Simulacrum - Archief

To Orbit Dogs into Space.

The Destructive Exploration of Science in the Museum of Jurassic Technology

Anne Siffels

We risk great peril if we kill off this spirit of adventure, for we cannot predict how and in what seemingly unrelated fields it will manifest itself. A nation that loses its forward thrust is in danger, and one of the most effective ways to retain that thrust is to keep exploring possibilities. The sense of exploration is intimately bound up with human resolve, and for a nation to believe that it is still committed to a forward motion is to ensure its continuance.
– James A. Michener, 1979

Science in the name of progress embraces the process of exploration as a means to discover what can still be (re)claimed “beyond the horizon”. In that sense it is often associated with adventure or a so-called venturing into the dark – and one of our darkest adventures, travelling into space, is within this logic also considered to be the most progressive exploration. Hence the fame of Yuri Gagarin, when he successfully orbited the earth in 1961, and the worldwide visual fixation upon the American astronauts who, in the name of mankind, were to touch the surface of the moon in 1969. Yet what is almost forgotten, is that every history has its pre-history. In the case of space-travelling this is a rather peculiar one, as decades before mankind could “progress” into space, small Moscow stray dogs orbited the earth in the name of science [fig. 1].[1]
In the late 1940’s the Soviet Union initiated a secret launch bunker as part of the Soviet rocket facility in Kapustin Yar, near the Caspian Sea. This new base was assigned with the task of exploring the cosmic vacuum with life creatures, in preparation of possible future space travel by humans. While the Americans mostly experimented with chimpanzees, the Russian rocket scientists were convinced that it were dogs, and especially the hardened stray dogs of the street, that had the right attitude to travel into space. Hence teams of scientists roamed the Moscow alleys in search of future astronauts. These potential dogs of the universe had to weigh as little as possible (otherwise the rocket could not carry the weight), had to have a fur of a light colour (to be able to capture them on camera), needed to be good-natured (in order to be well-trained) and brave-hearted (to stand the pressure). The selected dogs were about to face an extensive training programme through which they were not only taught to cope with pressure droppings, centrifugal powers [fig. 2] and extreme vibrations, but by means of which they also learned how to feed themselves in space and how to endure isolation and extreme loneliness. As Chriss Dubbs explains in his book Pioneers of Space Travel; “in the strange world of space dogs, even sitting still was a test.”[2]
Subsequently, another strict selection was made out of these intensely trained dogs and the remaining animals were eventually to participate in the top-secret Soviet Rocket Programme that gave birth to the so-called “age of space dogs”: starting with the first launch in 1951 and ending with the final, record-breaking, 22-day dog flight in 1966.[3] Before the dogs were actually launched into space, they were strapped into restraining suits and airtight capsules with the necessary wires and sanitation tubes connected to their body. These surrounding “wires, machines, glowing lights, and strips of paper gave the oddest impression – that [the dog] was actually a part of this great machine, rather than just a passenger” [fig. 3].[4] In the training laboratory of Kapustin Yar the scientific promise of space-exploration thus seemed to presage everything: it even made the dogs strangely “fit” their airtight capsules. Enclosed within the rocket, the space dogs were finally sent to the stars in order to pre-experience the unknown before our eyes. They were thereby shot into the very frontline, which was – simultaneously – the edge of our realm of discovery. As the dogs were taken as far as the horizon could carry them, their potential loss of life was preliminary justified as part of the precarious combat zone of international exploration. Of the 46 dogs sent into space over a period of fifteen years, an appraised 32 returned to earth to prove that space was now open to human enquiry.
