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September 10, 2007
Isamu Noguchi and the World as Sculpture
A few minutes into my walk back from the Noguchi Museum, while going down a fairly typical city street, I was very suddenly struck by the textures and sculptural details of every physical entity around me. Were the textures I wanted to put my hands on in the museum’s sculptures really that different from those in a dilapidated brick wall? Is the endless variations-on-a-theme of Noguchi’s work that different than what I see on streets and parks every day? I enjoyed looking at most of Noguchi’s sculptures, but what seems far more valuable is what his work left with me afterwards, and I can’t help but wonder if this was the broader intention of his project as an artist.
If there is one point which Noguchi made with the all encompassing design of his museum it was the breaking down of barriers, or at least the pointed acknowledgement of the gray areas between barriers: between the “work of art” in the traditional sense of the term and the world in which it sits, between the natural and the manmade, between playful improvisation and careful preparation, between balance and disorder.
The broadest sense in which he does this is in the way the design of the museum mirrors the sculptures. Aging brick walls and cement floors present the same organic systems which Noguchi emphasizes in the rough, raw textures in much of the work. The wooden platforms on which many works are displayed becomes part of the work. The endless variety of plant life in the courtyard has the same simultaneous unity and disparity as sculptures. Everything works together and everything plays off of everything else.
While his work obviously shows a reverence for the natural word, there is also something alien about it, as if he is imagining what natural processes of growth and decay could look like in a slightly different world. Chunks are carved out of jagged rocks and replaced with perfectly smooth surfaces of a different color. Small, rough bumps of roughly the same size and shapes, unlike anything in nature but really not that unlike it, are chiseled into segments of stones. Somehow, it all maintains a balance.
While not exactly the most visually stimulating, probably the most thought provoking of his works for me was one of two large jagged rocks placed on top of three small wooden beams. After walking around to the other side of the piece I saw he had chiseled a small segment of bumps into the backside of each one, but still, even if he did add some very minor touches, or even if he actually carved the rocks into their current shapes, the overall feel of the piece was that he had taken two big rocks and simply appreciated their natural form enough to put them on a pedestal in his museum.
Posted by Steven at September 10, 2007 03:03 PM