More than meets the eye
What do you say about a museum that can't hang paintings in one of its main galleries?
By Jonathon Keats, Photography by Tim Griffith
You’ll see no art on the walls of one of the three galleries in the Contemporary Jewish Museum, which opens this month across from Yerba Buena Gardens. With a ceiling that peaks some 60 feet overhead and walls that slant diagonally, the room is a cube tipped on its end. And the windows on all sides—36 diamonds cut into the angular facade, one of them sitting just a foot above the varnished wood floor—saturate the room with ever-changing light as the sun passes overhead. The space is visually overwhelming; even if you could hang paintings here, they’d only be a distraction. So, for its first exhibition, the museum has commissioned some of the most talented practitioners in the world to fill this stunning space with sound art, auditory landscapes that visitors can explore as if strolling through an orchestra. The museum’s embrace of such edgy art is completely consistent with its enthusiasm for a room tipped on a corner.
This new museum is admirably willing to take chances—starting with the decision, in 1998, to give New York–based architect Daniel Libeskind his first North American commission, back when the former Jewish Museum occupied borrowed space on Steuart Street. Libeskind was not a celebrity when he took the job, half a decade before his master plan for the former site of the World Trade Center made his name one of the most recognizable in his field. At the time, he had little more than a respectable teaching career and some imaginative designs on paper, though he was completing a couple of projects in Germany. The choice was courageous, and the results are sui generis. The Contemporary Jewish Museum is a masterpiece unsurpassed by any building that Libeskind has since designed—a singularly poetic, 63,000-square-foot invention built in an abandoned PG&E substation (and the absolute opposite of his bombastic Freedom Tower, intended to soar a patriotic 1,776 feet above Ground Zero).
Seeing Libeskind’s oblique forms, clad in deep-blue steel and dropped into the old brick and terra cotta of the 1907 power station, prepares you for the complex spatial interplay inside, without giving anything away. The forms represent the two letters that make up the Hebrew word chai (life), as in the Jewish toast and the song from Fiddler on the Roof, “L’chaim!” (“To life!”). The room tilted on edge is meant to resemble the letter yud. As you
walk from the yud to the long, narrow space based on chet, the first letter of the word chai, you can appreciate Libeskind’s deft use of the power station structure, and how this practical rectangular building, designed immediately after the 1906 earthquake by celebrated local architect Willis Polk, has modulated Libeskind’s instinctive angularity. Some of the walls in the chet are raked—though not as extremely as in the yud—playing off the linearity of the original building, which is further revealed inside in the iron trusses and the rectangular skylights above. These are walls that can hold art, not because Libeskind compromised with the curators or gave in to the building codes protecting this historic landmark, but because his formal inventiveness found an ideal frame in an edifice designed to be functional. Libeskind could be unrestrained because Polk provided the support. As a result, this may be the first Libeskind building to function successfully as an exhibition space.
I have encountered other Libeskind museums, most memorably the Jewish Museum Berlin. Completed in 1999, it remains the basis of Libeskind’s professional reputation: It received Germany’s top architecture award and won the architect the Hiroshima Art Prize, essentially a Nobel Peace Prize for artists, in 2001. The reason for the latter recognition is that the Jewish Museum Berlin, a remarkably expressive building laden with symbolism, is equally a Holocaust memorial. Astonishingly, it didn’t host any exhibitions for its first two years. Most who saw the museum during that time preferred it without any art on the walls. I could see why, as I walked through a building at odds with itself.
Libeskind designed the edifice to resemble a broken Star of David when viewed from above, which made the galleries difficult to navigate. Built in intimidating proportions with cold materials such as concrete, and lacerated with gashes of skylight worthy of a prison, the building unfailingly induces anxiety. A sickness in the belly seems effective for a Holocaust memorial, yet is hardly conducive to viewing the Jewish ritual objects at the core of the museum’s collection, let alone contemporary sculpture or paintings. Even Libeskind’s symbolic flourishes seem ridiculous in the midst of
such brute architectural power. For example, just outside the building, Libeskind’s Garden of Exile and Emigration—a grid of 48 towering concrete vessels of soil from Berlin surrounding one column of dirt from Jerusalem, intended to embody the founding of Israel in 1948—foreshadows the pedantic populism of his Freedom Tower.
