Trying It With a Net

Three months ago, David Wilson’s cell phone rang in the middle of a meeting at his one-of-a-kind establishment, the Museum of Jurassic Technology. He was talking planning with Kelly Coyne, the museum’s administrative director.

“It was a pretty down period, and we were trying to figure out how we were going to get through November,” he says. “Financially, every month is a juggling act. We get to places where we’re OK for two or three months but then it goes back to week-to-week.

“I got a call and I didn’t recognize the number. I wasn’t in the best of moods and I said to myself, ‘Do I want to take this?’ And then this guy, Dan Socolow, comes on and identifies himself as the director of the MacArthur Fellows Program.

“The first thing he asks is ‘Are you alone?’ and then ‘Can you get alone?’ So I went into the other room. He asked if I had ever known a MacArthur fellow, and I answered, ‘I guess I know some.’ When he said, ‘Well, you know one better than you think you do,’ I still didn’t have any idea of what he was leading up to. I thought he was going to invite me to nominate someone. And then he broke the news.”

Along with 22 others, Wilson had been named to the 2001 class of MacArthur fellows. He had gotten a “genius” grant, $500,000 out of the clear blue.

No stranger to the mysteries of the universe, Wilson is also familiar with the power of understatement. Pocketing his phone, he wrote a note to Coyne: “I think,” he scribbled, “things are going to be a little bit better next month.”

In 1981, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation started giving money to artists and thinkers, scientists and dreamers, none of whom had asked for it. Every year since then, 20 to 40 individuals, in fields that range from music to molecular biology, architecture to agriculture, and poetry to primatology, get the same sort of call that interrupted Wilson on Oct. 18.

No applications are submitted (nominations are made and championed via a series of confidential recommendations), and no strings are attached. There are no restrictions on becoming a fellow, except that nominees must be residents or citizens of the United States. The $500,000 grant (before 2001, the amounts varied, with older fellows receiving more money) is paid out over five years; checks go out quarterly. Aside from occasional invitations to get together with other fellows, that’s it: money, free and clear.

The process is famously confidential. Socolow’s phone call was Wilson’s only direct contact with the foundation. Everyone involved in the nomination, evaluation and selection of fellows is more than circumspect about the details of the procedure. Instead, the foundation relies on its mission statement as explanation: The grants are intellectual seed money, long-term investments that reward past accomplishments only in the sense that such achievements indicate a recipient is likely to do bigger and better things with the freedom provided by a bigger and better budget.

Chicago painter Kerry James Marshall, who received a MacArthur in 1997, calls it venture capital: “It underwrites a five-year period of research and development. It didn’t change my approach to doing anything; it just made it easier. It eliminated immediate commercial concerns and let me take more chances.”

Wilson has barely settled into considering the effect of his grant, but like Marshall, he sees it as an investment, and one more bit of serendipity underpinning the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

Getting a MacArthur, he says, “was a huge relief....But it’s not at all like winning the lottery--I mean, thank God, but it feels much more like a continuation of the sort of short-handed process that has been going on for 10 years, that has allowed us to get this far.”

On a typical day at the Museum of Jurassic Technology, 30 to 60 patrons leave behind the glaring sunshine and speeding traffic of Venice Boulevard for the dimly lighted wonders of Wilson’s galleries, whose floor plan resembles an overpopulated rabbit warren. Visitors are evenly divided between first-timers and repeat customers, families and art students, from the hip to the nerdy. It’s dark inside, and before your eyes can adjust, your ears pick up all kinds of sounds: jangling bells, rushing water, a barking dog, a melancholic opera, and the soothing voices of men and women explaining arcane subjects in trustworthy tones.

