Mr. Wilson's Cabinet of Wonder (6 page)

It was getting late, time to be going and gone. I looked down at the pamphlet again, at the archaic head. What was the story with him?

“Oh, Mr. J? That's what my daughter calls him. He's sort of like our mascot, I guess.”

And the “A, E, N” on the banner outside?

“Well, you may have noticed the line on top of the letters: that signifies negation or cancellation. So that the A, E, N' means
non
-Aristotelian,
non
-Euclidean,
non
-Newtonian. Sort of one of our mottoes.”

As I was opening the door to leave, I once again noticed the diorama of the urn and the moths. What about that?

“Oh, that's a little urn surrounded by French moths—or, no, maybe Flemish, I'm not sure.”

And what was the significance of the urn?

“It's just an urn. I don't think it means anything.”

And that other diorama—the chemistry-set bottles?

“Oxide of titanium, oxide of iron, and alumina—those are the three chemical constituents of corundum, which forms the basis for all sapphires and rubies. Actually, we have the bottles out there because of the link to sapphires, which as you may know, have long been associated with qualities of faithfulness and endurance.”

A
FEW
DAYS
LATER
I happened to be at the UCLA Library on another project when, half on a lark, I started riffling through the computerized card catalogue. “Ebbinghaus, Hermann,” I typed in, and sure enough there rose up a slew of references (“
Memory: A Contribution to Experimental
Psychology
, 1913,” etc.). Then I typed in “Sonnabend, Geoffrey,” and the screen churned for a while, before finally clocking in: “No record found.” I went up to the reference librarian and asked whether there wasn't perhaps some more complete catalogue, one covering all the libraries in the system; and he gestured over toward the OCLC computerized database on his own desk, which covers not only all the libraries in the UC system but pretty much all the collections of any consequence in the entire country. He typed in “Sonnabend, Geoffrey,” but once again the answer came back: “No record found.” I subsequently called information in Chicago and asked for the Northwestern University Press, only to be told there was no listing for that either—which seemed odd until the operator pointed out that if it did exist, the press, like the university itself, probably would be listed under Evanston, not Chicago, and, sure enough, it was. But when I called them, they'd never heard of Sonnabend either. I called KUSC and asked for Jim Svejda; when he came on, I explained the situation, told him about the exhibit, and asked if he'd ever done a show about the singer Madalena Delani. He just laughed and laughed: never heard of her. I called information in Chicago once again and got the number for the Chicago Historical Society. Once I got through to them, I asked dubiously for Rusty Lewis, who, however, did turn out to exist. Had he ever heard of Charles Gunther? “You mean the candy tycoon?” he shot back, without missing a beat. He went on to confirm every single one of the exhibit's details about Gunther—his collection, the transplantation of the Libby Prison, the historic tables, even the snakeskin,
which remains in the Historical Society's collection to this day.

Back at the library I asked about the ethnographer Bernard Maston: “No record found.” I asked about Donald R. Griffith: “No record found.” For some reason, I tried that reference out by title too—
Listening in the Dark
—and this time I hit paydirt, except that the book had a different subtitle and its author was Donald R. Griff
in
, not Griffith. I went upstairs to look over the book's index but found no references to Maston, the Dozo, or any
deprong mori.
I went back downstairs and tracked down Griffin's most recent whereabouts; he appeared to have retired to Lexington, Massachusetts, where I in turn located his number and called him up. When I reached him I started out by explaining about the museum (he'd never heard of it) and its exhibit about Donald R. Griffith—“Oh no,” he interrupted, “my name is Griffin, with an
n
, not Griffith.” I know, I said, I know. I went on to ask him if he'd ever heard of a bat named
Myotis lucifugus.
“Of course,” he said, “that's the most common, abundant species in North America. That's why we used it on all the early research on echolocation.” Did its range extend to South America? Not as far as he knew—why? As I proceeded to tell him about the piercing devils and the thatch roofs, the lead walls and the X-ray emanations, he took to laughing harder and harder. Finally, calming down, he said, “No, no, none of that is me, it's all nonsense—on second thought you'd better leave the spelling of the name Griffith the way it is.” He was quiet for a moment, before continuing, almost wistfully, “Still, you know, it's funny. Fifty years ago, when we
were first proposing the existence of something like sonar in bats, most people thought that idea no less preposterous.”

I don't know why, I just couldn't let the story go. I called information in Portland, Oregon, and asked doubtfully whether they had any listings for a Carolina Biological Supply. They did. I called the number and asked for Richard Whitten. The woman who answered said he no longer worked there, which was really too bad, because he was such a wonderful character, bless his heart. She went on to regale me, completely unbidden, with tales of his incredible beetle and butterfly collections and of his other passions, how he'd even managed to sing in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir—the whole thing. A couple of years ago, though, she explained, he and his wife had pulled up stakes and headed down to San José, Costa Rica, where they'd finally launched their dream project—a little museum entirely given over to displaying their marvelous collections. Whitten didn't have a phone down there, but he had sent up some clippings—did I have a fax machine? It happened that there was one where I was staying. I gave her the number, and a few minutes later, the clippings started coming through: rapturous reviews of the Whittens and their new Joyas del Trópico Húmedo (Jewels of the Rain Forest) museum. The pages kept eking out of the machine for some time, until the last one, at the bottom of which there emerged a photo of Richard Whitten himself, beaming contentedly amidst his butterflies.

