2.

Because neither Wilson nor the Salon organizers themselves claim their spaces as art projects or describe themselves as artists, these don’t seem to be accurate labels to apply to either of them. Yet the pedagogic license taken over the interpretation of the objects, the opaque mission statements of their enterprises, and the unusual conditions of the exhibitions also would prevent us from placing them on the roster of Los Angeles or New York cultural institutions. Wilson’s decidedly ambiguous positioning of his museum has made it, for the most part, impossible to extract from its original environment and insert into a traditional art-historical narrative. A case in point would be a casual conversation I had on the subject in 1999 with MoMA’s curator Kynaston McShine, who had just opened his exhibition The Museum as Muse—MoMA’s attempt to document and chronicle both the institutional critique generation and the Postmodern impulse by artists to use museums as their subject matter. When I inquired about the conspicuous absence of the MJT in MoMA’s exhibition, McShine shrugged: “I just didn’t know how to fit the Jurassic into the show.” A similar problem arose when curator Larry Rinder selected the Salon de Fleurus to be part of the 2002 Whitney Biennial. While some objects from the Salon were placed in the galleries, they felt out of place inside an art museum. The effect of being inside the Salon was impossible to recreate and the true experience was left for only the scheduled visitors to the actual location.

McShine and Rinder are not the only ones who have had trouble pinning down these Postmodern Wunderkammern—like the MJT’s conceptually elusive Flemish moths—in art history. The constant conundrum of how to place these projects in a curatorial context—what is true (or not true) about the exhibits, whether these should be regarded as artworks or not, whether the organizing institutions should be treated like any other museum, and so forth—is also the main reason for their success and might suggest that they may actually be all these things at once. It was the late curator Marcia Tucker who first gave the most accurate assessment of the MJT: “It’s like a museum, a critique of museums and a celebration of museums,—all rolled into one.”²

Much has been written about the MJT in terms of its history, its exhibitions, and its connection to the traditional cabinet of curiosities—most notably by Lawrence Weschler in his 1995 book Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder—so I will not repeat Weschler’s insightful description and analysis. What I will offer in this short text is are some thoughts on where contemporary Wunderkammern like the MJT and the Salon de Fleurus could be placed in the larger historical context of contemporary art practice, tracing a brief typology of these projects and their spatial and narrative strategies and arguing how the manipulation of spatial, cognitive and narrative conventions proposes models that in fact are now helping redefine the notion of the alternative space employing, in an unorthodox way, community-building notions that are comparable to Ray Oldenburg’s theory of the “third place.” I will argue that the slipperiness of these projects, achieved through a delicate choreography of physical and conceptual space, has become one of the most important contributions to rethinking today’s artist enterprises, merging earnestness with irony, certainty with self-doubt.

4.

Different and unique as they both are, both the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the Salon de Fleurus employ a strategy of contextual displacement and immersion, in which the viewer has to ask where he or she is. This slight confusion is key to introducing the viewer into a situation where objects and the place itself, despite specific names (this is a museum, that is an exhibit, this is an artwork, you are a museum visitor, etc.,) soon start looking like something else and shedding their officially assigned meaning. This is seen, for example, in the way the MJT’s scientific exhibitions don’t appear to be objective, and in how the Salon doesn’t feel like an anonymous location but rather a very accurate historical reconstruction of a very concrete place and the events around it.) What is regained by this strategy of displacement, interestingly, is a more heightened awareness of the visual information being presented.

Connected to the feeling of displacement is the playful tension that both spaces employ with notions of authenticity and truth as conveyed by an institution. While using formal devices and authoritative interpretive tools such as the ones used by museums, but also presenting statements that are at best dubious or arguable, one is left to wonder, always with more questions about the answers that are being given. The more one scratches for the “truth” of these places, the more one sinks into ambiguity.

Another equally important component of these two spaces is their intimacy. Both the MJT and the Salon are relatively small locations, so the social dynamics that take place are closer to what would take place in a small or medium-size shop than in a public art museum. Size allows also for a more personal relationship with the art, and perhaps for an unexpected kind of isolation where we are not surrounded by others to influence our thoughts on what we are experiencing. We instead reflect on our own and have one-to-one dialogues. Additionally, spaces like these become conversation pieces amongst the initiated, offering a mystery that can be discussed and debated. Amongst those close to the spaces, the humor of deceit becomes important.

It goes without saying that all the above described conditions are very difficult, if not impossible, to recreate in public art museums today. A museum’s public mission and duties regarding access and interpretation and institutional mandates to accommodate large groups of people in every exhibition greatly reduce the possibility of preserving the one-to-one experience of art. In reality, this is the great irony about museums, which in theory should offer viewing situations where the art works come to life in the mind of the viewer. Yet, because the public demands access and information in all sorts of formats, much of the experience needs to be mediated through frames, labels, and explanations that can quickly turn each artwork into a dead specimen. Contemporary Wunderkammern, by contrast, can afford to dispense with any demands of public service and create a world where a seemingly opaque and surreal logic erases every sort of frame—or, rather, the frames that it presents appear to fuse into the work itself. (The mission statement of the MJT, for instance, refrains from explaining anything, becoming an extension of the opacity of the interior space.)

