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Museums

The Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco

Other than my son’s and my apartment, the doctor’s office and the pharmacy, I have not been anywhere inside a building in my three months in San Francisco. With regret, that avoidance extends to museums. Even though some have re-opened, with strict Covid-19 restrictions, I will not take risks when I don’t have to.

Public Testing station a block from the museum, people tested in the tents below

So I stood outside the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM) with frustration. I had visited before and would have loved to repeat the overall positive experience (they are reopening on 10/17). The museum has an interesting approach, praised by some, criticized by others, that includes having no permanent collection, and exploring the influence that Jewish ideas and concepts have had on our culture, rather than Jewish identity and history per se.

CJM’s mission statement to make “the diversity of the Jewish experience relevant for a 21st-century audience” is reflected in a plethora of curated and traveling exhibits, educational programs and events. As of two years ago, the most recent statistics I could find, 70 original and traveling exhibitions — an average of seven per year — as well as a vast number of educational programs, community events and opportunities for engagement were offered. More than 1.2 million people have visited since the new building opened in 2008; in 2017, the museum drew 125,000 visitors, 20,000 of them through school programs.

Worries that community engagement would overshadow representation of community achievement did not exactly pan out.

“The Contemporary Jewish Museum was thrust back to its community origins. But it is not concerned with recounting the origins of that community, nor with chronicling its triumphs and trials. You won’t find exhibitions about Levi Strauss, who began the jeans empire here and became a Jewish philanthropist.”

Hmmm.

Founded as a community organization in 1984, it grew rapidly and in 2002 embarked on a merger with another major Jewish museum, the Judah L. Magnes Museum in nearby Berkeley, which has the third-largest collection of Judaica in the United States. The union was called off in no time, given different perspectives and goals, which left CJM to fend with a much reduced budget (still ending up at $47.4 million for the construction) to re-build in a new location.

Which brings us to the building, all I could photograph this time around.

Designed by Studio Libeskind, with some of Daniel Libeskind’s familiar esoteric trademarks observed in his other designs, the building incorporates parts of a former PG&E substation on Minna Street. The station had been damaged in the 1906 earthquake and, although restored in 1907, had never played another role until the Jewish Community Museum board bought it from the San Francisco Redevelopment Agency in 1994 for $1.

Put together with the newly erected, upended blue-steel box astoundingly balancing on one corner atop CJM, the combination is supposed to form the Hebrew word l’chaim (life),  the ‘chet’ providing continuity for the exhibition and educational spaces, and the ‘yud’ serving as special exhibition, performance and event space.

Honestly, I wouldn’t have guessed that, if I hadn’t read about it. But then again, my first association with the cube were thoughts of another one, located in Mecca and being the holiest site in Islam, the Al-Kaaba Al-Musharrafa mosque or Kaaba. That one, which used to be on my bucket list to see before Covid-19 made all thoughts of travel obsolete, is covered by a curtain and of course squat. But cube associated with cube… and, as you would have predicted, I liked the imagined linkage between the Abrahamic religions.

The cube on site here is truly beautiful, even without a fabric cover, providing a sense of tapestry on its own. Clad in 3,028 luminous blue sheets of iridescent cross-fire interference stainless steel, it is finished in a unique cross-hatching surface that helps to diffuse and soften the reflection of light off the stainless steel. The panels change color depending on your view point, the time of day, the amount of shifting light due to clouds.

I don’t care that it is a scaled down version of an original plan (which was supposedly a sort of golden spaceship linked to the brick walls of the substation) by an architect who is, I am told, often scolded to be a one-trick pony, with crystalline structures used for a casino in Singapore, condo towers in Sacramento and St. Louis and a shopping center for the Las Vegas strip, among others. 

“The buildings seem to be the same thing over and over again,” suggests Aaron Betsky, former curator of architecture for the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and now director of the Netherlands Architecture Institute.(Ref.)

It is alive in the way it invites and reflects light, the way the windows provide anchors for curiosity, the way it beckons exploration while maintaining a sense of mystery, the way it exudes a kind of cautious optimism thinking it can pull of its balancing act – all reminiscent of Jewish culture throughout history.

Here is a CJM website that offers a variety of programs for your perusal.

For music I chose Elie Massias (starts at 7:45 on the video.)

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Exquisite Creatures

If you enjoy perpetual whiplash between disgust and fascination, do I have the thing for you! That is, if you hurry – this is the last weekend of Christopher Marley’s Exquisite Creatures at OMSI, and then they are packed away in cartons, glass or metal containers, and shipped off.

You’ll meet a jarring abundance of dead animals, 1000s and 1000s of them across two full floors of the museum, with the amounts of applied embalming fluid alone making centuries of Egyptian pharaohs roll in their pyramids, green with envy.

