Museum of Jurassic Technology

David Wilson

The following essay is an edited version of the text from David Wilson’s speech, “Museum of Jurassic Technology,” given at the Obsession, Compulsion, Collection Symposium, May [day], 2003.

If we know one thing at our museum, the Museum of Jurassic Technology, it is obsession and compulsion. For better or for worse, these are the waters we swim in. We have discovered over the years that the best way to present the work of the museum is not to take an encyclopedic view, not to try and talk about the museum in a broad sense, but to focus on a particular area of interest that we have pursued. We are a museum that is inspired by older museums, by a period in time during which collection and exhibition practices were far more eclectic than today. There are many downsides to having your own institution, your own museum, but there are also a few upsides and one of them is you can do whatever you want. That said, it is good to look at one small area, and the area I was thinking of presenting is one of the goals of our museum. It is the goal of bringing to a larger audience evidence of human artistry and ingenuity on a microscopic scale. This is a goal we have been pursuing since the museum opened its doors, and we continue to explore it today. In the last month or two we have opened a new exhibit that helps to further this goal, and later I will show you a little evidence of that.

What I’d like to do first though is read you a story — not an entire story, but a snippet of a story. It is a story written by one of a long line of Irish literary geniuses. This particular literary genius is less well-known than other Irish literary geniuses. His name is Flann O’Brien. He wrote only three or four books, but he was also a newspaper man. Of his books, our favourite at the museum is The Third Policeman, and it is a selection from that novel that I would like to read today. Currently, there are about eight individuals working at our museum. We are each from different backgrounds and different walks of life. We do not have much in common really except we all probably spent way too much time as kids inside museums when we should have been outdoors getting exercise and vitamin D. Another thing we have in common is that we all had read and loved this somewhat obscure book called, The Third Policeman. The book tells the tale of an unnamed protagonist and a policeman named MacCruiskeen:

“It is not today or yesterday I started pointing spears,” he said, “but maybe you would like to see something else that is a medium fair example of supreme art?”

“I would indeed,” I answered.

“But I cannot get over what you confided in me privately sub-rosa about the no-bicycle, that is a story that would make your golden fortune if you wrote it down in a book where people could pursue it literally.”

He walked back to the dresser, opened the lower part of it and took out a little chest till[DAVID: ?] he put it on the table for my inspection. Never in my life did I inspect anything more ornamental and well-made. It was a brown chest like those owned by seafaring men or lascars from Singapore, but it was diminutive in a very perfect way, as if you were looking at a full-sized one through the wrong end of a spy-glass. It was about a foot in height, perfect in its proportions, and without fault in workmanship. There were indents and carving and fanciful excoriations and designs on every side of it and there was a bend on the lid that gave the article great distinction. At every corner there was a shiny brass corner-piece, and on the lid there were brass corner-pieces beautifully wrought and curved impeccably against the wood. The whole thing had the dignity and the satisfying quality of true art.

“There now,” said MacCruiskeen.

“It is nearly too nice,” I said at last, “to talk about it.”

“I spent two years manufacturing it when I was a lad,” said MacCruiskeen, “and it still takes me to the fair.”

“It is unmentionable,” I said.

“Very nearly,” said MacCruiskeen.

The two of us then started looking at it, and we looked at it for five minutes so hard that it seemed to dance on the table and look even smaller than it might be.

“I do not often look at boxes or chests,” I said, simply, “but this is the most beautiful box I have ever seen, and I will always remember it. There might be something inside it?”

“There might be,” said MacCruiskeen.

He went to the table and put his hands around the article in a fawning way as if he were caressing a sheepdog and he opened the lid with a little key, but shut it down again before I could inspect the inside of it.

“I will tell you a story and give you a synopsis of the ramification of the little plot,” he said. “When I had the chest made and finished, I tried to think what I would keep in it and what I would use it for at all. First I thought of them letters from Bridie, the ones on the blue paper with the strong smell but I did not think it would be anything but a sacrilege in the end because there was hot bits in them letters. Do you comprehend the trend of my observations?”

“I do,” I answered.

