Courtesy the artist and Yvon Lambert, Paris and New York. © the artist

Kay Rosen, "063" (detail), 2008, wall installation, Contemporary Jewish Museum, San Francisco

Cunradus Schlapperitzi, Bible History, circa 1445, full-page miniature from manuscript of pen and ink drawings, 288 x 2009 x 110 mm (closed)

Barnett Newman Tyeb Mehta The Masterful Mr. Penn Couple’s Rare Art Collection on Display in Berlin Many Splendid Things Restoration Drama Holy Inspiration: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Art Matt Keegan in New York

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Like a large, off-kilter die, its diamond-shaped exterior pierced by intermittent windows, the new Contemporary Jewish Museum is a dynamic presence amid San Francisco’s somewhat sterile downtown arts campus. The pitch of the building’s carapace alone promises a certain momentum, taken up in its interior details, as well: doorjambs and benches all slant at a lurching angle. Architect Daniel Libeskind has incorporated the blue steel-clad structure into the old Jesse Street Power Substation, a handsome brick building from the first decade of the 20th century, wrapped in a striking neoclassical cornice. Lateral walls in the museum’s various galleries afford glimpses of this older structure’s atrium. The new and the old thus interpenetrate each other, rather than simply sit side by side—an ethos that characterized the museum’s inaugural exhibition at both the material and conceptual levels, with ancient manuscripts and 18th-century prints accompanying works commissioned expressly for the occasion, notably not all by Jewish artists.

These days, the term creation seems more politically and socially charged than ever. But the tensions between the scientific and spiritual nature of origins—the insistence on their inextricableness, or, conversely, contentions about their fundamental difference—have been around as long as the earliest creation myths themselves. Still, the haunting of science by more stubbornly metaphysical questions, particularly in an American context, is alluded to in the hallway leading to the exhibition: grainy television footage from the Apollo 8 spaceship, broadcast on December 24, 1968. At the sight of the earth from outer space, the astronauts end their transmission by reading from the book of Genesis. Sound artist Ben Rubin’s God’s Breath Hovering over the Waters (His Master’s Voice) (2008) conjures similar themes, but with more lyrical economy. A sculptural recreation of an Echo horn antenna, this outsize earpiece also resembles an early turntable amplifier (hence the title’s other reference, to the famous RCA pooch who cocks his head at the sound of “his master’s voice”). The original instrument was used by physicists who, in 1964, discovered extant feedback from the Big Bang. That such a prosthesis could detect the lingering evidence of an unfathomable occurrence lifts the piece’s theme out of pure science and into a more rarefied domain. The strange sounds that emerge from the sculpture’s ample throat would be even more striking without the attendant voice-over. The low crackle of faraway feedback is haunting and lovely in its own right, in its utter lack of language. In the beginning, the piece might otherwise tell us, was not always “the word.”

That dehumanized poetry contrasts sharply with the objects on display in an adjoining room: Bibles and illuminated manuscripts that locate man—or a God in man’s image—as the origin of the universe. But the creation myth of art itself also percolates as a subtext, or meta-text, in and among the exhibition’s displays. Just outside this gallery hangs Creation Story I (Animals), a woodcut by the German artist Franz Marc. The small print exemplifies how much modernist artists—on the heels of their Romantic forebears and in the wake of Nietzsche’s writings—played newly secular gods in their own right. The design of art was for most dyed-in-the-wool modernists not about intelligence, as it were, but rather intuition. To that end, we find some striking differences between Marc’s visceral, embodied imagery and the more cerebral, language-based interventions of contemporary artists on the same theme. Many of the show’s installations and conceptual pieces—from Kay Rosen’s 063 (2008) to Shirley Shor’s The Well (2008)—use text (especially computer-generated or -derived text) as their vehicle. The latter piece reveals the Hebrew phrase “in the beginning” as a computerized swirl of language, draining into (or spinning out of) a simulacral well. Rosen’s wall installation is more tight-lipped, whittling down words to a sphinxlike riddle of letters and numbers. Barnett Newman’s Onement II (1948) perhaps negotiates between the extremes of conceptual practice and more emphatically visual, plastic metaphors. The tidy zip that splits Newman’s canvas seems to anticipate the ascetic, “literalist” tenets of Minimalism; but the patina of its surface yokes the painting back down to the level of something wrought, something shaped by hands (no matter how seemingly de-skilled) into meaning. The oxymoronic irony of Newman’s title articulates a common thread that unites the exhibition’s various prints, paintings, installations, and objects: the idea of creation as an act of cleaving, whether word from silence, or line from the void.