The exhibition shows the corporeal remnants of insects, butterflies, chameleons, crabs, scorpions, shells, snakes, turtles, fish and birds – all found dead, it is repeatedly emphasized, not killed for the show. The point, though, is, they are mostly not displayed as single specimens, to introduce the public to the wonders of nature, as they would in a natural history museum, where the aurochs might elicit awe that cannot be had on the streets of NYC (or only be had by other sources…)

The corpses are displayed in patterns and arranged by color, carefully calibrated by Marley, a self-taught naturalist who was a school drop-out and men’s fashion model at various points in his life, but is now a true nature enthusiast who speaks from the heart about the interconnectedness of things and travels the world to find the materials for his designs.

And designs they are: spanning the spectrum from a likely advertisement for room freshener, to semblance of abstract aboriginal art.

And they are fascinating, as long as you can suppress thoughts about the source of the collage pieces. The eye part of me could not get enough of the colors on display, the variations of nature’s palette, the sheer beauty of evolution’s blueprints and the inventiveness of Marley’s kaleidoscopic creations. The brain part of me could not forgive that there is yet another way we exploit nature, by manipulating it into artificial constructs that speak to artificial design rather than an intended place in the world.

Accumulations of feathers and seashells seem innocuous enough. It gets a bit trickier with the bugs, although they look sufficiently like buttons you get way with ignoring where they once might have crawled.

The butterflies are familiar as cased objects, centuries of collectors, pins in hand, made sure of that.

The fish and turtles seem so plastic-like that you can avoid thinking about their origins.

It gets complicated with the 4-legged creatures

and for me, surprise, dear reader, with the birds. To see them used as token kaleidoscopic images feels sacrilegious.

I tried to think through what produced my reaction. People have always displayed nature with precision – I grew up, for example, with prints by Maria Sibylla Merian, one of my heroines, on the dining room wall, the 17th century naturalist and artist, who embarked on trips around the world to collect insect specimens for truly scientific purposes and rendered them beautiful. But these were engravings. People make land art with found natural materials, but these are inanimate, stones and wood for the most part. I have no problem with floats being covered with designs made out of dead flowers (other than the tastelessness of their arrangements, as a rule.)

It must be the sense that what was once animate, a living, creeping, crawling, slithering, hopping, swimming or fluttering subject, has become an object. The placement in complicated designs might invoke overall iridescent beauty, but it creates tokens, puzzle pieces, erasing a singular existence. And clearly the troubling effect on viewers gets linearly stronger the higher upward the evolutionary ladder we get. As a thought experiment try to envision that you’d place dead hamsters in geometrically intricate patterns. Dead Cats? Dead Sheep? It is no coincidence that mammals make no appearance in this show.

For every gaggle of kids surrounding me, squealing with delight about the wonders in front them, there was the one wailing in the corner,”I can’t look at this!” Empathetic 4th graders dragging their class mate to a display of flowers: “It’s safe here, it’s flowers! “Little did they know they’d just arrived at pitcher plants, insect-killing machines……

I left OMSI with a treasure trove of images that remind me of individual beauty of a creature – and a sense of renewed commitment to and respect for nature, not because of what I saw, but in opposition to it. Not a bad outcome for a museum visit!

Let’s now hear the fleas! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Drzcj5LF7K4&feature=emb_logo

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Consider the Tears

“Children are uniquely vulnerable to physiological effects of chemical agents. A child’s smaller size, more frequent number of breaths per minute and limited cardiovascular stress response compared to adults magnifies the harm of agents such as tear gas.” This from the American Academy of Pediatrics, an organization of 67.000 pediatricians, in response to the Trump administration’s teargassing of children at the southern border. The images that floated in the news after the events at San Ysidro did not need doctors to explain to you how bad things are.

What do you do when someone you know is involved in these kinds of unjustifiable actions? What do you do, further more, if that someone happens to provide you with a lot of money that is essential to your organization? This is the question being asked right now (by some) at the Whitney Museum for Modern Art in NYC.

Benefactors and Malefactors

Long exposition in link attached above. My summary below:

It had been generally known that multiple trustees of this museum (and for that matter many others) had links to the weapons and oil extraction industry. It took the singular case of images of these teargassed children and spent teargas canisters bearing the brand name Safariland to stir action and be outraged about Warren B. Kander, Vice Chair of the Whitney’s Board of Trustees. He is CEO of the company that is linked to the manufacture and distribution of these substances used at the border. (Safariland? Does the name point to crocodile tears, or to the chase of brown-skinned living beings on southern continents? Who comes up with these names??? But I digress.)

More than 100 staff members signed a protest letter, urging the museum to no longer accept donations from controversial donors. One of the first responses? “It seems unfair to single out a specific Board member...” Right. One should look at all of them.