The inconsistencies of the Jewish Museum Berlin reflect Libeskind’s own contradictions. He is an academic determined to get things built. In his transition from professor to practitioner, he learned that abstruse comments about “spaces of nonequilibrium” befuddled clients and alienated prospective funders. The public preferred to hear that “it was not just the light of nature; it was the light in people’s eyes” and “the beauty of their aspirations” that inspired his creations.
Those were the words Libeskind used two years ago at the dedication ceremony for the Denver Art Museum, his first completed building in the United States. Like the Jewish Museum Berlin, the Denver museum functions better as a monument. The form is crystalline, like a broken geode, a skyline of shards. The galleries are stunningly faceted, and the glass walls are cut so that no two are parallel. Intervention after the fact by the chief exhibition designer, who added dozens of movable internal walls, made it easier to hang pictures in the museum. The cloying symbolism of the facets and glass (“the light in people’s eyes”) cloaking an untenable building is classic Libeskind, as is the museum’s undeniable sculptural force. The museum is the art.
What’s different about the Contemporary Jewish Museum? Not the symbolism. If anything, Libeskind’s metaphor building is more mawkish than his speechifying at the Denver Art Museum and more contrived than his gardening at the Jewish Museum Berlin. According to Libeskind, the word chai is meant to be “literally the life source and the form of the museum,” a notion vague enough to let his architecture stand for “continuity and identity…innovation and tradition…creativity, vitality, and access.” Even the old PG&E plant doesn’t escape his metaphoric reach: “[The building] will transform the physical energy associated with the legacy of the power substation to the power of human communication and imagination.” It sounds as if Libeskind’s architect’s statement, from which these words are excerpted, got mixed up with a Barack Obama campaign speech.
Yet the building that
Libeskind wants us to see (or elect) cannot stand up to the one he has built. The exterior does not dominate, as it does at the Denver Art Museum. On the contrary, seeing Libeskind’s oblique blue forms tipped into the old power station, encountering the puzzle fit of such disparate elements, provokes one to wonder what would happen within such a structure. The answer to that question is the second reason why Libeskind’s building is an unusual success.
Since the Contemporary Jewish Museum is not a collecting institution, it has nothing of its own to display, so the programming is almost entirely open-ended. This month, inside the chet, the museum will launch an exhibition of on-loan art inspired by the creation tale in Genesis. Showing the world’s first seven days as depicted in Roman mosaics and medieval manuscripts and Renaissance paintings, the exhibition will be historical, but the timeline of visual representations will also provide a backdrop for Genesis-inspired imagery by seven contemporary artists, who work in media ranging from painting to video. And inside the yud for the next six months will be the sound art, guest curated by legendary New York–based jazz saxophonist and composer John Zorn. Zorn won a MacArthur “genius” grant two years ago not only for his own performance, but also for the thousands of collaborations he has orchestrated, bringing together veteran downtown jazzmen raised on Coltrane with, say, fresh-off-the-boat klezmer players. His near-universal reach is one of the greatest assets he brings to San Francisco. It is allowing him to assemble a rotating roster of up to 22 works, one for each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, by as many composers.
For instance, there’s New York theater and sound artist Laurie Anderson, who uses hypersonic sound transmission, which can beam sound waves across a room as accurately as a laser can pinpoint light. With her hypersonic speaker, Anderson can suspend sounds in midair like audible holograms. Turn your head one way, and you might hear singing. Tilt it another, and you might hear a whisper in your ear. Equally renowned in his own field is Bay Area classical composer Terry Riley, whose mastery of sound sampling predates hip-hop by decades. Riley does many of his audio collages—which employ sources as far-reaching as deep-space sounds taped by NASA—using a MIDI keyboard. In
addition to installing a prerecorded work, he plans to play new compositions in the yud.
Performance is an ideal art form for this tilted gallery. I can imagine seeing dance here, soaring in a space so high and light. The complex shape suggests potential for installations in which site-specific geometric sculpture plays off Libeskind’s architecture. And I can foresee more sound art, more ambitious in scope. For example, I can envision making the yud into a musical instrument played by the sun, in which the windows, like keys on an organ, sound notes when struck with light.
Unconventional spaces call for unconventional art. Through innovative programming, the inventiveness of Libeskind’s architecture is being activated now as it ought to be in future years. Symbolism can’t be imposed on a building. Meaning can’t be ordained. It has to emerge from within.
JONATHON KEATS IS SAN FRANCISCO’S VISUAL ARTS CRITIC.