One display outlines Donald R. Griffith’s capture of a tiny South American bat reportedly able to fly through solid objects. In 1952, the eminent chiroptologist tricked the “piercing devil” by setting up, in the jungle, massive lead walls that were invisible to the bat’s unique echolocation system. Another display contains a diorama of Iguazu Falls, complete with circulating water. Viewed from the side, the landscape looks like a model railroader’s fantasy. But when seen from the front, a ghostly suspension bridge spans the falls. A nearby phone receiver conveys the story of Wilhelm Sonnabend, a young structural engineer whose dream bridge collapsed into the chasm a day before its completion in 1886.

Several galleries are devoted to the intellectual adventures of Anthanasius Kircher (1602-1680), a Jesuit scholar, inventor, geographer, Egyptologist, astronomer and, among many other things, proprietor of one of the first public museums. Other rooms, halls and closet-sized spaces are dedicated to special exhibitions, including “Garden of Eden on Wheels: Collections from L.A. Mobile Homes and Trailer Parks” and “Tell the Bees: Belief, Knowledge and Hypersymbolic Cognition.”

The museum’s devious exhibits form labyrinthine stories in which truth and fiction play cat and mouse. The charm of the place resides in the homespun feel of the exhibits. Rarely is every one of them up and running: burned-out light bulbs and malfunctioning mechanisms can always be found, adding to the sense of adventure.

“We think of ourselves as just another museum in a city full of splendid museums,” Wilson says. “All museums are different. All have something to put into the world. We’re an institution with a very specific kind of thing that is sometimes complicated to put into words. We have a program and we know our program is not for everyone, but it seems to be for enough people to warrant our existence. And that’s basically how we see ourselves. As providing a service in terms of fulfilling a certain kind of need in the culture.”

Admissions (suggested donations: adults $4, students and seniors, $2.50), gift shop sales and a loyal core of about 500 members provide a steady source of income. From 1989, when the museum opened to the public, to 1999, when Wilson purchased the building, this more or less covered the rent. Since then, it has paid most of the mortgage ($5,000 a month). Gifts and grants have also increased throughout the 1990s, paying the modest wages of a part-time staff of six and all of the museum’s operating expenses, which for the last few years have ranged from $150,000 to $200,000 annually. Wilson, the founder and director, does not draw a salary. His modest office is housed in a weathered 1951 Spartanette trailer, built by J. Paul Getty’s Spartan Aircraft Co.

Never one to put security ahead of growth, he has consistently expanded the museum, often taking it to the brink of financial disaster. In 1993, he doubled its floor space, breaking through an adjoining wall to add a 1,600-square-foot building. A second expansion, in 1995, added 2,000 square feet. And in 1999, with major contributions from the Lannan, Bohen, Ahmanson and Ralph M. Parsons foundations, the museum was able to purchase the 12,000-square-foot structure in which it is housed. (Part of that deal involved selling a 1,600-square-foot space to the Center for Land Use Interpretation, a quirky information bureau that collects and disperses data about the natural and not-so-natural landscape we live in.)

When Wilson walks back to the museum from a nearby cafe, he strolls in a relaxed manner, chatting casually about neighborhood development and city governance. Once inside the front door, he picks up the pace. Darting around corners, scampering down crooked corridors and disappearing behind a sheet of plywood that covers a hidden doorway, he leads a visitor on a whirlwind tour of the museum’s back rooms: cluttered workshops, temporary offices and raw spaces still filled with the remnants of previous tenants.

He also speaks more quickly, outlining plans with dizzying swiftness. “We’re thinking of going beyond adding more exhibition halls to adding other kinds of experiences,” he says. “Expanding the nature of the experience rather than simply adding more of the same.”

The funds provided by the MacArthur Foundation will allow Wilson to transform a cluster of large storerooms, and part of a mid-size parking lot at the back of the property into an indoor-outdoor garden. A former walk-in freezer will become a new 3-D exhibit. Upstairs, he plans to convert several rooms of an old apartment into a tearoom overlooking Venice Boulevard. Down the hall, the construction of a 14-seat theater is awaiting its finishing touches.