He was playing an accordion.

“H
E
NEVER
EVER
BREAKS
IRONY
—that's one of the incredible things about him.” I was talking with Marcia Tucker, the director of New York's New Museum, about David Wilson. It turns out there's a growing cult among art and museum people who can't seem to get enough of the MJT. I seemed to encounter it everywhere I turned: the L.A. County Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), the Getty … “When you're in there with him,” Tucker went on, “everything initially just seems self-evidently what it is. There's this fine line, though, between knowing you're experiencing something and sensing that something is wrong. There's this slight slippage, which is the very essence of the place. And his own presence there behind the desk, the literal-minded way in which he earnestly and seemingly openly answers all your questions, his never ever cracking or letting you know that, or even whether, he's in on the joke—it all contributes seamlessly to that sense of slippage.

“I was at an international conference of museum people a while back in Germany—top people,” she continued. “And he was there, the only one wearing a suit. And at a certain point, he got up to give his presentation about the history of museums in general and his own museum within that history. Completely straight—but he took that conference from the most ultraserious, smug, self-satisfied, pompous level onto this whole other level altogether—this sheer flight of fancy. The foreigners who were listening to the simultaneous translation—you
could tell that they were having a hard time. And afterwards they were all coming over to me, very confused, and asking, ‘What kind of thing is this Museum of Jurassic Technology?' And I'd answer, ‘Well, what kind of thing does it seem like to you?' It was just like psychoanalysis. The museum affords this marvelous field for projection and transference. It's like a museum, a critique of museums, and a celebration of museums—all rolled into one.

“Listen,” she concluded. “I consider the Museum of Jurassic Technology to be one of the great artistic treasures of the Western World.” As with everything to do with the MJT, it was hard to tell whether she was kidding or not.

Ralph Rugoff, an L.A. art critic, has spent a lot of time thinking about the MJT. And one of the things he most likes about the place is the way it deploys all the traditional signs of a museum's institutional authority—meticulous presentation, exhaustive captions, hushed lighting, and state-of-the-art technical armature—all to subvert the very notion of the authoritative as it applies not only to itself but to any museum. The Jurassic infects its visitor with doubts—little curlicues of misgiving—that proceed to infest all his other dealings with the Culturally Sacrosanct. (Thus, for example, another critic, Maria Porges, once noted how “Wilson satirizes perfectly the tiresome, pedantic qualities of ‘authenticating' scholarship. The copious footnotes and references and didactic panels are certainly fictitious, something I've long suspected of the citations in academic journals anyway.”) “It's all very smart,” Rugoff insists, “and very knowing.”

Very knowing, and yet at the same time utterly sincere. Rugoff told me how one day he was sitting beside David's wife, Diana, at a lecture Wilson was giving to a class at the California State University, Los Angeles. It was an early version of his Sonnabend spiel, which in fact for a long time existed solely as a lecture, only relatively recently having taken on its exhibitional form. “And he did it completely straight,” Rugoff recalls. “Everybody there was taking notes furiously, as if this were all on the level and was likely to be on the test—the Falls, the cones, the planes, the whole thing. It was amazing. And at one point I leaned over to Diana and whispered, ‘This is the most incredible piece of performance art I've ever seen.' And she replied, ‘What makes you think it's a performance? David
believes
all this stuff.' ”

A
S
I
SAY
, I began making a point of visiting the museum on each of my trips out to Los Angeles, and each time David would be there manning the desk, so that after a while I got to know him pretty well—which is to say, it felt like I got past the first layer of ironylessness to, well, maybe a second layer of ironylessness. I don't know. Occasionally we'd talk about his own life story, and it's my impression that everything he told me was more or less true-as-stated (or, anyway, whatever I could check did check out), although, as with some of the displays, a wealth of solid detail early on began to fog over somewhat as one approached the present.

David was born in Denver in 1946, the middle of three well-loved sons of a doctor (an ear, nose, and throat
specialist) and his wife. The family lived in the old suburban neighborhood of Mountclair, originally founded as a spa by one of the von Richthofens (either the baron himself or a close relative). The von Richthofen castle, allegedly an exact replica of the family manse back in Germany, dominated a nearby hill, and in fact, directly across the street from the Wilson's own home, the founder had planted an elaborate memorial to his deceased wife, featuring a very large and imposing urn into which he had deposited her ashes. Already in those days Denver had a brace of wonderful museums—natural history, oriental, state historical, art—and David recalls how as soon as they could ride the buses unaccompanied, he and a sidekick would travel downtown to spend the day exploring among them. I asked him what had first attracted him to the museums, and he replied, “Well, their museumness. How dark and hushed they were inside, the oak-and-glass cases, the sense of being in these repositories amongst all those old things. That, and the curious style of writing—for instance, on the wall captions. Already then I was fascinated by what I've since come to see as these curious ellipses, the jumps between what you as a visitor are just assumed to know and the most minute, often bizarre, detail of explication, a leap in rhetoric that at times can be absolutely breathtaking. We've tried to preserve a bit of that effect with some of the exhibits here—for instance, the European mole. In fact, the caption for the ringnot sloth exhibit—one of our most arcane captions—is taken verbatim in its entirety from the caption of a similar exhibit at the Field Museum in Chicago. It's true. Nobody believes me.”