Menil’s Byzantine Fresco Chapel reborn
When the Menil Collection returned a trio of priceless 13th-century mosaics to the nation of Cyprus three years ago, no one knew what would become of the exquisite Byzantine Fresco Chapel architect Francois de Menil designed to hold them. Widely admired and more overtly spiritual than the Rothko Chapel, it’s been empty three years.
The unobtrusive concrete building two blocks east of the museum was custom-made for the frescoes Dominique de Menil, the architect’s mother, rescued from thieves in the 1980s. She paid more than $522,000 for the damaged art, spent $815,000 to restore it and raised $4 million to build the consecrated chapel after the Greek Orthodox Church of Cyprus agreed to a long-term loan.
Now the chapel has been dramatically resurrected as a space for year-long, site-specific art installations. The first is by renowned Canadian artists Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, whose multimedia environments can be both disorienting and transcen-
dent.
The delicate-looking interior skeleton of steel and glowing glass that held the frescoes is gone. In its place hangs “The Infinity Machine,” a huge, rotating mobile made of more than 150 antique mirrors. Amid changing lights, the mirrors throw such mysterious shadows around the dark room that even Cardiff found herself ducking imaginary things last week.
Like a giant work of Cubism or Surrealism, “The Infinity Machine” echoes some of the museum’s prize possessions.
Ethereal sounds rotate around the room, conjuring a whoosh-y aural storm, or maybe the vibrations of 1,000 chanting yogis. In fact, the sounds literally came from the heavens: They’re digitally translated recordings of electromagnetic fields taken by NASA’s still out-there Voyager I and II probes as they passed Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
The architect is pleased. “It’s good the building is being used again as an art space,” de Menil said. He finds “The Infinity Machine” relevant to the chapel’s history. “It has movement and dynamic components but also a contemplative aspect that forces you back on yourself, through time and memory,” he said.
De Menil recommended several years ago that Cardiff and Miller could be commissioned to re-imagine his chapel. He loved “The Forty Part Motet” they created with 40 individually-recorded choral voices for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Fuentidueña Chapel in 2013.
“The Infinity Machine” eventually happened because Menil director Josef Helfenstein invited Cardiff and Miller to create a work anywhere they wanted on the museum’s campus for his exhibition “Experiments With Truth: Gandhi and Images of NonViolence.” He thought they might want to lead visitors around the campus with one of their famous audio or video walks, but Cardiff chose the fresco chapel.
She and Miller, who are married, had never made a mobile before, but have long admired the work of Alexander Calder and sketched mobiles in their notebooks. The chapel’s 29-foot-high ceiling and black box shape provided the right setting.
They were too busy to create a big piece in time for the exhibition’s opening last fall, so “The Infinity Machine” squeaked in like a cosmic coda. (The rest of the show over in the Menil’s main museum ends Sunday.) .
Cardiff and Miller wanted to riff on Pythagoras’ ancient music-of-thespheres.
“We live on the west coast of Canada; it’s kind of hippy-dippy, right? Lots of New Age, banging-ondrums spiritual stuff,” Cardiff said. “This idea of the scale of Pythagoras resonating with your body, spirituality out in the universe; we started thinking about that, then we came across the NASA recordings that fit right in with Houston.”
The idea to use mirrors came to Miller one night as he sat in the bathtub. About 20 antique mirrors hang in the couples bathroom. Their ornate frames reminded him of old-fashioned paintings. Like paintings, mirrors are flat surfaces that give an illusion of space. And they reflect human histories.
“Think of all the people who have looked at themselves in these mirrors,” Miller said.
Mirrors can also seem spiritual and magical; Cardiff finds them beautiful as physical objects. “Some of them have writing on the back,” she said.
The mirrors are tilted at angles that don’t easily capture viewers’ reflections.
“You’re looking for yourself. It goes by and you’re like, where was I?” Miller said.
He and Cardiff excel at making you wonder if you exist.
In the middle, two large mirrors face each other, making “an infinity chamber.” The sounds are mixed by a random generator that isn’t likely to repeat — so it’s an infinite composition as well.
Cardiff and Miller’s works often incorporate mysterious narratives, but the only human voice in “The Infinity Machine” is a recording of a numerical countdown they often use to test speakers. They also included one “terrestrial” recording taken inside the engine room of a Vancouver ferry.
“I’m not sure how it fits in, but it fits in for us somehow,” Miller said.
The Voyager’s planet sounds still amaze them — some are harsh, some beautiful. “Sometimes Earth sounds like cars driving in the water,” Miller said.
When they came up with the title for their installation, Cardiff and Miller did not know that Dominique de Menil referred to the chapel — whose black walls appeared to float — as “the infinity box.” It’s a serendipitous thread curator Toby Kamps sees in the new chapel project.
Next year Francis Alÿs’ “Fabiola Project,” which involves hundreds of portraits of the fourth-century Roman ascetic St. Fabiola, will replace “The Infinity Machine” in the chapel.
Since the Menil Collection’s loan period ended in 2012, the frescoes have resided at the Byzantine Museum of the Foundation Archbishop Makarios III in Cyprus — an unspiritual place that doesn’t tell any story, de Menil said.
He’d be happier if they could live in their original home, the 700-year-old Church of St. Euphemianos in Lysi, Cyprus.
De Menil likes to think the frescoes are still present, in a sense, in his chapel.
“Their story doesn’t just disappear,” he said. “At a certain level, this amplifies it.”
Significantly, the chapel was the last project his mother commissioned before she died in 1997.
Across Yupon Street, crews are preparing for the March 7 groundbreaking of the Menil Drawing Institute, the museum’s biggest project in years. While “The Infinity Machine” will be gone by the time the new building opens, de Menil’s little chapel will be more visible than ever on the opened-up, oak-treefilled campus.
“The building continues to have a life. That’s what’s important,” he said.