Meditations on Noguchi’s Garden-Museum
By Valery Oisteanu
It is early in the morning and the busses full of art journalist pull alongside a renovated building in Long Island City, Queens, concealed by an old red brick wall and a new cement brick wall. A simple flag at the entrance reads "Noguchi" in small letters. Inside, an industrial style corridor leads us to a two-floor museum conceived of unpredictable rooms, staircases, a serene garden and a library. In this labyrinth, some of us, in our excitement, got lost and exited through a door out into the street and had to re-enter blocks away. Inside, Noguchi’s sculptures dissolved the memory of a waylaid journey..
Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) was born in Los Angeles to an American mother and a Japanese-poet father. Noguchi lived in Japan until the age of thirteen, when he moved to Indiana, USA. As a student at Columbia University, in New York, he took evening sculpture classes on the Lower East Side and soon left the university to become an academic sculptor. In 1926 Noguchi saw an exhibition of Brancusi’s work and the experience profoundly changed his direction as an artist. A Guggenheim Fellowship moved him to Paris in 1927 where he worked in Brancusi’s studio for two years. Inspired by Brancusi’s essential, stylized forms, Noguchi developed his own style–imbuing his highly finished pieces with graceful lyricism and mystery.
Noguchi helped define abstract, utilitarian modernism, yet his work was not widely recognized until 1938, when he completed a large-scale sculpture symbolizing freedom of the press (commissioned for the Associated Press Building at Rockefeller Center). This was the first of numerous public works–playgrounds, plazas, gardens, and fountains. reflecting his deep belief in a social role of sculpture and the integration of the arts into daily life. He spent long periods of time carving stones in Italy and Japan, but Long Island City in Queens was his home and it was there that he created a museum to display lifetime of artistic endeavors. It is the first single artist museum designed and endowed by the artist to whom it’s collection is dedicated.
Noguchi’s work avoids categorization, traveling half way between meditative objects and recreations of his own inner landscapes of the soul. He arrives at a place where all contradictory meanings, opposites, and even enemies can reconcile. The result is not a cry or a shout; it is just a whisper that ultimately turns into a monotonous hum.
Among Noguchi’s first large-scale sculpture proposals in 1933 were two monuments: The unrealized, mile-long Monument to the Plough, to be located at the geographical center of the United States, and the Monument to Ben Franklin, which fifty years later was re-engineered and constructed at the base of the Ben Franklin Bridge in Philadelphia. Noguchi’s futuristic Sculpture to be Seen from Mars (model in sand, 1947), is an earthwork face, large enough to be recognized from space. Noguchi also designed several monuments to great leaders, none of which were built: Memorial at Gandhi’s Burial Place at Raj-gat, India (1948), Memorial to Buddha (1957) and Tomb for John Fitzgerald Kennedy (1964). But the last monument that Noguchi designed, memorializing those who had perished in the Challenger space shuttle disaster, was constructed in his Bayfront Park in Miami, Florida.
The Noguchi Museum is filled with works of a lifetime of creative experimentation, of artworks in stainless steel, marble, cast iron, balsawood, bronze, basalt, granite and even water. His Zen-garden of vertical sculptures is in itself one of the artist’s greatest works. In the garden is a Brancusi-inspired twisted "endless column" of slightly distorted light and dark rhomboids. A sculptural composition without a base of several "river tumbled stones" The Illusion of the Fifth Stone (1970) seems tomushroom straight from the ground.
In a passageway, a large gray horizontal stone, broadly notched on its underside, creates a horizontal dimension to mostly vertical works. Some pieces are displayed on an incline, some directly on the floor. Every dimension of the room is considered. One of the rooms ends with a sculpture of marble carved to look like a flexible tube; this marble then forms a square white windowless frame, outlining the bare wall.
His biomorphic sculptures show a holistic approach in creating totemic markers, which rest either on square bases, cross-shaped bases, or in some cases on both. The sculptures are complemented by trees, bushes and white river stones or chipped dark gravel. In a covered courtyard entrance several sentinels of stones set the tone for the indoor sculptural installation. The combination of original textures of natural stones and contrasts of polished/unpolished surfaces are his favorite dialogues.
A polished giant marble ring, the Zen symbol Enso (Zen-circle), is composed from equal modular sequential sections of light & dark marble, almost six feet in diameter is placed on edge on a square base. The title of the sculpture is The Sun at Noon (1969) and it marks the beginning of an interior garden of Zen decorative pieces.
The garden-museum, a former 1920’s photo engraving plant that was his working studio (he lived across the street), was opened to the public in 1985 and has now reopened after a two and a half year renovation. The museum presents a comprehensive collection of Noguchi’s art, craft (Akari Light Sculptures) and furniture (that can be ordered at the museum shop). In addition, beginning next year the museum will house a gallery devoted to Noguchi’s work in interior and set design.
He created stage sets for dancer Martha Graham, as well as for dancers/choreographers Merce Cunningham, Erick Hawkins, George Balanchine and composer John Cage. Isamu Noghuci: Sculptural Design special exhibit brings together many strands of his talent. Most of these 100 works would be considered sculpture, had they not been created for theatre. The show, conceived and designed by theater director Robert Wilson, is the first to incorporate Noguchi’s props and set designs. The most memorable piece in the theatrical section is the original lyre that Noguchi created for Balanchine’s Orpheus (1948). The slick glossy, "surreal" instrument is placed centrally in the darkened installation space as a scepter of a secret society. The Minotaur’s original mask from Errand into the Maze is also present. It was one of the twenty-five or so designs created for Martha Graham. In the fall of this year, the Museum will present "Noguchi and Graham" curated by Bonnie Rychlak, Noguchi’s former assistant (1980-88).
Noguchi’s sculptural language is loaded with intention but says little or nothing. Deeply involved with Zen as a living philosophy and Zen-art in
Japan and the United States, he also collaborated with other artist such us Yamamoto Gempo, John Cage, Merce Cuningham, Robert Motherwell and Fukushima Keido (a living Zen Master).
In 2005 the exhibition "The Imagery of Chess Revisited," curated by Larry
List, will re-create a legendary 1944-45 show at the Julien Levy gallery in
New York. That exhibition, which was initially curated by Marcel Duchamp, showcased Noguchi as well as the Surrealists and captured the convergence between New York Surrealism and the European school. On view will be a recently acquired copy of the chess table that Noguchi made, as well as a replica of the now lost chess set he designed for the 1944-45 exhibition.
The Noguchi Museum is a living artistic space operating with the goal of maintaining dialogue and initiating an ongoing program of temporary exhibitions for artists within Noguchi’s sphere of influence. The feeling at the exit is of serene understatement, of healing through silence, and of absorbing new forms (biomorphic in shape and organically compatible).
In 2006 the Museum will present Noguchi’s Sources and Influences, the first exhibition to investigate Noguchi’s mentors and artists who have been influence by him, included will be work by C. Brancusi, Gutzon Borglum,David Hare, Alberto Giacometti, Andy Goldsworthy, and Jean Highstein.
