ART CITIES: London-Isamu Noguchi

One of the most significant artists of the 20th century, Isamu Noguchi was an idealist whose timeless work blended ancient and modern ideas. An itinerant cultural synthesizer, he consistently rejected categorization and the false dichotomies of his time, espoused globalism and anticipated the social practice of art by several decades.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: white Cube Gallery Archive

Primarily a sculptor, Noguchi’s expansive, interdisciplinary practice included public projects, gardens, playgrounds, furniture, lighting and set design, all informed by an abiding view that nature was of fundamental importance to the human condition and a determination to make work which encouraged this belief. Titled “A New Nature”, the exhibition brings together several bodies of work by Isamu Noguchi that build organic environments from industrial methods and materials. The centrepieces are a presentation of Noguchi’s “Ceiling” and “Waterfall” (both 1957) from the lobby of 666 Fifth Avenue, New York, an undulating aluminium ceiling and a stainless steel louvered fountain wall that were permanently removed in 2020.  Two “clouds” of Noguchi’s Akari light sculptures and a complete set of the 26 galvanised steel works  provide further context on the artist’s interest in making his work subject to nature’s rhythms by inserting it into the flow of time. Five different configurations of “Octetra”, the modular, geometric play system he developed in the 1960s based on Buckminster Fuller’s theories about the fundamental structures found in nature, will be featured throughout. Noguchi saw the standard museum pedestal as a false horizon, preferring to inspire empirical awareness and innate states of harmonisation – his own version of ecology. He encouraged us to understand ourselves – and everything we produce – as extensions of nature, rather than as defences against or challenges to it. ‘Noguchi saw the sculpture as nothing less than the shaping of civic life, projecting a communal usefulness onto raw and machine-made materials. An advocate of real-world engagement, he promoted an accessible, integrated, one-world vision of art with a public purpose.

 Born in 1904 in Los Angeles to a Japanese father and an American mother, Isamu Noguchi’s early years were marked by upheaval and loneliness. Straddling continents and cultures and negotiating the perceived dichotomies of East and West, was, he later recognized, the defining characteristic of his artistic evolution. During the 1920s he lived in New York working as an academic sculptor, but despite early success soon changed direction, leaving for Paris in 1927 where he became the first and only assistant of Constantin Brancusi. Returning to New York in 1929, Noguchi met architect, inventor and social revolutionary R. Buckminster Fuller, who would remain a lifelong friend and mentor, and the dancer and choreographer Martha Graham, with whom he would collaborate on set designs for the next 40 years. He worked with a remarkably diverse range of materials, reflecting both the traditions of sculpture and modern industry. But he would eventually become most closely associated with stone, which he described as ‘the basic element of sculpture’, considering it ‘the unassailable absolute.’ He employed ancient stone carving techniques, but also readily embraced technological advances such as the pneumatic chisel, coring drills, diamond-tipped circular saws, post-tensioning, and other modern sculptural and industrial methods of production. During his life Noguchi travelled extensively, living for long periods outside the United States including six months in Beijing in 1930 where he studied ink brush painting, a year and a half in Mexico, where he made a butterfly collection for Frida Kahlo and visited Mesoamerican sites and more than a year in south and southeast Asia. But it was Japan that gradually became the second centre for his consciousness: its craft cultures. Noguchi’s work with public space, the most important and consistent part of his practice, reflected his strong belief in the social impact of sculpture. In 1947, two years after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Noguchi created a proposal for a monumental earthwork to express his unease with the atomic era: “Sculpture to be Seen From Mars”, originally titled ‘Memorial to Man’. Formulated more than a decade before the advent of space travel and significantly predating Land Art, this cenotaph to human kind appears to fuse the form of a human face with the remains of a pyramid-building civilisation. Noguchi’s obsession with empirical experience as the key to connection was perhaps best exemplified by his many designs for playgrounds and play equipment. In these projects, most of which were never realised, typographical contouring mixes with non-directive, modular and extensible structural systems and equipment designed to teach physics through physical experience. One such model, created in 1966, was realised by the artist two decades later as part of his exhibition “What is Sculpture?” for the US pavilion at the 1986 Venice Biennale. In 1962 Noguchi began making annual visits to work in a studio created for him in the Tuscan stone working community around Monte Altissimo, Italy. In 1969 he established a home and studio in Japan in the village of Mure on the island of Shikoku, an area known for its stone cutting. His home and studio in New York City remained the headquarters for his ongoing environmental and urban projects. In 1985 he founded the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum (now The Noguchi Museum) across the street from his studio in Long Island City, NY. It was the first, and is still the only, museum in the United States created by an artist to show their own work. The large stone sculptures in granite and basalt that Noguchi produced during the last decade of his career at Mure became his best known work . Noguchi chose hard stones for their ability to resist being sculpted and liked to joke that his ideal work would be a rock that looked like it had fallen from the sky.

Photo: Isamu Noguchi, Octetra (one element), 1968 (2021), Fiberglass reinforced plastic and paint, 44 1/8 × 53 7/16 × 53 7/16 in. | (112 × 135.8 × 135.8 cm), © The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, NY / Artists Rights Society, Courtesy White Cube Gallery

Info: White Cube Gallery, 144 – 152 Bermondsey Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 4/2-3/4/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, Sun 12:00-18:00, www.whitecube.com