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A shoe for a flea 

By Barbara Black

David Wilson, the founding director of the Museum of Jurassic Technology, is devoted to the arcane, the little-known, and the downright weird aspects of human endeavour.

At his institution in southern California, visitors can wander past a model of the giant horn that once grew out of a woman’s forehead, exhibits of stink ants and ray bats, and painstaking expositions of the work of eccentric and justly forgotten scientists. There is art, and there is kitsch. One section is devoted to peach-pit carvings; another, to objects collected by the denizens of trailer parks in the Los Angeles area, including decorated pincushions.

This museum, which has existed for some 20 years on cosmopolitan Venice Blvd., has come to fascinate intellectuals and lovers of contemporary art. They detect something going on under the earnest nerdiness of the enterprise: an elaborate put-on, or performance art; at any rate, a new take on the role of the museum.

In a lecture at the D.B. Clarke Theatre on Feb. 7, Wilson, a slight, soft-spoken man, chose to focus on one aspect of the museum collection, micro-art. He called his talk “The Eye of the Needle,” and that is literally where much of this art took place.

Wilson described the work of the great masters of the art form, who tend to be eastern European. He set the scene with care, reading a long excerpt from Flann O’Brien’s novel, The Third Policeman, in which the policeman reveals a series of boxes he has made, each smaller than the last, to the point where “the dear knows where it will stop,” the point, literally, of invisibility.

The greatest exponent of art in the eye of a needle may have been an Armenian immigrant to California, Hagop Sandaldjian, who crafted tiny masterpieces out of human hair, motes of dust and bits of metal. His subject matter often reflected his love for his adopted homeland, such as his renderings of Goofy, Donald Duck and other denizens of Disneyland.

When asked by a member of the audience to name the smallest made object Wilson had encountered, he responded seriously that it was probably a shoe for a flea made by a Russian micro-artist called Nikolai.

This combination of the laughable, the awe-inspiring and the oddly poignant rarely fails to intrigue those who visit the museum or hear Wilson’s lectures. The Jurassic phenomenon was given international currency through a 1995 bestseller by Lawrence Weschler called Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder.

You can watch David Wilson’s presentation by going to finearts.concordia.ca/html/defi.htm

The third and last lecture in this season’s Defiant Imagination series will be given by Carol Becker, of Columbia University, on “Values Implicit in Schools of Art and Design,” on Feb. 27 at 6 p.m. in the D.B. Clarke Theatre.