“Then there was my studs and the enamel badge and my presentation iron-pencil with a screw on the end of it to push the point out, an intricate article full of machinery and a Present from Southport. All these things are what are called Examples of the Machine Age.”

“They would be contrary to the spirit of the chest,” I said.

“They would be indeed. Then there was my razor and the spare plate in case I was presented with an accidental bash on the gob in the execution of me duty …”

“But not them.”

“Not them. Then there was my certificates and me cash and the picture of Peter the Hermit and the brass thing with straps that I found on the road one night near Matthew O’Carahan’s, but not them either.”

“It is a hard conundrum,” I said.

“In the end I found there was only one thing to do to put myself right with my private conscience.”

“It is a great thing that you found the right answer at all,” I countered.

“I decided to myself,” said MacCruiskeen, “that the only sole correct thing to contain in the chest was another chest of the same make but littler in cubic dimension.”

“That was very competent masterwork,” I said, endeavouring to speak his own language.

He went to the little chest and opened it up again and put his hands down sideways like flat plates or like the fins on a fish and took out of it a smaller chest but one resembling its mother-chest in every particular of appearance and dimension. It almost interfered with my breathing, it was so delightfully unmistakable. I went over and felt it and covered it with my hand to see how big its smallness was. Its brasswork had a shine like the sun on the sea and the colour of the wood was a rich deep richness like a colour deepened and toned only by the years. I got slightly weak from looking at it and sat down on a chair and for the purpose of pretending that I was not disturbed I whistled The Old Man Twangs His Braces.

MacCruiskeen gave a smooth inhuman smile.

“You may have come on no bicycle,” he said, “but that does not say that you know everything.”

“Those chests,” I said, “are so like one another that I do not believe they are there at all because that is a simpler thing to believe than the contrary. Nevertheless, the two of them are the most wonderful two things I have ever seen.”

“I was two years manufacturing it,” MacCruiskeen said.

“What is in the little one?” I asked.

“What would you think now?”

“I am completely half afraid to think,” I said, speaking truly enough.

“Wait now till I show you,” said MacCruiskeen, “and give you an exhibition and a personal inspection individually.”

He got two thin butter-spades from the shelf and put them down into the little chest and pulled out something that seemed to me remarkably like another chest. I went over to it and gave it a close examination with my hand, feeling the same identical wrinkles, the same proportions and the same completely perfect brasswork on a smaller scale. It was so faultless and delightful that it reminded me forcibly, strange and foolish at it may seem, of something I did not understand and had never even heard of.

“Say nothing,” I said quickly to MacCruiskeen, “but go ahead with what you are doing and I will watch here and I will take care to be sitting down.”

He gave me a nod in exchange for my remark and got two straight-handled teaspoons and put the handles into his last chest. What came out may well be guessed at. He opened this one and took another one out with the assistance of two knives. He worked knives, small knives and smaller knives, till he had twelve little chests on the table, the last of them an article half the size of a matchbox. It was so tiny that you would not quite see the brasswork at all only for the glitter of it in the light. I did not see whether it had the same identical carvings upon it because I was content to take a swift look at it and then turn away. But I knew in my soul that it was exactly the same as the others. I said no word at all because my mind was brimming with the wonder at the skill of the policeman.

“That last one,” said MacCruiskeen, putting away the knives, “took me three years to make and it took me another year to believe that I had made it. Have you got the convenience of a pin?”

I gave him my pin in silence. He opened the smallest of them with a key like a piece of hair and worked with the pin till he had another little chest on the table, thirteen in all arranged in a row upon the table. Queerly enough they looked to me as if they were all the same size but invested with some crazy perspective. This idea surprised me so much that I got my voice back and said:

“These are the most surprising thirteen things I have ever seen together.”

“Wait now, man,” MacCruiskeen said.

All my senses were now strained so tensely watching the policeman”s movements that I could almost hear my brain rattling in my head when I gave it a shake as if it were drying up into a wrinkled pea. He was manipulating and prodding with his pin until he had twenty-eight little chests upon the table and the last of them so small that it looked like a bug or a tiny piece of dirt except that there was a glitter from it. When I looked at it again I saw another thing beside it like something you would take out of a red eye on a windy day and I knew then that the strict computation was twenty-nine.

