Darren Knight Gallery is presenting The Destruction Quartet, by Jonas Mekas, through Nov. 4.

The piece is a new four-monitor video installation, in which eachfilm is presented on a separate monitor, playing on a continuous loopfor various durations. The artwork is meant to bring together fragmentsof symbolic and real acts of destruction.

The first documents a 1997 Nam June Paik performance in whichhe destroys a piano; the second observes the demolition of the BerlinWall in 1990; the third is Mekas’ footage of Danius Kesminas fire sculpture (New York) Consequence,presented in New York in 1991; and the last graphically records thedestruction of the World Trade Center. Mekas filmed the Sept. 11, 2001footage from the roof of his SoHo apartment building.

While the soundtracks in the first three films create an ambientbackdrop to the filmed events, the increasingly incredulous comments bya fellow observer in the Sept. 11 footage bring a chill to the wholeinstallation.

In an attempt to comprehend the incomprehensible, Mekas has, withthe addition of a title page quoting the 19th-century German poet Heinrich Heineand an old photographic image of a young child, presented Sept. 11 as afairytale, as if passing on the story as folklore, disconnecting itslightly from its defining date and introducing a sense of timelessnessand metaphor.

Mekas has, for most of his life, celebrated the beauty and wonder in life’s small and everyday events, making The Destruction Quartet all the more potent.