An artist fanatically committed to “endlessness,” Frederick Kiesler left many loose ends for future generations to parse. Ideas for machines of questionable utility piled up over decades of activity. Apart from Endless House, the mythic project he presented at MoMA in 1960, the Viennese émigré’s projects rarely developed beyond the drafting stage. Vision Machines, recently on view at the Jewish Museum, sought to give muscular embodiment to his obscurantist formulas, with extraordinary results.
True, the show’s copious and naive ephemera reinforced Kiesler’s legacy as a modernist (he had once been in the De Stijl camp) supposedly interested in science but actually concerned with metaphysics. But purpose-built mechanisms installed in each of the three galleries nudged viewers to give his propositions a closer look. The largest, the Mobile Home Library (1938–39), was exactingly constructed from instructions, plans, and partial prototypes produced by the Laboratory of Design Correlation, the research unit Kiesler oversaw while in residence at Columbia’s architecture depa…