The peculiar story of these pioneering space dogs is monumentally narrated in the exhibition Lives of the Perfect Creatures: Dogs of the Soviet Space Program on former enemy soil in the outskirts of Los Angeles. This exhibition presents a handful of Russian space dogs through large and heroically painted oil portraits, accompanied by the dim light of candles that bring about a mood of reverie: a seemingly solemn tribute to the pioneers of space travel [fig. 4]. This exhibition is instituted by one of the most unconventional museums in the United States of America: the Museum of Jurassic Technology (MJT) located in the peripheral Culver City. Its name already implies that this museum deals with the contradictory impossible (Jurassic + Technology) and suggests that its displays might be un(fore)seen. The MJT was founded by David Wilson in 1989[5] as an “educational institution, dedicated to the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic.”[6] Curiously, the collection of Wilson’s small museum comprises of idiosyncratic and emphatically “non-Jurassic”[7] items as multifarious as the skeleton of the European mole, a prototypical model of Noah’s Ark, a map of the battle of Pavia drawn by artists, a scale-model of a Dozo dwelling and letters written to the Mount Wilson Observatory by the lay public from 1915 to 1935. The space dog portraits are thus presented within this hybrid and rather ungraspable context of the MJT collection, which eludes any modern, and by now established institutional, distinction between art and science, myth and history, visuality and narrativity.
The curatorial choice for an exhibition on Soviet space dogs within the MJT is not a coincidence. The MJT collection consists of mainly marginal artefacts and forgotten pasts; of lost biographies narrated to the public by a voice-over that accompanies every exhibition. By presenting these forgotten moments, the MJT importantly does not attempt to reconstruct a “lost” history nor does it endeavour to construct a “counter-memory”: it emphatically only suggests history. The whole institution is “predicated on the idea that what we experience as memories are in fact confabulations, artificial constructions of our own design built around sterile particles of retained experience that we attempt to make live again with the infusions of imagination.”[8] In many ways the MJT rewrites history through fiction and imagination by addressing the faltering memory in a way “that underscores the limits of documentary reconstruction.”[9] It thereby tends to foreground scientific practices and theories that are already (largely) forgotten, to stress this necessarily disintegrative and simultaneously contemporary historical experience that we have in museums. Hence “Lives of the Perfect Creatures” narrates within the MJT another “little known chapter in the exploration of space.”[10] The space dog expeditions, as mere shadows of the human missions, are now instituted within a museum that foregrounds “the malleable in-between” as narrated through elusive objects that invite the viewer to explore their own cognitive boundaries; thereby following the transgressive example of the Soviet space dogs.[11]
The MJT exhibitions thus intrinsically stimulate the spectator to think outside given paradigms, to be led away from the familiar to the unfamiliar, as “the museum draws us into a shadowy zone where exhibits slip from the factual to the metaphorical with disarming fluency.”[12] This metaphorical quality is prominent throughout the whole museum and is most evident in the returning motif of the Ark of Noah. In an interview with the art writer Jan Tumlir, Wilson describes the Ark not only as “the first and most complete museum of natural history ever assembled”, but also as the ultimate museum.[13] The Ark becomes in this manner a metaphor for all collecting practices, and these are consequently defined as much more than the sheer accumulation of objects, as they come to speak of a stubborn resistance against the annihilating passage of time. In correspondence with Noah’s Ark, the MJT collection was born as such a stubborn fortress that foregrounds salvation as the only possible defence against the threat of destruction. The MJT defines “saving in its strangest sense, not just casual keeping but conscious rescuing from extinction – collection as salvation.”[14] The often unuttered motivation behind many space travel missions is also fuelled by this urge for salvation, predicated upon the belief that:

