If Spertus Museum director Rhoda Rosen had cooked up a piece of performance art to launch her new exhibit, Imaginary Coordinates, it couldn’t have been more surreal than the events that have played out at that center for Judaica over the past month. Spertus’s intriguing contribution to the map festival that’s been running at city cultural institutions since last year, Imaginary Coordinates juxtaposes antique and modern maps of the Holy Land (mostly from Spertus’s own collection) with the work of eight contemporary Israeli and Palestinian artists. Rosen wanted to “explore the limits of mapping,” reveal its cultural context, and “invite discussion.”
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This was surprising because the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies, which includes a college and a library as well as the museum, had opened its celebrated new ten-story structure on Michigan Avenue only six months before. The building, designed by the Chicago firm of Krueck + Sexton, and constructed for about $38 million, won immediate plaudits for a sculptural facade that manages to be both innovative and respectful of its neighbors along the Michigan Avenue street wall. Made of more than 700 panes of gently folding glass, the facade’s stunning from a distance, reminding viewers of a cut diamond or a huge piece of origami. From the inside, however, it turns the world gray. The acclaimed facade is embedded with tiny ceramic dots that control light and heat and prevent God-knows-how-many fatal bird crashes but also veil the view. With your nose to it, it’s like looking at Grant Park through a pointillist lens. From a few steps back, it’s a Windex emergency.
The museum’s Holocaust exhibit, a few steps away, is even more remote. Consider, a multimedia work by Indian artist Ranbir Kaleka, includes video projected on a wall separated from the viewer by a gaping hole in the floor—an atrium opening to the library, a level below. The gap is a literal distancing device, perhaps meant to provoke thoughts about the viewer’s relationship to atrocity, but watching it is like viewing a movie on one of those little screens four rows away in an airplane. This was weirdly compounded by the smell of the space: the remains of a Mother’s Day buffet were still spread out, the sumptuous odors mingling with the soundtrack of recounted Holocaust horrors.
Rosen, who worked on the exhibit for three years, notes no art was removed from the show during the closure, although wall cards were revised and objects were rearranged. A case containing a paligirl T-shirt and black shorts with palestine emblazoned across the butt (sold by Detroit-based HZwear) was moved from its original spot on the path between the elevator and the boardroom. Rosen no doubt had some difficult days during the hiatus, but insists she’s not defensive about the result: “The board, staff, and myself stand behind the integrity of this exhibit,” she says, adding that the guided tours will provide “context” and encourage discussion.