The notion that people involved in weapons profiteering could whitewash their position through philanthropy disturbed as well. Activists from Decolonize This Place organized a protest on December 9th, and are now preparing for a town hall on January 26th to explore further action. Adam Weinberg, the director of the museum, responded with an appeal to accept one’s place in the hierarchy: “As members of the Whitney community, we each have our critical and complementary roles: trustees do not hire staff, select exhibitions, organize programs or make acquisitions, and staff does not appoint or remove board members.“

https://www.artforum.com/news/activists-call-for-town-hall-to-address-controversy-over-whitney-museum-vice-chair-s-ties-to-defense-company-78249

He might as well have reused what he wrote, in the catalogue introduction to their current blockbuster retrospective Andy Warhol: From A to B and Back Again, about Andy Warhol’s art. “It is about currency, in every sense of the word.”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/11/19/theres-still-no-escaping-andy-warhol

Photographs today are from my last visit to the Whitney in 2017;

And since it’s past time for insurrection: here is 2018 John Zorn, who used to work with the Whitney. I know, it’s an acquired taste, but he writes truly smart music!




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Distractions

I iron when I need therapeutic diversion. I love to iron and to see all that crinkly stuff somehow get back in semi-pristine shape, o.k., hints of pristine, given my ironing skills. It calms me down to watch the overflowing ironing basket empty slowly, and the shelves back in order, neat for about a minute-and-a-half. I like ironing even more than I despise cooking, and that’s saying something.

It did not work to calm my nerves, however, on this eve of midterm election. If anything, thoughts cropped up like: “Which one of my beloved tablecloths (I have a bit of a fetish there) would I take if we had to leave the country?” Now, we are NOT leaving the country, not yet anyhow, but the fact that these thoughts involuntarily pop up is disconcerting.

Back to positive thinking then, heeding the sage advice of those less prone to drama than yours’ truly; the only thought that came up, alas, was along the lines of “How did other people manage to get through far worse catastrophes than a potentially messed-up midterm election?”

Well, for one, they made it through a horrible war and decided to focus on beauty, and playfulness, and doing good. They, in this case, refers to the French, who shortly after WW II created a small miracle of a traveling show displaying the height of French fashion on small, strangely life-like wire mannequins in sets created by numerous fashion houses and artists. The idea was to raise funds for war relief and also bolster a sense of pride in a people identifying with fashion as an important part of their culture.

The 237 little mannequins in their elaborate, functioning outfits, buttons buttoned, zippers zipped, hats ever so slightly angled,

 

 

 

 

were put into sets representing either Parisian landscapes or fantasy worlds, all depending on the fashion to be augmented by such backgrounds.

The exhibit opened at the Louvre in 1945 and then traveled the world.

From Wikipedia: After Paris was liberated, the idea for a miniature theatre of fashion came from Robert Ricci, son of couturier Nina Ricci. All materials were in short supply at the end of World War II, and Ricci proposed using miniature mannequins, or fashion dolls, to address the need to conserve textiles, leather, fur, and so on. The mannequins were 27.5 inches (700 mm) tall, fabricated of wire. Some 60 Paris couturiers amongst them Nina Ricci, Balenciaga, Germaine Lecomte, Mad Carpentier, Martial & Armand, Hermès, Philippe & Gaston, Madeleine Vramant, Jeanne Lanvin, Marie-Louise Bruyère, Pierre Balmain.joined and volunteered their scrap materials and labour to create miniature clothes in new styles for the exhibit. Milliners created miniature hats, hairstylists gave the mannequins individual coiffures, and jewellers such as Van Cleef and Arpels and Cartier contributed small necklaces and accessories. Some seamstresses even crafted miniature undergarments to go under the couture designs. Seamstresses carried their sewing machines around with them to complete work on the Théâtre de la Mode during Paris’s post-War electricity shortages.

You can see it all close to home at Maryhill Museum in Goldendale WA, where each year a third of the sets get rotated into view. (The museum closes on 11/15 until the spring, so you either have to dash or you have something to look forward to in 2019.) The link below gives a thoughtful, more detailed description.

Creativity Triumphs – Theatre de la Mode

I can see how a project of this size can help people focus, be motivated, create a sense of community. The money it generated for victims of war must have been meaningful to the organizers. But above all, I think the creativity that went into generating this beauty served as a release valve from the direness of everyday post-war existence.

As Phil Ochs put it: In an ugly world the only true protest is beauty.  Looks like we have options, even after November 6th…..

 

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Made by Hand

What would I do without my friends? They open up my horizons, over and over again. Just last week a dear one dragged me into the Portland Art Museum to an exhibit that I would have never, ever visited on my own: the show about LAIKA, the PDX-based animated movie producers.