“Here is your pin,” said MacCruiskeen.

He put it into my stupid hand and went back to the table thoughtfully. He took a something[DAVID: correct?] from his pocket that was too small for me to see and started working with the tiny black thing on the table beside the bigger thing, which was itself too small to be described.

At this point, I became afraid. What he was doing was no longer wonderful but terrible. I shut my eyes and prayed that he would stop while still doing things that were at least possible for a man to do. When I looked again I was happy that there was nothing to see and that he had put no more chests prominently on the table but he was working to the left with the invisible thing in his hand on a bit of the table itself. When he felt my look he came over to me and gave me an enormous magnifying-glass which looked like a basin fixed to a handle. I felt the muscles around my heart tightening painfully as I took the instrument.

“Come over here to the table,” he said, “and look there to what you see infra-ocularly.”

When I saw the table, it was bare only for the twenty-nine chest articles, but through the agency of the glass I was in a position to report that he had two more out beside the last ones, the smallest of all being nearly half a size smaller than ordinary invisibility. I gave him back the glass instrument and took to the chair without a word. In order to reassure myself and make a loud human noise I whistled the Corncrake Plays the Bagpipes.

“There now,” said MacCruiskeen.

He took two wrinkled cigarettes from his fob and lit the two at the same time and handed me one of them.

“Number Twenty-Two,” he said, “I manufactured fifteen years ago, and I have made another different one every year since with any amount of nightwork and overtime and piece-work and time-and-a-half incidentally.”

“I understand you clearly,” I said.

“Six years ago they began to get invisible, glass or no glass. Nobody has ever seen the last five I made because no glass is strong enough to make them big enough to be regarded as truly the smallest things ever made. Nobody can see me making them because my little tools are invisible into the same bargain. The one I am making now is nearly as small as nothing. Number One would hold a million of them at the same time and there would be room left for a pair of woman”s horse-breeches if they were rolled up. The dear knows where it will stop and terminate.”[1]

The Museum of Jurassic Technology’s interest in very small things actually began at its inception when we established ourselves in our current home. Mary Rose Cannon, a Pasadena woman whom we had known for some time, took us by suprise with the information that she had in her possession quite a large and extraordinary collection of curios and artifacts that had been passed down through her family. In actuality, her grandfather had seemingly stolen them from their original collectors (which I suppose has something to do with one of the focuses of this symposium). This donation pleased us to no end and actually became the seed without which the museum would probably not exist. So, we are enormously thankful to Mary Rose Cannon for her donation, which became the museum’s foundation collection.

In and among the wonders of Cannon’s collection was an object, a small carving made out of a fruit stone. This carving made us especially happy because our research into historical collections had revealed that all good seventeenth and eighteenth-century historical collections were in possession of a fruit stone carving. Here was ours: less good than some of the other more famous fruit stone carvings, but at least it was ours. Our carving came with a text entitled, “Almond Stone.” In actuality, it looks more like a cherry pit than an almond stone. The accompanying text states that the front is carved with:

a Flemish landscape in which is seated a bearded man wearing a biretta with a long tunic of classical character and thick-soled shoes. He is seated with a viol held between his knees tuning the strings. In the distance are representations of animals including a lion, a bear, an elephant ridden by a monkey, a boar, a dog, a donkey, a stag, a camel, a horse, a bull, a bird, a goat, a lynx and a group of rabbits. There is also a ladder under which sits an owl, another bird and a squirrel. On the back of the stone is shown an unusually grim crucifixion with soldier on horseback, Longinus piercing Christ’s side with a lance; the cross is surmounted by a title inscribed “INRI.”

We thought at the time, and still do, that this piece is a remarkable example of human artistry and ingenuity on a very small scale.

