San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
Watching the watchers
Timken Museum of Art to open video installation inspired by crowds who gather to admire Rembrandt’s 1642 painting ‘The Night Watch’
In art galleries there are always two different subjects on display, the artworks themselves and the people who come to observe the works and interpret their meaning for themselves.
That’s the concept behind “Night Watching,” an audiovisual installation inspired by Rembrandt’s largest and most famous painting, the 1642 masterpiece “The Night Watch,” at the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam in the Netherlands.
Created in 2019 by Dutch contemporary artist Rineke Dijkstra, “Night Watching” is a triptych of video screens featuring short films of groups of visitors coming to see Rembrandt’s painting and offering their own spontaneous reactions and observations on a camera that is aimed only at them, rather than the artwork itself.
The installation makes its West Coast premiere on Wednesday at the Timken Museum of Art in Balboa Park. An estimated 60,000 visitors are expected to see the exhibition before it closes June 4. While visitors are at the Timken, they will also be able to see the museum’s own Rembrandt, the 1657 painting “Saint Bartholomew.”
“Since the Timken is the permanent home of Rembrandt’s, ‘Saint Bartholomew,’ we are particularly excited to bring ‘Night Watching’ to San Diego audiences so that they can experience this immersive installation.” said Timken executive director Megan Pogue in a statement. “The Timken considers Rineke Dijkstra’s exploration of the currentday response to Rembrandt a worthy model to emulate. It fits into our institution’s ongoing exploration of the Old Masters, and our commitment to finding new ways to make these lastingly great works relevant for 21st century audiences.”
The 12-by-14-foot baroque painting now known as “The Night Watch” was commissioned around 1639 by Capt. Banninck Cocq and other members of a ceremonial Dutch militia to hang on a banquet room wall of the militia’s headquarters in Amsterdam. The painting depicts Cocq and many other well-dressed militia members marching in parade fashion on the street, surrounded by musketeers, flag-bearers, a drummer, a dog and a young girl.
When the painting was completed three years later, it broke new ground in the art form of commissioned portraiture of the 17th century, according to art historians Steven Zucker and Beth Harris of the art resource organization Smarthistory.
Rather than lining up the traditional group of equally sized men in even lighting, facing the viewer in static poses, Rembrandt created a narrative scene of lively action with 34 characters. Some men are raising or firing guns, some are partially in shadow and in the background, and all are coalescing around the militia captain and his lieutenant in the center of the painting. The painting also has elements of foreshortening that create an almost threedimensional look to the muskets and other details in the painting.
Initially the painting was given the name “Militia Company of District II Under the Command of Captain Frans Banninck Cocq,” and as it was moved from location to location, sections on the top and sides of the canvas were cut off to fit the walls where it was displayed. It wasn’t until many years later that the painting was given its better-known nickname, “The Night Watch,” because the darkened veneer on the painting made what was originally painted to represent a daytime scene appear to be a nighttime tableau.
“Night Watching” is a threechannel video installation, featuring 14 groups of people observing the painting. Each group’s conversation varies from visual descriptions to conjectures about the circumstances in which the painting was created.
There’s a group of Dutch schoolgirls discussing whether Rembrandt gave the only woman in the painting the face of his wife, Saskia. Japanese businessmen consider the painting’s potential for tourism. And a group of young artists discuss what it must feel like to make such an incomparable masterpiece. There are English subtitles on the films so American viewers can understand their conversations.
The scenes in the video are sequenced to explore the different ways a viewer might relate to a famous painting and its subject. The first groups speculate about what they’re seeing, like the barking dog in the corner of the painting and a young girl who is mysteriously glowing from the inside. These sequences are followed by groups who link similar observations to their own lives, making comparisons between past and current society. The final groups examine the painting within a historical art context.
In order to capture these unscripted observations, Dijkstra filmed the encounters on six consecutive evenings after the museum was closed to the public to allow groups to have a more private encounter with the painting.
Dijkstra, a famous Dutch photographer, has won numerous honors, including the Hasselblad Foundation International Award for Photography and the Spectrum International Prize for Photography, both in 2017, and the Johannes Vermeer Prize in 2020.
Over the past decade, she has had major midcareer exhibitions in the Netherlands and Denmark and at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Her “Night Watching” piece was commissioned by the Rijksmuseum on the occasion of the 350th anniversary of Rembrandt’s death, and it was first exhibited at the Marian Goodman Gallery in London.
The 58-year-old Timken Museum reopened last June after a two-year, $3 million renovation that modernized the midcentury building and installed more educational information for visitors about its collection, which is focused on European and American masters and Russian icons. As before, the museum offers free admission to the public.
The “Night Watching” exhibition is free, but on Monday morning the Timken is presenting a sneak-peek ticketed event, where the artist, Dijkstra, will discuss her work with Derrick R. Cartwright, the Timken’s director of curatorial affairs. Tickets are $15 for nonmembers and must be purchased in advance at weblink. donorperfect.com/rineke.
One of the rookie mistakes I made in my early preaching days was to assume that each passage in the Bible has one — and only one — meaning. The goal of the earnest seeker, I believed, was to crack the code of interpretation, deduce the singular meaning, and figure out how to apply it to our lives.
Today, I would suggest that such a singular-meaning approach to Scripture is but one of many ways in which Christianity has lost connection with its Jewish heritage. For within Judaism (at least, as I understand it) one begins with the assumption that a sacred text contains many meanings. As one might turn a gem in your hand and notice the many angles and sides and reflections, so it is with holding Scripture and appreciating the myriad ways it meets us and emanates its beauty. I find this multi-dimensionality uniquely true when it comes to Jesus’ teachings.