since, in the long run, every planetary civilization will be endangered by impacts from space, every surviving civilization is obliged to become spacefaring – not because of exploratory or romantic zeal, but for the most practical reason imaginable: staying alive. If our long-term survival is at stake, we have a basic responsibility to our species to venture to other worlds.[15]

Crucially, such (spatial) salvation is thus, as is life on the Ark of Noah, necessarily connected to the destructive logic of annihilation. The space dogs already prefigured this precarious connection between scientific exploration and disaster as the Russian scientists admitted that “in many ways, getting dogs 63 miles into the atmosphere was a lot easier than returning them safely to earth.”[16] Hence the MJT articulates above all this nonsensical alliance between scientific progress and destruction under the common denominator of salvation. It shows on the one hand that science is mainly driven by the principle of entropy, by the conviction that:

Time ravages everything, our person, our experience, our material world. In the end everything will be lost … And despite the apparent fullness and richness of our lives there is, deposited at the core of each of us, a seed of this total loss, of this inevitable and ultimate darkness [a darkness as found in space][17]

On the other hand the MJT emphasises that science also brings about destruction itself. Hence the museum narrates that in “the admirable but relentless quest for a reasonable and enlightened future the powerful forces of rationality were leaving a swath of decimation in the vast yet often fragile body” of common knowledge and space dogs alike.[18] Wilson’s “Jurassic” institution narrates as such the possibility of this disintegration of intelligence, whilst it simultaneously forewarns of the annihilating quality knowledge could have itself. It is this interrelation between scientific exploration, destruction, and the hope for salvation that is captured in the museum’s emblem of the Ark of Noah, but that is also suggested by the rockets that took Soviet stray dogs straight up into space.
In incorporating the mythically connoted pair of destruction and salvation within museum display, the MJT not only transfigures but also inherently critiques traditional modern museum policies. Instead of believing in the reproduction of great historical moments in museums the MJT seems to propose that:

museums function, partly by design and partly in spite of themselves, as monuments to the fragility of cultures, to the fall of sustaining institutions and noble houses, the collapse of rituals, the evacuation of myths, the destructive effects of warfare, neglect, and corrosive doubt.[19]

The MJT thereby subverts a century-old tradition of collecting as represented by “the great canonical collection, with their temple-like architecture, their monumental catalogues and their donor’s names chiselled in stone, [as they] testify to the paradigm of Beauty as the exclusion of all ugliness, to the triumph of remembrance over oblivion, to the permanence of Being over Nothingness” without refraining from using exactly that same traditional language to ironically signify its opposite.[20] Wilson’s museum, as precariously established on forgetfulness, thus comes to narrate such a disintegrating story of science through idiosyncratic, mythically based, necessarily ambiguous and sometimes even decaying objects.[21] The MJT’s policy not only affirms that the rarest and most precious knowledge is not imposed but freely inhaled by the spectator – it also suggests by itself a new museum format in which the responsibility of interpretation is passed on to the spectator. The MJT thereby alludes to the future; just as Wilson sees the Ark prefigure all forthcoming collection-practices and many people see the exploration of space as the next step in human history, the MJT could be the next model for the future museum-institute. In an age where museums are often considered to be obsolete or insufficient, a new museum and a new scientific perspective might be born from the MJT’s redefinition of historical experience. The science journalist John Horgan sees the creation of such a contemporary “beneficial” museum only “achieved by replacing the way in which objects have been presented since the eighteenth century with an intertextual model that allows for doubt, contradiction, irony, conflict and constant revision;” by a museum that is not afraid to incorporate fiction in its presentations, myths in its histories and whose objects are able to cross the line from science to art and vice-versa. Wilson thereby subscribes to the marginal belief “that peripheral vision is just more productive.”[22] A perspective the Russian scientists certainly held high when they rocketed their space dogs to the very edge of the world: no, in fact even beyond that horizon. [S]

Biografie:

Anne Siffels is a Cultural Analysis student at the University of Amsterdam, and is particularly interested in the representation of history in museums and the intrinsic relation between fiction and memory.