We felt quite good (and still do) about the fruit stone carving, but then shortly thereafter, our way of understanding these things changed dramatically. In 1990, we encountered a man named Sandaldjian Sandaldjian. One Sunday afternoon my wife Diana and I were visiting Judy and Stewart Spence, contributors to our museum. We noticed a mimeographed flyer for an exhibition entitled, The Unique World of Microminiatures of Sandaldjian Sandaldjian ([DAVID: year of exhibition?]) on their kitchen table. The show was to be held in an Armenian Orthodox Church in Boyle Heights, which is not a place that people would typically think of in Los Angeles for going to exhibitions of any kind, but we asked if we could accompany them. They said, “Well, we weren’t really thinking of going, but we’ll go.”

So the four of us met and what we found was a parish hall. In the hall there were about six large tables beautifully covered with white tablecloths. On top of the tablecloths were quite elegantly executed viewing devices constructed from acrylic tubes resting on marble and brass bases. When we looked inside the viewers, we encountered strange and wonderful objects, including a likeness of Pope John Paul II that was carved from a piece of Sandaldjian Sandaldjian’s own hair and mounted in the eye of a needle. To give you a sense of scale, the cross constructed by Sandaldjian and held by the pope was created from a human hair that had been split seven times. Another work, called Aramic’s Hair (1990), was made from Sandaldjian’s infant grandson Aramic’s hair. We approached Sandaldjian immediately and said, “You know, we have a small fledgling museum. Would you be interested in doing an exhibition with us?” Afterall, this exhibition in the Armenian church was only a one-afternoon event. To our great surprise and happiness, Sandaldjian agreed, and said he would love to do it. Sandaldjian, a cheerful and friendly man, was a Soviet Armenian immigrant who had come to the Los Angeles area in 1980.

It took us longer than anticipated to prepare for the exhibition of Sandaldjian’s work. When we called to confirm the dates, his son Lavon answered the phone and told us that his father had died just the week before. It was quite a bittersweet thing. The family decided to go ahead with the exhibition, which became a celebration of Sandaldjian’s life. The entire Armenian community in Los Angeles, which is a sizeable community, turned out, and it really was a splendid remembrance for quite a remarkable person. Sandaldjian had carved Aramic’s Hair shortly before his death. Each one of the little birds sitting on the wire is carved from a tiny section of his own hair. The wire that they sit on is the hair of his infant grandson, the wonderful silken hair of an infant, much smaller than the hair of an adult.

Sandaldjian was not an artist by trade, but a violinist. In his home country he had been a very successful violinist, studying at the Moscow Conservatory and playing the lead violin with the Yerevan State Orchestra and the Moscow Symphony Orchestra. In addition to his performing career, Sandaldjian was also a violin instructor. He had developed a system of violin instruction called the “ergonomic method of violin instruction,” which taught students to play with a minimal amount of force, learning to work with, instead of against, gravity. He was able to teach his students to play in a virtuosic style in a much shorter period of time than traditional teaching methods allowed. The ergonomic method of violin instruction became the state-supported and endorsed method of violin instruction throughout the Soviet Union. Sandaldjian’s career was quite stellar in the Soviet Union.

When he came to the United States, Sandaldjian’s musical career simply hit a brick wall. He could not get work as a concert violinist, and no one was interested in the ergonomic method of violin instruction. He was forced to take on individual students in order to help support his family. His difficulty was to our great benefit, since it gave him the time and inclination to begin his practice of microminiature sculpting, which he would otherwise not have had the time to do.

Another of Sandaldjian’s masterworks is Napoleon ([year]) in the eye of a needle. There is a wonderful irony here: a small man with great ideas being reduced to such a very small scale. Under high enough magnification, you can see the individual buttons on Napoleon’s vest. Sandaldjian was alive when there were only three living microminiaturists working at this calibre. Of the three, he was the only one that painted his sculptures. His Cio-Cio San ([year]) from Madame Butterfly was left unpainted, I like to imagine, because he loved the kind of crystalline beauty of this almost glass-like little Cio-Cio San. Sandaldjian talked about painting being the great dictator. He told us that on many occasions he would go to paint one of his pieces and get a bit too much paint on his sharpened single-hair brush, which would then entomb many months’ worth of work in a little sphere of paint that would harden instantly. The piece would be lost inside this globe for eternity. We never saw Sandaldjian paint, but people did say it was both a remarkable and unremarkable experience at the same time. He would set his piece up perfectly and practice his stroke, going from the paint source to the miniature a number of times until he was sure of his stroke. Then he would wait for the moment, between the beats of his heart, so that the blood coursing through his veins would not throw off his aim, and then he would plant his decisive stroke. People said that in watching him, you didn’t see anything; nothing seemed to happen.

