LOS ANGELES — As you push on metal bars, a towering 16-foot giraffe with a mosaic body stretches its head. Flamingos with fly-swatter feet and pink-purse bodies promenade past, guided by puppeteers. A child turning a crank sets off sparks of lightning, signaling an approaching storm. And a moving rubber ramp lifts small animals, two by two, into an enormous ark made of unpainted fir.
Such are the creatures and creations that welcome visitors to "Noah's Ark" at the Skirball Cultural Center here. Inspired by the biblical tale, this 8,000-square-foot indoor playground includes about 400 life-size animal constructions, many of them interactive machines. It is the most extraordinary children's exhibition I have seen.
I am not interested, though, simply in this ark's brilliant conception (or in trying to juxtapose its sensations with those of Darren Aronofsky's film "Noah"). This exhibition is powerful partly because it forces us to pay attention to each animal in all its strangeness. Each creature, with its eccentric assemblage of found objects and mechanisms, is a singular world with its own idiosyncrasies and principles; by immersing yourself in one, you begin to understand others. And that brings us to one of the more vexing themes in the contemporary museum world — the nature of identity — that lies beneath the surface of this unusual institution and requires more exploration.
This season, the Skirball completed its 30-year master plan with a final building on! its 15-acre campus, which now attracts 600,000 visitors a yea! r. The center, which first opened here in the Santa Monica Mountains in 1996 (and is bolstered by a $150 million endowment), is designed by the architect Moshe Safdie, while its conceptual vision has been nurtured by its charismatic founding president, Uri D. Herscher. (The Ark was created in 2007.)
And what is the Skirball about? What is the vision that encompasses a performing arts space, conference halls, libraries, event spaces, gardens and educational programs, and that plays a vibrant role in Los Angeles cultural life with lectures, dance, film and music?
Its origins are in the oldest Jewish museum in the United States, which was established in 1913 in Cincinnati at the Reform movement's seminary, Hebrew Union College. In! 1972 the philanthropist Jack Skirball underwrote the museum's move to Los Angeles. Later, he ensured that it would be at the heart of this center, which he created with the guidance of Mr. Herscher. The Skirball now holds one of the nation's largest collections of Judaica and related objects: more than 30,000 items, many on display in an ambitious permanent exhibition. That is one reason the Skirball calls itself a Jewish institution. It also describes itself as universalist, multicultural and multiethnic, but Mr. Herscher stresses that this is actually a reflection of its Jewish character.
This gives the Skirball an unusual place in the spectrum of identity museums. Typically, such museums are created by immigrant or minority groups to trace their history, demonstrate their sufferings and celebrate their triumphs, ending with an assertive embrace of their i! dentities. This narrative shapes recent museums about Chinese-Americans! , Japanese-Americans, Arab Americans, Hispanic Americans — and with fundamental modifications — black Americans and American Indians.
But the Jewish American museum narrative is subtly different, and at the Skirball, starkly so. In its literature, the Skirball says it seeks "to build a community including every ethnic and cultural identity." And, at the end of its main exhibition, a video dramatizes that dream: Faces of different ethnicities morph into one another, demonstrating an interchangeable unity.
Jewish American identity here sees its triumph partly as dissolution: not in religious particularity, but in secular universalism; not in distinctiveness, but in resemblance. Aspects of these ideas appear in other Jewish! museums, like the National Museum of American Jewish History in Philadelphia and the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. (Variations even appear in the Israel Museum, a Jewish-identity museum with a national focus that only obliquely embraces its national identity.)
There is a tradition behind these attitudes. The New York Society for Ethical Culture, with its emphasis on universal ethical teachings, grew out of similar impulses in 1876; it was started by Felix Adler, who had intended to become a Reform Jewish rabbi like his father. The Skirball continues the tradition: Mr. Herscher was ordained as a Reform rabbi, as was Jack Skirball. Both left the pulpit. Skirball made his fortune first as a movie producer (of Hitchcock's "Saboteur" in 1942 and "Shadow of a Doubt" in 1943) and then in real estate, before working with Mr. Herscher.
The main exhibition's narrative treats Jewish history as a progressive series of encounters with other nations, reaching its apotheosis in the United States, where an emphasis is placed on the development of secular and political universalism. American Jews are said to embrace the message of Passover, for example, by "taking active roles in civic life and supporting the global struggle for human rights." One of the most dramatic displays is a reproduction in two-thirds scale of the Statue of Liberty's torch.
In fact, while the exhibition broadly surveys some aspects of Jewish belief and alludes to the diversity of Jewish life, the spirit of celebration here comes more from superseding traditional identity than from embracing it — an inversion of the usual identity museum theme. And while identity museums often end up dist! orting history by failing to see it whole, at the Skirball we can glimpse some flaws of universalism: It can lead to sentimental generalities, and if universalism becomes the main mode of seeing, much is also being missed.
These issues reverberate in Skirball's Ark. The biblical tale is secularized (there is no God), and the Ark becomes what the Skirball calls "a symbol of human resilience." And while the biblical rainbow was a divine promise, here another message appears projected on a wall: "Build a Better World."
In the Skirball literature, the Ark is a demonstration of the center's doctrines, sounding chords of contemporary virtue: "The diverse menagerie of Noah's Ark serves as a metaphor for human society"; it encourages children! "to work together for the greater good, to strengthen connections wi! thin and among families, to value diversity within community, to respect and protect minorities."
Museum aides emphasize such messages, and the Ark design encourages cooperative interaction. But its power lies elsewhere. A lion with a straw mane and chopstick whiskers is lying down with a metallic lamb. A zebra's haunches are wind turbines. An Asian elephant really is Asian: made of a gong from Thailand, vegetable steamers from Laos and lokta paper from Nepal. Encountering these creatures, we become like postdiluvian children, just beginning to make sense of a new world, exhilarated by its possibilities.
Outside in the arroyo garden, a companion sculpture created by Ned Kahn with Mr. Safdie is called "Rainbow Arbor"; it is a curved metal arc wi! th mist sprayers that, in sunlight, creates natural versions of the biblical symbol arcing through the air. The exhibition becomes a celebration of play, inspiring fascination, reviving wonder. How bland and impractical universalism seems in contrast. And how varied and astonishing the world's particularity becomes.
Such particularism can't be done without, which is why Skirball can frustrate with some of its preoccupations; it is only through our individuality and difference that we learn to see anything at all. Universalism is also needed, of course. The challenge is not to see one way or the other, but both at the same time.
Source : http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/22/arts/design/noahs-ark-at-skirball-cultural-center-in-los-angeles.html
