Lawrence Weschler

Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology, by Lawrence Weschler
Vintage Books (1995)

“[A] small nondescript storefront operation located along the main commercial drag of downtown Culver City in the middle of West Los Angeles’s endless pseudo-urban sprawl: the Museum of Jurassic Technology, according to the fading blue banner facing the street.” Lawrence Weschler, a staff writer for The New Yorker, describes the show more otherwise anonymous location for one of the oddest museums on the American landscape. He details the exhibits of the Museum and the life of its creator, David Wilson, in Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder: Pronged Ants, Horned Humans, Mice on Toast, and Other Marvels of Jurassic Technology.

After reading this book, I had to ask, “Where has this book been all my life?” Despite majoring in Public History, the intellectual adjunct to academic history focusing on museums, historical societies, and the like, I had never encountered this book. Even with my Museum Studies classes taken at the Milwaukee Public Museum this was never on the mandatory reading list. It should be.

For an otherwise short book – the paperback text is only 108 pages, albeit with a lengthy section of endnotes – there is a lot to unpack. Weschler divides the book into two sections. The first, “Inhaling the Spore,” is a lengthy narrative tour through the Museum of Jurassic Technology. The second, “Cerebral Growth,” is a combination biography of David Wilson and the history of modern museums. The second sections explores the digressive route Wilson took to eventually become head of his own idiosyncratic museum. This digression is combined with a digressive exploration of the kunst- and wunderkammern (German for “art- and wonder cabinets”).

Wonder cabinets became popular around the sixteenth and seventeenth century. During this time (early modern Europe in academic parlance) Europe experienced an extended period of culture shock due to the discoveries made through contact and exploration with North America. The culture shock was coupled with a revival of classical learning and a fascinating with esoteric and occult knowledge. Curiosity cabinets reflected this simultaneous combination of global exploration and interior contemplation. Prior to the time, Europe was dominated by a medieval mindset. The curiosity cabinet fell out of favor when the Enlightenment popularized a more scientific and rational mentality.

Granted, the statement above is a broad-brush generalization. Weschler also concedes that despite the new people, places, and things discovered during early modern times, it was also a period of cruelty and barbarism.

All this is a roundabout introduction to what David Wilson is attempting with his Museum of Jurassic Technology. In his own way, he has created a modern curiosity cabinet. A tiny jewel box museum mixing fantasy and fact. Wilson’s brilliance comes from the Museum’s admixing of parody, homage, and critique of modern museum practice. A visitor can’t readily distinguish between a factual exhibit or one created by Wilson’s imagination. He has mimicked to the voice of Institutional Authority with incredible precision. In his interactions with visitors and at museum conferences, he never “breaks character.” Everything is done with a straight face and with the utmost serious. (Contrast this with The Church of the SubGenius, which is a parody religion, except when it isn’t.)

After reading the book, I realized it was one of my top favorite non-fiction works. Unlike fiction, non-fiction is so broad and varied, it is hard to label something an all-time favorite. Like the House on the Rock and the Salt Lake City Temple, the Museum of Jurassic Technology will go on my list for an American Odd Pilgrimage.

The Museum of Jurassic Technology is yet another example of California as American laboratory of weirdness and idiosyncrasy.

https://driftlessareareview.com/2021/04/09/american-odd-mr-wilsons-cabinet-of-wo... show less

I bought this book by mistake. Great title and cover art. I was prepared to read anything about Vermeer. But this turned out to be more veneer than Vermeer. Rather than a novel this book is a collection of articles previously published by the author as journalist, foreign correspondent and cultural correspondent. The association with Vermeer comes from the first few articles. The basic premise is Vermeer is the go to time out for those associated with the war crimes tribunal in The Hague. show more They sit through hours of description of horror and inhumanity and need the relief of the Vermeer's to take their minds to a more peaceful place. The author asserts that the little known fact is that Vermeer was concentrating of scenes of normal life as a way to avoid the horrors of inhumane acts that occupied life around where he was painting. Seems tenuous but makes some sense.