I don’t watch animated movies, never have. And so I never thought about what goes into them, except some kind of trickery of animation, probably computer-based now, via filmed drawings then. What I now learn is that the folks at LAIKA actually build models, in 3D, creating entire worlds, that are the basis for their magic.

https://portlandartmuseum.org/exhibitions/animating-life/

The exhibit at PAM shows some of these models, elucidates the technical processes, gives behind the scene glimpses of the core mechanisms, materials and tools used. All of which was rather interesting, but paled in comparison to some visions inside my head: what would it be like to go to work and everyday create a world in full detail. Sort of like being a minor god, who has the choice to supply or withhold. To let whimsey dictate some of the details, or full understanding of an artificial, agreed upon universe command the ways to fill it.

 

And, importantly, a work that unites thoughts and ideas with working with your hands. Someone builds all these models, cuts and saws, flattens and glues, scrapes and irons, sews and hammers, and puts it all together to create a world. Mind boggling.

Not that I have the talent for handiwork, or, these days, the flexibility of joints and fingers. But it speaks to me, and makes me want to get into the artisan’s minds of how it feels to make something, rather than sit at a computer and write, or take pictures with my camera. Well, for occasional change, anyhow……

This week, then, I’ll focus on things that are made or tools that are used.  And might even watch a Laika movie to see the model worlds come to live.

 

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La Muerta

DCMX has more museums than any other city in the world with the exception of London, or so I am told. Today I am providing a glimpse of three of them, as different from each other as can be and yet linked by a common theme, how to deal with the dead.

Here is the home of Trotzky during his short exile. The museum is a modest affair, house and grounds pretty much left untouched, down to the rabbit cages since the time of his assassination.  A small modern gallery has been added, exhibiting permanent historical photographs and changing contemporary political shows. The vibe is one of simultaneous veneration and resignation, and gratitude if a small percentage of the multitudes visiting the nearby Frida Kahlo residence is willing to take a small detour.

An important man lived and died here, a Marxist revolutionary, leader of the communist party after the October revolution, head of the Fourth International, enemy of Stalin. Several attempts on his life failed, until one didn’t – in 1940 a soviet agent killed him with an ice axe.  You wouldn’t know it; despite the grave in the garden, the delapidated place exudes a kind of peacefulness, languor or even indifference.

The contrast could not be larger when entering the Museo Nacional de Antropología e Historia – INAH,  

It is an architectural marvel, a glorious memorial to a diverse past, and filled with awe-inspiring collections. It is also, quite frankly, overwhelming. The kind of place that you can only truly get to know if you live nearby and have unlimited time to visit.

Exhibits are in chronological order of Mexican civilizations, more or less, spread out counterclockwise around a central courtyard with water features. Each individual exhibit also has their own, smaller courtyard. They surround the building from the outside, buffering it from the world and providing tranquil panoramas of how people lived through the centuries. Guides hover, groups scurry around, multitudes of people are entranced in the offerings of the showcases.

And here, in some important ways, death is the centerpiece, with so much collected evidence of sacrifices, death celebrations, death battles and games, and skulls where ever you look.  Since I am no historian and know nothing about Mexican culture I am offering three accounts of the preoccupation with La Muerta found at various sources.  They seem to overlap and paint an interesting picture.

Chicano Obsession and Acceptance of La Muerta

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sandra-cai-chen/mexico-death-comfort_b_8775574.html

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2010/nov/02/mexican-celebrate-day-of-dead

The third museum I visited, the university’s museum for contemporary art, http://muac.unam.mx, is lodged somewhere in-between. It, too, is modern and architecturally successful. It is the perfect space to exhibit contemporary art, with dark caves, media theatres and huge, bright, airy spaces.

Hard to describe how intensely one of the current exhibits, Jill Magid’s A Letter Always Arrives at Its Destination. (The Barragán Archives) drew me in.

The website blurb says: Jill Magid brings together the divergent strands of the personal and professional archives of the Architect Luis Barragán, encompassing the complex intersections between the psychological and the judicial, between authorship and property, and between the human body and the body of work. With this project, the MUAC opens up a political and ethical debate on the current and future conditions of the transferal of cultural heritage from a model of the nation-state to one of corporate institutions. 

I say:  this was about 2 women fixating on a dead guy they had never met, an ensuing cat fight, exhumation, transformation of the ashes, legal threats, claims about the notions and to the rights of exclusivity, question about who are the rightful heirs to the papers of any one national  – in sum, utterly terrific, intelligent, thought-provoking conceptual art. Showing how how a body of work, art can transcend death, on so many levels. Weak in the knees just thinking about it, jealous, too.

Here is the long version which reads like a thriller:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/08/01/how-luis-barragan-became-a-diamond

This show did not lend itself to being photographed, and in some ways my brain was too busy processing the information to have room for arranging shots. Just as well. Theory, no action, this time. (Exhibit title below says: Theory as Action.)

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