Sandaldjian also worked on larger scales. His Mesrob Mashtotz ([year]), an important figure in the Armenian pantheon who created the Armenian alphabet, is executed from a grain of rice. When Sandaldjian came to this country, as I said, his violin career failed. He made a piece called Broken Dreams ([year]).[DAVID: clarify if he made the piece as a result of the failure of his career.] A large piece made from gold and measuring 1/32 of an inch in height, it also references another episode in Sandaldjian’s life when he was a boy. Sandaldjian grew up in Alexandria, Egypt, and his father was so dismayed that his son wanted to follow an artistic path, he smashed Sandaldjian’s first violin. Broken Dreams references both of these sad events in his life.

Among his many hats, Sandaldjian wore the hat of an Armenian revolutionary. In 1990, shortly before his death, he created a memorial to the Armenian Revolutionary Federation, which that year had celebrated its one-hundredth year anniversary. Sandaldjian was an ardent patriot and an Armenian revolutionary. When he came to the United States he embraced all the things in his new-found home, including the good people at the Walt Disney Corporation and all of their creations. Sandaldjian’s Goofy ([year]) is is truly one of his absolute best works by our standards. When we mounted the first exhibition, we were actually quite concerned that the Disney legal staff, who are notoriously good at what they do, would come down on us with a heavy hand for exhibiting these likenesses of their creations.

We approached the Disney Corporation to get a license to show Sandaldjian’s Disney characters. Fortunately at the time, our daughter was in preschool with one of the daughters of one of the vice-presidents of the Walt Disney Corporation. Our daughter was not in a fancy preschool; they were just slumming it. Our daughter and their daughter were friends, so through our three-year-old daughter we were able to make the contact that then allowed us to approach the Disney legal staff. To their great credit, the Disney Corporation granted us a license for the cost of one dollar that would allow us, as well as the Sandaldjian family, to exhibit these works forever. The only similar license they had ever granted had been to Andy Warhol for a quarter of a million dollars for the use of the mouse. We were never quite clear if it was by weight, or volume, or how they determined the price, but we were very happy nonetheless.

Noah’s Ark ([year]) is a piece that is dear to our hearts at the Museum of Jurassic Technology. It is a procession of animals going to the ark. Noah’s ark has been a recurrent image in our museum for a long time. It was the earliest and most complete museum of natural history ever compiled. In Noah’s Ark, Sandaldjian carved the animals into the back of one of his split white hairs. Sandaldjian, by all standards including our own, was an extraordinary individual and an extraordinarily generous individual. All of his students that we interviewed after his death had nothing but the most glowing reports to give. Sandaldjian’s May All Your Dreams Come True ([year]), sums up the way in which this remarkable man approached the world. [DAVID: give more of an explanation about the piece otherwise it comes out of nowhere.]

At the termination of the first incomplete exhibition of Sandaldjian’s work at our museum, we agreed with his family that we would do an entire retrospective and produce a catalogue. We asked a friend of ours named Ralph Rugoff to write an essay about the miniatures. Rugoff is an excellent writer and exhaustively researched the tradition of microminiature sculpture. While researching, he came across cloudy references to another living microminiaturist named Nikolai Syadristy, who was said to be alive and practising in the distant city of Kiev in the Ukraine. Soon afterward, Rugoff and I got on an airplane in the middle of the night and flew off into the dark unknown, finally landing in Kiev in the Ukraine. We were totally unprepared for the visit, not even having obtained the necessay visas, but somehow we finagled our way into the country and were led to this extraordinary place, Kiev-Pechersk Lavra (Monastery of the Caves).