For the theater’s lobby, which is still just a gutted apartment, Wilson is commissioning L.A. artist M.A. Peers to paint portraits of dogs from the former Soviet Union’s space program. They will complement a series of films he is producing in collaboration with Olesya Turkina, curator of contemporary art and science at the Russian State Museum, and Viktor Mazin, founder of the Freud Dream Museum, both in St. Petersburg. The first film in the series has been underway for years; the paintings simply a bright idea in need of funding. The MacArthur will help make both a reality.

“The garden is a relatively complex vision of things,” Wilson says. “But it’s something we’ve been thinking about almost as long as the museum has been here. We don’t know if any of this is for sure, but it certainly feels like some of it will now become possible.”

Artists, including Wilson, make up less than 5% of the 611 fellowships dispersed since 1981. What they do with the money seems to follow a pattern that’s mostly based on age and experience.

Real estate is a common theme. Kerry James Marshall’s grant of $260,000 allowed him to purchase a studio four blocks from his home on the south side of Chicago. Similarly, in 1989, pioneering video artist Bill Viola used his to rent his first studio. Until then he had been working out of his home in Long Beach.

For sculptor Martin Puryear, who was also tapped in 1989, the MacArthur provided stability when he was overseeing a major retrospective of his work, starting a family and moving from downtown Chicago to upstate New York. It permitted him to build a new home and studio in the country.

Artists who are further along in their careers usually pour the money into whatever project they’re working on. Seattle-based Gary Hill was in Helsinki in 1998 when he got his call. “I was dumbstruck,” he says. But the grant didn’t produce any dramatic transformations. It simply filtered into his work, paying for better equipment and materials, and providing a cushion from the fickle art market. James Turrell, who has been transforming an Arizona crater into a massive earthwork for 30 years, used the money to continue construction on the project, which includes tunnels, chambers, viewing platforms, even a small hotel.

When legendary furniture designer Sam Maloof, who lives and works in a home-studio he built in Rancho Cucamonga, got his award of $375,000 in 1985, he felt that he was already working at full capacity, with a crew of three and a secretary. So he donated $75,000 to the American Craft Council and set up a scholarship at Anderson Ranch Art Center in Snowmass Village, Colo. Sales of his furniture sustain it. “I already had the freedom,” says the 86-year-old. “But I was thrilled. I thought, ‘Gosh, what’s a woodworker doing in that kind of company?’”

Along with financial support, a MacArthur fellowship brings prestige--which sometimes invites the jealousy of colleagues. Vija Celmins, a realist painter who has lived in Manhattan since moving there from Los Angeles in 1981, used her grant to buy a new car and make a down payment on a house. She acknowledges the possible downside.

“I am happy to report that [the fellowship] hasn’t ruined my life,” she says. “One of the problems is the ‘genius’ name. It’s a grandiose term; you think of Da Vinci and Michelangelo. I don’t know any geniuses. I don’t think in those terms. It’s irritating. It’s a generous prize, but I don’t accept the term. [The award] is for people who work hard. It gave me a certain amount of confidence, that there were people out there who cared for my work. I just continued what I was doing. I didn’t quit. I didn’t freak out. It really helped out at the beginning. Now I’m in my last year and don’t even think about it.”

When the MacArthur Foundation named Wilson as a fellow, it put its weight behind a project that, in his words, “never really made sense in the normal way things make sense.”

Born in Denver in 1946, Wilson earned a bachelor’s degree in urban entomology in 1969 at Michigan’s Kalamazoo College, where he met his wife, Diana, at a square dance on the first day of school. (They have been married 32 years and have a 14-year-old daughter, DanRae.) After a brief stint in Chicago, they moved to Colorado, where Wilson, a conscientious objector during the war in Vietnam, did alternative service as an emergency room and mental ward orderly.

Upon earning a master’s of fine arts degree in film at CalArts in Valencia, he did freelance special-effects work for the movie industry, fabricating robotic devices that allowed cameras to get shots from seemingly impossible positions. This allowed him the time and money to make short art films, which he did throughout the 1970s. “I loved the process of doing those,” he says. “But I was conscious [that I] was just kind of, I won’t say biding time. But I absolutely knew that this was not what it was all going to be about.”