Jean Baudrillard’s quote at the beginning of this essay refers to how the inevitable effect of a perfect simulation is the nostalgia of the real. There is indeed a pervasive sense of longing for these places, a romantic impulse to restore a kind of knowledge that had been lost (or, quoting one of the exhibition titles of the MJT, “no one will ever have the same knowledge again.”) In the Postmodern context, this nostalgic sensibility should not be interpreted as a Pre-Raphaelitesque movement toward recapturing lost innocence or building an artistic Arcadia, but instead as another kind of impulse as described before: the restoration of the viewing experience, and the attainment of secret knowledge, as an alchemical process that bestows the visitor with a prized possession through mysterious means.

2. Downstairs: Facts and Lyrics of History

Elsa Lizalde, my aunt and my closest living relative in Mexico City, unexpectedly passed away this past summer. She was an opera lover, an authority in numismatics, a gourmet cook, and an unparalleled hostess. Always single, she spent her life traveling around Europe and spending her money on the best opera balconies and the best restaurant tables. Her overcrowded apartment was a perfect reflection of her personality: over the top, generous, and crowded with souvenirs from her travels and cultural life experiences.

It came upon me, my mother, and my sister to travel from the US to empty out Lizalde’s apartment, which had been the family home to four generations. Being the last in line of a long genealogy that broke when we emigrated to the US, my aunt left behind a true museum of family memorabilia that needed to be dealt with, as well as an enormous amount of things that she had accumulated throughout her life as part of her travels, her work, and her compulsive shopping. I thus went through the sad and somber task of selecting and eliminating an overwhelming amount of objects, books, and photographs. In general, however, most objects (old train tickets, ashtrays, European souvenirs, empty perfume bottles, concert program notes) had a symbolic or sentimental value that we could only imagine. And while we were often torn by the idea of disposing of those things that obviously had meant so much to her, we eventually had no option but to get rid of them.

When a person disappears, they take with them a whole world of meaning projected onto every object they once owned, and even if you are fastidious about memorializing, retaining these objects does little to recover the anecdotal stories that lie behind them.

While my aunt was alive, all these objects contained a private, albeit knowable, story, ranging from the silly and trivial to the truly commemorative and meaningful. Once she died, all those objects immediately became plain objects again (with the exception, of course, of those of which we happened to know their meaning and had our own personal attachment.) Certainly for a stranger who walked into her apartment at that point, the place looked like a museum of a typical upper-middle-class apartment of late twentieth-century urban Mexico. By studying the objects she owned, a researcher (or a detective-historian) could put together a somehow descriptive history of her taste, travels, profession, and hobbies. But with the exception of the stories that those close to her could tell, the specific “lyrics” of her life are now out of reach.

And it is against this paradox of history where art has stepped in, providing that interpretive appreciation. History may have given us the facts and the accurate theoretical evaluation about why certain things were the way they were, but the emotional character of certain historical ages have largely been artistic creations, such as the characters of Balzac and Dickens in the  nineteenth century and Hollywood’s characters in the twentieth.

There is certainly something mischievous about the way in which art co-opts the historical narrative and turns it into a human story, because historical accuracy usually gives way to its dramatization, creating distorted perceptions of what may actually have happened, for the sake of art. From the tour guide in Teotihuacán making fabulous histories of moon goddesses and jaguars to Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, history becomes a medium for art with varying degrees of historical credibility and too often the ability to influence our collective perception of historical episodes or events that may be complete fabrications. How can any historian now correct the perception that Mozart was the adolescent prankster as portrayed in Amadeus or that most people in turn-of-the-last-century Paris weren’t dancing rap-like rhythms as suggested in Moulin Rouge? It is a particularly irritating process when a complex historical narrative is turned into a cheap or oversimplified story. In this scenario, history tends to become something of an endorser for movies that make the vague claim of being “based on a true story,” as the story being told necessarily had a greater charge of reality than one purely inspired by imaginary events.

Art that plays the role of history may just underline the fact that academic historical narratives usually fail at connecting with the viewer on a personal level. What art really does, more than transporting us to another time and place, is to transport that time and place to our own time, translating it into our contemporary visual and narrative codes. And, in the case of absent historical data, art becomes a filler for those gaps. In the best cases, art doesn’t function like a replacement of history, but rather in its soul. It enacts a relationship that has existed from the earliest times: mythology is nothing but an artistic attempt to fill in an incomplete history. In the end, we can’t understand without interpretation, and we can’t interpret without creativity.

The best metaphor that I can think of to describe the way in which art plays the role of history is that of a tendentious dictionary: one that provides entirely subjective, and yet fairly concrete, responses to complex puzzles of time.