Kiev-Pechersk Lavra is arguably the most sacred place in all of Russia. It’s the place where Christianity entered Russia during the tenth century and it consists of about twenty square city blocks full of tenth and eleventh-century buildings. Behind huge wooden doors are rooms full of incalculably sacred icons and artifacts of orthodoxy. The ground underneath the Lavra[DAVID: is it correct to say “the Lavra”?] is a tunnelled labyrinth of catacombs where all of the orthodox saints have been entombed; they’re entombed in glass coffins, and because of the unique conditions of the place, they remain intact. They remain in their regalia, in their fine array, laid in glass coffins, and are referred to as the Incorruptibles. Rugoff and I arrived on the day between the winter solstice and the equinox, which is the day when all of Kiev goes to the Lavra. Each person takes a candle and walks through the tunnels, and kisses each of the two hundred sarcophagi. Rugoff and I did the same and it was quite the experience.

Then remembering why we were there, we sought out and found what it was we were led to this place to find. Behind one of the doors were not icons and artifacts, but a place that looked more like a science fiction set than an orthodox monastery. It was designed by Nikolai Syadristy. Every detail in the room has meaning in a complex cosmological structure that Syadristy espouses. There are very large glass dishes, about four feet in diameter. In the centre of each dish is a viewing device and within the devices are housed amazing objects. One object is a dragonfly, with its head measuring the diameter of about five human hairs joined together. Inside the head is a working clock. Syadristy primarily works in gold, unlike Sandaldjian. Gold is a very malleable medium. It goes to a very small scale and holds its integrity.

We took a photograph of Syadristy holding a catalogue from his first exhibition and then one of ourselves, if only to prove that we were in fact in Syadristy’s studio, which is quite nice by Soviet standards. His workspace, like Sandaldjian’s, was very unimpressive. It consisted of a dissecting microscope and the most mundane of tools: basically, sharpened pins and a little crushed gemstone. Yet with these tools he created wonders like The Ship with Red Sails ([year]). Also made of gold, the rigging is purportedly one-four-hundredth the diameter of a human hair.

Syadristy also created a chess game on the head of a pin. It represents a chess game won by Stanilov Ostapenko, a famed Ukrainian chess player, over a renowned Russian chess player, much to the delight of the Ukrainians, who are, especially these days, not so terribly fond of the Russians. Syadristy also carved a portrait of a famed Armenian singer from a pear seed. He carved Ernest Hemingway on a sliced pear seed. Ernest Hemingway was one of the very few Westerners it was all right to eulogize during the Soviet era. Syadristy also carved Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, from a pear seed. I’ve seen it, and it’s a very very small thing. For us, it is remarkable. Sandaldjian’s work was heartfelt and beautiful. Syadristy’s work is cold and austere, almost arctic, but perfect. I felt almost like Flann O’Brien’s protagonist felt: like it is incalculably perfect or unacceptably perfect in execution.

Syadristy prides himself in being able to, as he said, “work the system,” which allowed him to have this extraordinary facility in Kiev-Pechersk Lavra. It’s the only thing that is not of a religious nature in the whole of the Lavra, but the Soviet government felt that his work was of strategic importance. As a way of saying thank you to the Soviet government, he did a portrait of Lenin, but of course since Syadristy was doing it, it was not just any portrait. On close examination one finds that it is made of a treatise. It’s a large written piece of text too small for the unaided eye to see, and the lights and darks of the drawing are made from the pressure on the quill as the writing is being done.[DAVID: unclear, please rephrase] The text is from a treatise written by Lenin in the 1930s that detailed how to control and subdue a population through the use of famine, which, by way of painful irony is exactly what the Soviet Union did to the Ukrainians, the breadbasket of the Soviet Union. They manufactured and created a horrible famine in the 1950s and 1960s to bring the rebellious Ukrainian people to their knees.[DAVIS: source of info?]

