Not of this moment

Time caught up with Rush only two and a half years after landing his dream job as director of a spectacular new contemporary art museum. Rush died Friday, at 65, after a twoyear battle with pancreatic cancer.

A former Jesuit priest and TV actor, Rush was an outsider in the art world and liked it that way. His passion for art was only one part of a lifelong quest for meaning, and that made his argument for art more compelling than that of many curators, academics or critics.

At a slide show previewing the first exhibit at the Broad, he couldnt tear himself away — even to meet with a museum donor.

“I have to stop. Wait. I have to show you this,” he wavered. When he flashed a frame from Israel-born Michal Rovner’s apocalyptic “Oil Fields of Kazakhstan,” the gorgeous desolation froze him in place.

“Witnessing this work of art for the first time, I felt like I was present at the beginning and the end of the world,” he said.

He finally rushed out of the room, but returned a minute later to retrieve the wristwatch he had left on the table.

In July 2011, before the Broad Museum was finished, Rush walked with me through the angular shell and talked like a man who is chasing an elusive moment and finally getting close.

“Youre placed physically in a time and space that is almost not of this moment,” he said of the building, designed by Zaha Hadid. “Its of moments that are coming.”

Rush was an unorthodox choice for Broad Museums first director.

The twists and turns that brought him to MSU border on the surreal.

“I’ve always tried to put the threads together myself,” he said.

Rush, a New Jersey native, was ordained as a Jesuit priest in the 1970s. He had bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the Jesuit College of Arts and Letters at St. Louis University.

“I knew about the Jesuits’ connections to the Baroque, Jesuit Baroque churches and so forth,” he said. “The Jesuits have a very strong history with the visual arts, and they are fundamentally educators. I imbibed that in my 15-year experience.”

After Rush left the Jesuit order, he earned a doctorate in psychology from Harvard and gravitated to theater. In the 1980s, he dabbled in TV, popping up in “Law and Order” and “Spenser: For Hire.”

He came to the visual arts through the back door of an experimental theater in New York called La MaMa, an offshoot of influential avant-garde playwright and director Robert Wilson’s company.

Several of Wilson’s people were working at La MaMa. “We started creating works together, and they were very visually oriented,” Rush said. “They opened up a whole new world of the visual arts to me.”

Rush devoured Wilson’s book, “The Theater of Images,” and started reading intensely about visual art. When he learned that playwright Samuel Beckett and painter Jasper Johns did a book together, he got permission from the Beckett estate and from Johns himself to adapt it to theater.

“It was a real highlight of my time in the theater,” he said.

Rush also created pieces based on the work of Picasso, Duchamp and Johns.

He entered a new phase of life, writing about art for Art in America, Bookforum, The New York Times and other publications. The museum world started to beckon.

“It seemed that I was heading in this direction,” he said. “The threads, to me, are pretty clear.”

From 2000 to 2004, Rush was the first director of the Palm Beach Institute of Contemporary Art. There he got his first taste of the daunting job he would face at the Broad.

“This was also a community that had not had a lot of familiarity with the contemporary, and so our task was clearly to make the place as welcoming as possible,” he said.

The link between theater and visual art was one of Rushs favorite themes. He found performance art in Old Master paintings (Mona Lisa smiling for Da Vinci) and painterly beauty in modern works like Rovner’s oil fields video.

A 2006 show at Brandeis University’s Rose Art Museum, where Rush was director from 2005 until 2009, blended performance and surveillance videos to blur the line between creator, viewer and voyeur.

At Rose, Rush romped through a rich collection full of Picassos, de Koonings, Lichtensteins and other treasures, but there might have been too much theater there — even for him.

In January 2009, Brandeis Museum administrators decided to sell off the museums $350 million art collection to meet a budget shortfall. As director, Rush led a wave of protest, and the plan was scrapped. Rushs contract was not renewed.

If any building or institution could satisfy Rushs restless spirit, it would be the Broad, a teaching museum with constantly changing exhibits.

When Rush was named its first director, he exulted in the buildings stripped-down, punkish angularity.

“Most museums, even wonderful places like the Metropolitan in New York or even the Guggenheim, you feel a certain reverence, silence, a sense of importance,” Rush said. “Here you feel the architectural wonder of it, but you dont feel silence. You feel movement.”

Rush dove into a series of diverse exhibits that blended aesthetic delight with social and political content, working closely with curator Alison Gass, who left the Broad last year.

“Were really living the vision,” he said. “Were all just going for it.”

He embraced the confrontational, challenging art people expected of the Broad, but didnt shy from dropping what he called “the ‘b’ word.”

“I’m totally into beauty,” he said. “But what I mean by beauty is a pretty expansive idea. I can find a neon sculpture by Joseph Kosuth with quotes from Freud and Wittgenstein beautiful. They really turn me on.”

Less than a year into his tenure, a cancer diagnosis began to limit Rushs involvement. But he was still in house most weeks, calling in nearly every day even as he underwent treatments. At the Oct. 30 opening last year of an exhibit of contemporary Chinese art, he looked frail but enthusiastic as he greeted visiting artists from China. The exhibit was curated by Wang Chunchen, the Broads adjunct curator from Beijing, but it was right in Rushs sweet spot. From the start, Rush wanted to bring international art, and especially art by emerging young artists, to the Broad.

“I’m interested in going into back alleys, into countries that have artists that have not gotten into biennials,” Rush said.

Even as a museum director, Rush kept his outsider stance. He worried more than ever about getting caught up in “the system.” He mistrusted the curatorial consensus on what gets shown and showered with prizes.

“Every time I sit on a jury, or for a grant, people generally agree, for better or worse,” he said in a 2012 interview. “Is that because we’re brainwashed and we’re looking at the same things all the time and we just feed on each other, or is there something to it?”

Rush never seemed to settle into the job, but then, it was not his style to settle into anything. He remained wary of drinking the contemporary art worlds latest flavor of Kool-Aid. In a 2012 interview, he wondered what would happen if Marcel Duchamp came along again and presented the equivalent of his famous “ready-made” urinal to a contemporary group exhibition.

“Would we have the foresight to go with it — something that radically, radically altered the course of art?” he mused. “I keep hoping for those radical course changes, but would I recognize them if they came along? I don’t know.”

His wariness of art world smugness and insularity extended even to the Broad itself and its famous designer.

“There are issues with the money thats involved in contemporary art, how money is spent when so many people are hungry,” he said in 2012. “We have fetishized architecture, and ‘starchitects,’ to a large degree. Youll be seeing that critique down the road.”

In recent weeks, Rush was planning a major new exhibit of video art that would have taken up the museums entire second floor.

It will be left to others on the Broads staff to decide whether or how these unfinished plans will come to be.