a house o cards.
o build the house o cards, you always have to nd a card to lea n
against.