As I said at the beginning, our interests at the Museum of Jurassic Technology are not just in the arts but also in human artistry and ingenuity on the microscopic scale. Some time ago, we did an exhibition called Nanotechnology and Machines in the Microscopic Realm ([year]). We actually erroneously used the word “nanotechnology,” because what we were really exhibiting were micromachines not nanotechnology. It’s a fine point, but one for which we were sorely chastised.[DAVID: suggest deleting or can be put in an endnote?] The exhibition featured a series of extremely small machines and machine components made from silicone. The human hair was the unit of measure for all of this work. To give you a sense of scale, the human hair is two hundred microns in diameter. A motor made by Yu-Chong Tai at the California Institute of Technology was the first working electrostatic micro-machine motor and measured one hundred microns in diameter. It is smaller than a human hair and it spins wildly. It doesn’t drive anything; it just spins. Most of this type of work is still experimental, and does not really have any practical applications. Some of the devices do have practical applications. Neuroprobes, probes made through micromachining technology, are mounted in the brain of an embryonic lab animal and then as the animal grows with this neurosensor in its brain, the neurological material fills in around the neurosensor, allowing the observers to read the electrical impulses in the animal’s brain during the course of its life.

This is another put into practice use of micro-machining. These are the tips, the working end of what is called an atomic force microscope, and the good people at the International Business Machines, IBM, spelled out their name in atoms and showed us all an image of it. How do you make an image of something that small? You use one of these microscopes, an atomic point microscope. This is an impact sensor that it is actually used in air bags. Here also in practical application is an aphid with a piece of micro-machine technology on his back with a little wire that transmits the telemetry back to whoever it is that studies aphids.[DAVID: this is very unclear, especially without aid of the slides. Either rewrite or delete.]

At the beginning I mentioned an exhibition that we recently opened. It is[DAVID: is or was? Give name and year of exhibition] an exhibition of the work of a fellow named Harold Dalton, a mid-nineteenth-century microscopist who made very small mosaics by teasing the scales from the wings of butterflies, and, with a tiny glass pipette, blowing them into position. He would then adhere the scales to a microscope slide by pressing the scale with a sharp probe using the natural oil contained in the butterfly wing as an adhesive. When you look at them under the microscope they kind of shimmer. To us, the amazing thing is not just that he was able to do it, but that he did it so artfully, so really beautifully. I mean these are really lovely things.

When Sandaldjian Sandaldjian was in Armenia, a man came to him and asked if he would teach him to play the violin. Sandaldjian agreed on the condition that this man, Edward Kazarian, would teach him the extraordinary craft which he had mastered, the craft of microminiature sculpture. The two men started a relationship, becoming each other’s teachers. They were friends for over a decade until Sandaldjian left for the United States in 1980. We have not actually met Edward Kazarian yet, nor have we had the opportunity to see his work. We attempted to do an exhibition of his work in conjunction with an exhibition of Sandaldjian’s work at the de Young Museum in San Francisco. That was, for us, quite a large and splendid venue. It’s a venerable old museum, and we thought it would be wonderful to bring these two old masters back together again, but we ran into financial difficulties.

When we were writing the catalogue essay for Sandaldjian, we tried extremely hard to contact Kazarian, because he was Sandaldjian’s teacher. The whole Armenian community in Los Angeles was helping us through the relatives they had in Yerevan, but no one could seem to find him. Then one day, about three years ago, we got an e-mail from him. We felt this strange sense of getting e-mail from the other[DAVID: nether?] world. This man, who we had all assumed was dead, was all of a sudden sending us a piece of e-mail. Kazarian put us in touch with his spokesperson, a fellow named Andronic Petrosian. Petrosian acts as Kazarian’s agent, but is himself a scientist and the editor of a magazine called, The Journal of Micro Structure. He kindly sent us a biography:

Edward Ter-Kazarian was born on June 20, 1923 in the capital of Armenia in Yerevan in a respectable family. He graduated from the Armenian State Conservatorium at his 20^th year. He was a well-known violin player as well as violin-maker and sculptor. However, his sculptures first shown in Yerevan in 1947 were visible only under a microscope. Edward Ter-Kazarian views the world through the eye of a needle. Undoubtedly, his highest achievement is finding the world of moving microminiatures. In one of these masterpieces, a working TV in a human, is a working TV in a human hair. The idea of the moving figures came from an exceptionally curious incident contained in one of his miniatures. A static micro figure on the stairway started to go up the stairs by themselves. Apparently, the figures made of marmot’s tooth had attracted microbes which transferred the vibrations to the figures in one remarkable work, “Gulliver in the Country of the Lilliputians.” Gulliver is sitting on a wire on a human hair set between two houses and holding a ball in each hand. On one ball, a Lilliputian sportsman is turning on a horizontal bar a hundred times thinner than a human hair and on the other ball are two fighting karate men. All of the figures are moving asynchronously. No movement is repeated twice. Still, there is no explanation about this phenomenon. Maybe the great Einstein is right in describing these movements as an interaction of magnetic and gravitational powers. [DAVID: document source in endnote.]