Noten:

Dubbs, Chris. Space Dogs: Pioneers of Space Travel. New York/Lincoln/Shanghai: Writer’s Showcase, 2003.
Dubbs, 2003: 27.
This last successful flight was made by the dogs Veterok (Little Wind) and Ugolek (Little Piece of Coal), who flew aboard the satellite Cosmos 110. Nonetheless the record-breaking result and the seemingly healthy return of the dogs (of life from space), Veterok lost all his hair and energy and died soon after the landing. Of course the news was kept from the rest of the world, as it proved that the mysteries of space were still not completely unravelled. Dubbs, 2003: 80.
Dubbs, 2003: 51.
Despite Wilson’s anachronistic claims that the museum has a long history that reaches back to the moment of the first collections as formulated in the Jubilee Catalogue: “The Museum of Jurassic Technology traces its origins to this period when many of the important collections of today were beginning to take form … Except for the periods of the great wars in the previous century (when twice portions of the collection were nearly lost), the Museum engaged in a program of controlled expansion.” The Museum of Jurassic Technology. Primi Decem Anni: Jubilee Catalogue. Divide Place, Cal.: The Trustees in association with the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Information Press, 2002: 16.
The Museum of Jurassic Technology, 2002: 13.
“Non-Jurassic” means not related to the Jurassic in a geological or geographical manner.
The Museum of Jurassic Technology, 2002: 65.
Rugoff, Ralph. “Beyond Belief: The Museum as a Metaphor.” Visual Display: Culture Beyond Appearances. Ed. Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen. New York: The New Press in association with the Dia Center for the Arts, 1995: 71.
Dubbs, 2003: xi.
The MJT stimulates a perceptional attitude that is metaphorically captured in the “Stink Ant of the Cameroon (Megaloponera foetens)” display. This exhibition narrates the peculiar life story of the Cameroon stink ant that forages on fallen leaves and undergrowth in the rainforest of West Central Africa. Periodically a fungus of the genus Tomentalla, which grows high up in the trees, releases spores that rain down onto the forest floor. When it rains and the right conditions are met (here too as an effect of chance) the stink ant can inhale a microscopic spore from this fungus while foraging. The narrator further explains that “after being inhaled, the spore seats in the ant’s tiny brain and begins to grow, causing changes in the ant’s patterns of behavior. The ant appears troubled and confused; for the first time in its life the ant leaves the forest floor and begins to climb.” The Museum of Jurassic Technology, 2002: 31.
Rugoff, 1995: 72.
Tumlir, Jan. “The Museum Museum: Interview with David Wilson.” Frieze Magazine 39 (1998): n.pag. Web. 28 Dec. 2009. . Wilson refers as such to the Ark following Charles Wilson Peale, who set according to Wilson the standard for all public museums. Peale stated that the Ark of Noah “is a museum in itself and a subject in the line of the fine arts.”
Elsner, John, and Roger Cardinal, ed. The Cultures of Collecting. London: Reaktion Books, 1994: 1.
Carl Sagan. Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space. USA: Ballantine Books, 1994: 371.
Dubbs, 2003: 34.
The Museum of Jurassic Technology, 2002: 84.
The Museum of Jurassic Technology, 2002: 96.
Prakash, Gyan. “Museum Matters.” Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts. Ed. Bettina Messias Carbonell. London: Blackwell Publishing, 2004: 209.
Elsner and Cardinal, 1994: 4.
One very obvious example of this entropic disintegration can be found in the exhibition “Rotten Luck: The Decaying Dice of Ricky Jay” that presents a collection of cellulose nitrate dice from the earlier 20th century. The synthetic plastic the dice are made from typically remains stable for decades; when suddenly, in a flash, it can dramatically decompose. The decomposition of the dice is presented in the MJT as exemplary for the inevitability of disintegrating passage (here in all its beauty).
Tumlir, 1998.

Afbeeldingen:

A Russian capstan-type pressure suit used to send dogs to high altitudes in rockets from 1957.
The future space dogs being trained in the centrifuge in the laboratory at Kapustin Yar.
Laika sitting in a mockup of the Sputnik-2 passenger compartment before her final voyage into space, November 5, 1957.
A large oil painting of Laika as part of the “Lives of the Perfect Creatures: Dogs of the Soviet Space Program” exhibition in the Museum of Jurassic Technology, Culver City, California.