The idea for the museum came to him in 1984. “It built slowly,” he says, “but it definitely erupted into consciousness in an absolute single moment.

“My background was very split between natural science on the one hand, and display and presentation on the other. I had a terrible time with that split for a very long time in my life--I’d say a decade or 15 years, really, really struggling, knowing there was something that I just wanted, needed to do that was going to bring all of this together in some kind of meaningful way. And it actually all just came together one Saturday morning.”

On that day, in his Silver Lake workshop, while looking through a series of slides of displays at the Smithsonian, Wilson saw his future. “I was just sitting there and it was just like somebody had dropped a locomotive on me. It wasn’t like being hit by a train, but having one fall from the sky. All of a sudden the idea of what I wanted to do just came with just such extraordinary clarity: that more than anything in the world what I wanted to do was to have a museum.”

He continues, “And so many aspects of the whole idea of the museum, its relationship to the world, having a place open to the public, and ideas for probably the first six or eight exhibits all just fell into place. It’s amazing how minds work--that kind of eruption of all that material, which must have in some way been there, simmering, entirely unknown to me.

“When we opened,” he says, “we didn’t know if anybody would ever come. And for a very long time, nobody did come. There were many days when there were two or three people. If we would get 10 visitors, we’d celebrate.” Wilson often woke up in the middle of the night wondering where he had put the “For Lease” sign that had been in the window. He was sure he would have to give up the building, and he didn’t want to buy a new sign.

“Even though the museum was costing Diana and me all of the money we had, the whole of our life energies, there was never a sense that it was a mistake. Even when it seemed absolutely certain that it was all just going to come to nothing, it felt like it was going to be the right thing to have done.”

The museum’s seat-of-the-pants financing has done more than determine the look, feel and flavor of its exhibits. “Clearly economic necessity has shaped how we developed, what we were able to do and not able to do,” Wilson says. “Somehow it is obvious that we didn’t have money and we did it anyhow. And I think that that actually has become, in an unspoken or almost unconscious way, an important part of what our act is, in terms of putting things into the world.”

Although not knowing where the money to pay next month’s bills will come from fills most of us with fear, Wilson seems to be inspired by such white-knuckle uncertainty. In any case, putting people in the presence of the unknown is one of the fundamental goals of his museum.

He says, “I’ve gotten a little touchy about the word ‘wonder,’ but if [what you know about the world] doesn’t come from amazement, it lacks something. There’s a kind of mental-scape and expansiveness that comes from that extraordinary sense of not knowing. When folks in the sciences talk about their moments of inspiration that seem to come out of the blue, it seems to be very similar to people who endure creative inspiration. It all has some kind of common well. Whatever processes of mind those are, they allow us to know more than we thought we knew or thought we could know. It always seems to be a combination of knowing and not knowing, a crazy mixture that’s a great place to be. Not all of the time, but a great place to visit.”

Like his museum.

More than anything else, the MacArthur has given Wilson a sense of the future. “It’s five years. For us, five years is a huge amount of time. We have never known if we would be around more than a few months in advance. Now we can kind of plan things, we can count on being here down the line.”

He pauses, then elaborates. “We have come to trust whatever mechanism it is that allows us to continue to be around. It’s not as if there’s any rational reason to think that now it’s more likely that we’re going to be around, with the possible exception of the MacArthur. It’s only that we have all come to see, you know, I don’t want to say miracles, but to see unexpected surprises happen so many times that we just now function assuming that somehow things will work out. It doesn’t mean that you can sleep much better--but you do assume you’ll be here. And I think we actually do sleep better, and I can’t begin to explain why. Which doesn’t mean that it all couldn’t fall apart next fall.”

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David Pagel is a regular contributor to Calendar.