Petrosian also provided captions for Kazarian’s work, including, “Charlie Chaplin made from steel and standing in a needle’s eye,” and, “Paganini playing on a violin made from golden cram standing in a needle’s eye.” [DAVID: document source of quotes in endnote if possible.] Kazarian’s primary material was gold, like Syadristy’s. “Don Quixote and his servant, Sancho Panza, placed inside the eye of a thin needle. Figures are made from colored stones.” All of these needles are not carpet needles, these are standard sewing needles. “Armenian kings on a saucer silver mint.” This is purportedly the diameter of three human hairs. “A Stradivarius violin inside a fiddle-stick hair. Violins are made of wood.” I’ve never actually been sure how you could tell at this scale that these are Stradivariuses, but somehow they know. [DAVID: again this doesn’t work without the slides. Please delete or rewrite.]

We tried to bring Kazarian to San Francisco for the exhibition, but we were not able to. The financial difficulty came from the fact that he travels with an entourage. The entourage is comprised of people who help him. He also travels with the three other members from his string quartet, all of whom play normal-sized instruments, except for Kazarian. He plays a 1.4 centimetre long microviolin. Although we have not yet heard him play it, people say that he plays it absolutely beautifully.

[DAVID: give context for following quote - perhaps add “According to his biography,”] Kazarian has also created copies of “eight Armenian khachkars pictured on a longitudinal section of human hair [DAVID: title and year of work?]. Khachkars are like stone road markers, stone crosses, a very characteristic minor form of Armenian Christian architecture in the Middle Ages; and they are pictured on the longitudinal section of human hair.”[DAVID: put source of quote in endnote] In other words, the hair has been split, as in Sandaldjian’s Noah’s Ark, and these beautiful little miniatures of stone crosses have been carved into the back. “These stone flowers are made of many colored Armenian stones; each detail, each little piece of the mosaic, is a hundred times thinner than a human hair.”[DAVID: source] “It is a panorama of the oriental city and is made of golden dust.”[DAVID: is this quote talking about the same piece? Is it from the same sourceas the previous quote?] Kazarian also created an Armenian orthodox prayer book that is said to include a great deal of the Armenian prayer book inside a little tiny golden book. He has also created a “stadium inside a hair where football players are made of obsidian.”[DAVID: source of quote]

Before I finish, I would like to just go back and read a tiny paragraph or two more from Flann O’Brien, which will perhaps tie into the keynote idea of my speech:

“Such work must be very hard on the eyes,” I said, determined to pretend that everybody was an ordinary person like myself.

Some of these days,” he answered, “Some of these days,” he answered, “I will have to buy spectacles with gold ear-claws. My eyes are crippled with the small print in the newspapers in the offeecial[DAVID:?] forms.”

“Before I go back to the day-room,” I said, “would it be right to ask you what you were performing with that little small piano-instrument, the article with the knobs, and the brass pins?”

“That is my personal musical instrument,” said MacCruiskeen, “and I was playing my own tunes on it in order to extract private satisfaction from the sweetness of them.”

“I was listening,” I answered, “but I did not succeed in hearing you.”

“That does not surprise me intuitively,” said MacCruiskeen, “because it is an indigenous patent of my own. The vibrations of the true notes are so high in their fine frequencies that they cannot be appreciated by the human ear-cup. Only myself has the secret of the thing and the intimate way of it, the confidential knack of circumventing it. Now what do you think of that?”

I climbed up to my legs to go back to the day-room, passing a hand weakly across my brow.

“I think it is extremely acatalectic,” I answered.[2]