The metaphor begins to get stretched the further we get in to the book. The next section begins to see the association between art and war with lengthy insights into the life of people caught in the Holocaust of WWII such as Roman Polanski and the author's grandfather, Ernest Toch, a composer who fled the horrors of Germany to have a major career in films. Beyond that, Poland seems to be what ties this together. We gets side trips learning about the author's daughter, Sara, Ira Glass of This American Life, David Hockney, and Ed Kienholz. The major glue that holds these together is the author, Lawrence Weschler, staff writer for the New Yorker. Fortunately he's a talented writer and has some keen insights.

I don't think this will ever be turned in to a movie, possibly a few documentaries. show less

Title adapted from Paul Valery, as noted in the 1982 edition (last page): "To see is to forget the name of the thing one sees."

A spare, artfully structured account of Robert Irwin's career. It reads like an offhand front porch conversation, but Weschler introduces ideas with satisfying heft every few pages. The overall effect is a serious examination of art history and purveyors of art in a deceptively light framework. Were I drafting a syllabus for an Introduction to Phenomenology, I'd be show more tempted to use this as the first book we read, then address in depth the various themes it raises at later points in the course.

Weschler weaves in references to ontology and epistemology when appropriate, and never obtrusively. Irwin's examinations of perception and presence (which Weschler sometimes refers to as Irwin's research) build on themselves and raise these metaphysical questions naturally, so Weschler mostly stands back and lets Irwin do the talking.

At the same time, their conversation provides a nice summary of Western art since the Renaissance, and a somewhat more nuanced overview of modern art, with sketches of the East and West Coast art scenes along the way. I'm not well versed in art, but have heard of various artists, schools, styles, and historic periods enough to confuse me. Weschler manages to fit these stray pieces into a comfortable frame without seeming to make overly strong claims about any of them.

Irwin's maturation is equally interesting, evolving from a preternatural "technician" to someone challenging himself at each step, finally reinventing himself as an artist when he decides to leave the studio and its emphasis upon making "art objects" rather than art. To a certain degree, Irwin's post-Whitney career path seems to be something of a cop-out. Except that by that point in the book, I'm persuaded that Irwin is driven by integrity more than anything else, certainly not being safe or staying in a comfort zone. I'm interested to read some of Irwin's essays on his artistic and philosophical perspective.

"What I'm really trying to do with these things is draw their attention to, my attention to looking at and seeing all of those things that have been going on all along but which previously have been too incidental or too meaningless to really seriously enter into our visual structure, our picture of the world." (183, quoting Irwin)
"It was as if Irwin were saying, 'I can paint this square here at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street, and doing so creates a remarkable perceptual space, but why bother? There are hundreds of shadow squares just as remarkable all up and down the block. The point is to attend to *them*.'" (186) show less

Oliver Sacks to the author Lawrence Weschler "At my symbolic best, I aspire to Donne, at my conceptual best, to Wittgenstein, but I grant, I get over-Donne" Oliver Sacks was the real neurologist portrayed by Robin Williams in the film Awakenings. Author Lawrence Weschler has written a very worthwhile about Dr. Sacks, his life and his work. I have started to listen to two of Oliver Sacks books on audio but never finished either, not because I wasn't intrigued but because they were long and it show more takes me a while to listen to a long audio book. A library loan time just wasn't enough time. I will get actual paper copies next try. Sacks was a physician who gave his patients all the time they needed. He was careful and thorough and that doesn't fit with current insurance company driven practices. Oliver Sacks didn't care. In addition to his medical work Sacks led an interesting life. He loved fast motorcycles, often going well over 100 miles an hour on city streets in his younger years. While working in Southern California he took up weight lifting at Muscle Beach and once set the California record for squats lifting 600 pounds. But most importantly he was a dedicated physician and researcher.
There are long books that I can't wait to finish and be done. This was the other kind. I am a bit sad that it is finished. I will miss Oliver, Lawrence and their friends. Now to read On the Move by Oliver Sacks MD himself. show less