Museum Could Go the Way of the Dinosaurs

For 10 years, David Wilson, curator, artistic director and wizard-in-residence of Culver City’s Museum of Jurassic Technology, has managed to keep his museum of satiric, pseudoscientific artworks afloat, despite a decade of financial challenges.

He’s operating on a budget of $150,000 a year and boasting a distinguished roster of supporters that includes Los Angeles County Museum of Art curator Stephanie Barron, actor-playwright-art collector Steve Martin and John Walsh, director of the Getty Museum.

In addition, New Yorker writer Laurence Weschler wrote a critically acclaimed book about the museum, “Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder,” published in 1995 by Vintage Books, a division of Random House.

Despite its hard-won success, the Museum of Jurassic Technology is celebrating its 10th anniversary with another financial crisis: It may have to close if Wilson and the museum’s supporters don’t raise the $200,000 to $300,000 needed as a down payment to buy the $850,000 complex housing the museum.

The Venice Boulevard complex of four buildings is owned by a consortium of physicians, who plan to sell it soon after the first of next year. Wilson believes that the museum may not be able to survive the rent increases that could come with new ownership.

Wilson also believes that it is virtually impossible to just pack up the museum--an inexplicable collection of phenomena whose mission is “the advancement of knowledge and the public appreciation of the Lower Jurassic”--and move it to a new location.

Over the years, its dark labyrinth of exhibition space has expanded to fill spaces periodically vacated by its next-door neighbor, a forensics laboratory warehouse that banks slides of biopsy tissue for seven years, as required by law.

Wilson, 51, has little concern for money; in fact the stuff makes him nervous. He and his wife once owned a house in Silver Lake, but the American Dream of home ownership made them so miserable that they sold the house and fled to what Wilson describes as “a strange, weird, dingbat apartment” just up the block from the museum. They’ve lived there happily, and modestly, ever after. But suddenly, Wilson is forced to deal with money in a big way.

“If you look at the way we have constructed the museum--it is so integral to the space of the building--it would mean that we do those 10 years of work all over again,” Wilson says.

“We don’t want that. It’s obviously been the most important thing in my life, and a lot of other people are now deeply involved, too.”

So the reticent Wilson has overcome his distaste for things financial to become the world’s most unlikely fund-raiser, hoping to buy the complex and lease out the other three buildings. Wilson says the current owners of the building are supportive and have given the museum the right of first refusal; they have also allowed Wilson until the end of the year to show some fund-raising progress.

The museum began as a touring exhibition. Then, in 1987, the Wilsons took the plunge and rented the Culver City space. “When we began, we didn’t have any idea that anyone would ever come,” Wilson says. “For the first year, we had maybe two people a day; if we had a 10-person day, it was a huge success. . . . It just slowly started to be accepted.”

Weschler recalls fondly that the Wilsons were once thrilled when their car was stolen: It gave them $5,000 or $6,000 in insurance money to prevent the museum from going under for just a few months longer.

Wilson said his family, which includes 12-year-old daughter Danielle, survives on wife Diana’s income (she manages the building in which they live). The museum survives on door donations, as well as on receipts from “a pathetic gift shop” at the museum, various government and foundation grants and donations from its 350 members. Those donations, he says, tend to be in the $25 to $50 range and never more than $1,000.

Although museum members and directors have yet to be notified of the museum’s plight, one supporter, magician Ricky Jay, has promised to give a benefit performance for the museum in Los Angeles after the first of the year. Jay recently finished a part in the latest James Bond movie, in which he portrays Gupta, “the father of techno-terrorism.”

A sleight-of-hand artist with a loyal cult following, Jay discovered the museum when a friend took him there. “I just think this is one of the great L.A. places, flat out, and if I can do something to benefit it, I’m happy to do it,” he says.

“I think the best way to view the museum is just to have someone who loves it take you and not say a word about it,” Jay continues. “It didn’t take me more than 45 seconds to be having a wonderful time. It’s kind of like a living cabinet of curiosities.”

Jay discovered that he and Wilson share an interest in 17th and 18th century lore. They have discussed doing a museum exhibition of Jay’s collection of the artworks of Mathew Buchinger, “the little man of Nuremberg.” Born in 1674, Buchinger, who never grew beyond 29 inches tall, did not let his shrunken arms or lack of hands, feet and size prevent him from becoming a master of swordplay, card tricks and miniature calligraphy. (Jay’s book, “Learned Pigs and Fireproof Women,” includes a self-portrait of Buchinger, in which several psalms and the Lord’s Prayer are inscribed in the curls of his hair, discernible only by microscope.)

“It is literally true: There is nothing like the place in Los Angeles,” says the Getty’s Walsh. “Los Angeles would be much poorer without the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

“It is, literally, a wonderful place . . . full of unexplained phenomena, full of reminders that the wonder of our science is that it can’t, and doesn’t, explain everything. And we need that.”

* Museum of Jurassic Technology, 9341 Venice Blvd., (310) 836-6131. Open Thursdays 2 to 8 p.m.; Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays noon to 6 p.m. Suggested donation: adults, $3; students and seniors, $2.