In the Beginning: Artists Respond to Genesis
Works by: Alan Berliner, Trenton Doyle Hancock, Ben Rubin, Matthew Ritchie, Kay Rosen, Shirley Shor, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, William Blake, Auguste Rodin, Marc Chagall, Barnett Newman, Jacob Lawrence, Ann Hamilton, and Tom Marioni
The Contemporary Jewish Museum
San Francisco, CA
8 June 2008 – 6 January 2009

by Tonya Warner

The newly redone Contemporary Jewish Museum’s initial draw is arguably its eye-catching design by celebrity architect Daniel Libeskind. On the same fame level as the likes of Renzo Piano, Herzog & de Meuron, and Rem Koolhaas, Libeskind’s name is guaranteed to bring a high profile. Known primarily for designing the Jewish Museum in Berlin, his sharply angled buildings are generally loved for their facades but hated for their interior impracticalities. At the new Contemporary Jewish Museum, however, Libeskind’s apparent disdain for right angles was reeled in by the museum’s repurposing of an historic power substation building, whose façade was retained. As a result, the building becomes a pleasant marriage of functional exhibition spaces and innovative design.

The Libeskind signature comes in the form of the Yud Gallery, a blue diamond bespeckled with skylights with juts strangely off the stately and boxy power station. Inside, however, the space is mesmerizing and transcendent with soaring ceilings and odd angles. John Zorn’s “Aleph-Bet Sound Project” does quite well in a space that would not comfortably hold art. Zorn commissioned sound pieces from various musicians based on gematria of the Hebrew alphabet, exploring the mystical and spiritual connexions between sound, harmony, and meaning.

The main exhibit, “In the Beginning” is, like its vessel, a mixing of the old and the new, traditional and inventive, spiritual and secular. This seems to be a theme of the museum, in its mission of being all inclusive. The show manages to pull off these seemingly disparate works, that range from contemporary commissions to Chagall, to illuminated manuscripts, quite well, due to excellent curating. The theme was interpretations of the book of Gensis and the creation of life as we know it. What struck me as quite progressive is the inclusion of works that question the role of an all-mighty god in this process. Ben Rubin came across something called the Horn Antenna, built in New Jersey in 1959. This rather crazy looking contraption that resembles a giant ear horn, was able to record cosmic background radiation that in turn helped to confirm the “Big Bang” theory. For his work, “God’s Breath Hovering Over the Waters (Big Master’s Voice)”, Rubin provides documentary photographs, along with a small-scale recreation of the antenna that plays recordings of the scientists, as well as the cosmic sounds themselves. In this context, the piece becomes not just an interesting scientific artifact, but also a rumination on belief and the sometimes irreconcilable differences between religion and science.

Another stand-out contemporary work in the show is Matthew Ritchie’s “Day One,” a series of abstract animations on screens embedded in a wall covered with black line drawings. The work is intended as an exploration of the idea of infinite possible realities. His abstracted blobs reference the origins of life, bringing into question how we got from there to here and all that has led up to this very moment. It opens the mind to the possibilities and consequences of a shift along the long sequence of events of history. It’s a very reflective, meditative work that creates more open-ended questions than answers or interpretations.