When reading the teachings of Jesus, at first glance we might pick up a rather obvious intention to his words. We could call this the surfacelevel, clear, obvious meaning. But I think one of the reasons Jesus’ teachings have had such lasting impact is because there’s also more than meets the ear. To his original audience his words had a way of touching the Deep. They reflected what is True and Real. They held within them the capacity to explore Meaning and Beauty in ways that clung to the hearts and minds of those who heard him — and that still cling to many who hear and read them today.
Here’s an example (and the catalyst for this particular article). Jesus once taught, “Do not cast your pearls before swine.” On its surface (and how I’ve generally thought about it), his basic point seems to be that it’s foolish to give valuable things to people who can’t or won’t appreciate them. And look, that is a fine enough takeaway, and I’m sure people have been edified by such a reading. However, while studying some of the teachings of Buddha the other day, I stumbled into a new insight. I saw a different side of the gem, if you will, of the whole “pearls and pigs” concept.
The Buddha taught that things do not have inherent value. Rather, worth and meaning are assigned to something only as a function of the person (or people) deciding that it has value. (Forgive me, Buddhists, if I’ve totally butchered that teaching.) This is easily demonstrated with pearls. Pearls are formed when debris gets stuck inside a mollusk. The mollusk then coats it in substances that, over time, create what we call a pearl. In other words, pearls are just trash that has been excessively protected by a barely sentient sea creature—hardly something with inherent worth or value. Yet, like most (or all, if you’re Buddha) things, pearls have taken on a level of significance because humans have impressed upon them a degree of value.
So then, let’s return to Jesus, pigs and pearls. A surface-level reading of this teaching seems to imply that the possessors of pearls are the good or right ones, whereas the pigs are those who have it wrong, or who can’t appreciate what is good. But, like, says who?
Well, says the person who sees value in the pearl. To them, a pearl is a pearl. Ooh, la la! It has meaning and value and worth. But to the the pig? For them the pearl is a nuisance. An irritant. Something to be ignored at best and rejected at worse.
Now here’s the thought that struck me while considering this teaching of Jesus in conjunction with Buddha’s teaching about things not having inherent value: you might be a pig to my pearls, and I might be a pig to your pearls, but this says nothing about the objective goodness of the pearls (or the objective badness of the pigs). It merely reveals how each of us thinks and feels about that which we consider pearly.
Here’s what I mean. Have you ever been around someone who has a really strong opinion about something, and who feels like anyone who doesn’t share this opinion is wrong? Or less than? Or stupid? Or uninformed? Or brainwashed? Or ignorant?
Of course you have. You might even be that person sometimes, with some issues — I know I have been (and still can be!). Maybe it’s that friend who’s over-the-top passionate about being vegan, yet every time they share their enthusiasm it has this way of making others feel immoral for eating a cheeseburger. Or that co-worker who’s committed to a kind of zero-footprint living, which is great and wonderful for them, and yet they’re constantly making little comments about your waste of energy here, or your carbon impact there.
I’ve been overly precious (pushing into pretentious) about things as mundane as Apple products, coffee preparation, TV brands, and the best/right way to enjoy bourbon. These have been pearls to me in the past. Which is fine, of course. Yes, have your preferences and opinions and takes! But I think where we run into trouble is when we then expect others to view them as pearls, too. When that happens, when either we cast our pearls before the swines in our life or we’re the pigs on the end of another person’s pearl casting, the typical response is to feel judged. Either we judge them (because they don’t buy organic, or because they don’t speak the same way we do), or we feel as though they’re judging us (because we drive a gas guzzler, or let our kids watch four hours of Disney+ a day).
It turns out, is the broader theme of Jesus’ teaching about not casting our pearls before swine in Matthew 7. He opens with the line, “Don’t judge, so that you won’t be judge. … Whatever you deal out will be dealt out to you. … Don’t give holy things to dogs, and don’t throw your pearls in front of pigs. They will stomp on the pearls, then turn around and attack you.” (Matthew 7:1-2;6)
Judging comes very naturally to humans (some more than others, *raises hand*). Part of what it has meant to me to try and follow the Way of Jesus is to actively work against this instinct. To notice when I’ve assigned great worth and value to something (aka, made it a pearl), and then to notice when I might be throwing it at other people in a way that judges them for not feeling the same as I do about it.
My experience is that the average person doesn’t think of themselves as a judgmental person. They think of themselves as open, tolerant and accepting of others. Yet in practice, I wonder how many of us see our little pieces of overly protected garbage as something that is obviously the most valuable thing in the world. And then how often might we make those around us (whether explicitly or implicitly) feel as though we are judging them because they don’t also see our tiny trash ball as “pearl”?
Look, pearls are great. I love my pearls. I’m sure you love yours. I’m not suggesting we stop seeing ideas, or beliefs, or convictions, or ways of living as having worth and value. No, cherish what you cherish, and value what you value. Just keep in mind that our pearls have probably changed a lot over the years. For me, some things I used to cherish as precious I now hold in less regard (and vice versa). Such a realization ought slow me down from expecting others to value my pearls in the same way I do. So may we have eyes to see that our pearls are
our pearls, and not necessarily something that all people should also agree is right and good and pearl-worthy. And may that, in turn, lead to less judgment of one another, and more compassion, kindness and respect.
Martin co-founded Sojourn Grace Collective, a progressive Christian church in San Diego. He is the author of “Unclobber: Rethinking our Misuse of the Bible on Homosexuality” and “The Shift: Surviving and Thriving After Moving From Conservative to Progressive Christianity.” You can reach him at colby@colbymartinonline.com.