‘Night Begins the Day’ thrills but falls short at Jewish Museum
Rethinking Space, Time and Beauty — the first collaboration of Renny Pritikin and Lily Siegel, the Contemporary Jewish Museum’s new senior and junior curators — is a stirring exhibition that never achieves the focus it needs.
The project tries to get its arms around central contradictions of our historical moment: the coincidence of triumphant technology and human-engineered ecological crisis; how our probing of nature’s secrets confirms the cosmic insignificance of our vaunted progress; our frustrated drive — the root of much sadism and violence — to account morally or theologically for our own existence.
The curators try to link this vision, whose emotional key is mingled awe and dread — de-divinized in late 18th century aesthetic theory as “the sublime” — with threads in contemporary art, entwining them around themes of space, time and beauty.
Klea McKenna’s coolly lyrical black-and-white photograms of fallen rain similarly connect intensity of observation with openness to the beauty of phenomena, including the photochemical phenomena of her image-making.
Light rephotographed declassified Defense Department archive images of aboveground nuclear weapons tests: pictures of human technology’s most perverse bid — so far — to marshal the destructive power of nature.
With the projected videos of David Crooks and Masood Kamandy, the frame of reference narrows from the ecological and apocalyptic to the social and mundane.
Crooks offers a long street-level tracking shot, his camera sighting down numerous alleys and other urban passageways, his editing having collapsed the enclosing architecture into razor-thin facades that occlude passersby, making them appear and disappear, phantom-like.
Kamandy’s low-flying aerial imagery, projected downward onto a white floor-level platform, describes sprawling suburban Southern California neighborhoods, dimmed digitally, except for the many swimming pools among them, which glow like phosphorescent amoebas.
Static art objects sit at a disadvantage among the spellbinding video works, but 80 paintings by Peter Dreher, from a series ongoing for more than 40 years, stand out by the demands they make on viewers’ attention.
Each 8-by-10-inch canvas depicts the same empty drinking glass from the same vantage point, variations arising only from the changing lights of different times of day and seasons and from nuances of color and touch that Dreher needs to render them.