Looking Up

LOOKING

UP THE SKYVIEWING SCULPTURES OF ISAMU NOGUCHI

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Acknowledgments

This book is published in conjunction with an exhibition curated exclusively for the Western Gallery by Dakin Hart, the Senior Curator of The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum in New York. The exhibition and book were realized through an extensive and rewarding cooperation with the museum. Its extensive holdings of Noguchi’s art made it possible to bring a large group of his skyviewing sculptures together for the first time. The staff’s wealth of knowledge and commitment to research has made this project particularly worthwhile. Many thanks to Matthew Kirsch, Curator of Research and Digital Content, Kate Wiener, Assistant Curator, and the museum’s archivist Janine Biunno, who have done a great amount of new study of the skyviewing theme. Thanks also to Daniel DaSilva, Larry Giacoletti, and Jennifer Lorch for their help in organizing the exhibition and, of course, to Dakin Hart for his curatorial and editorial vision. Last but not least, I want to thank Brett Littman, the Director of the Noguchi Museum, for his unwavering support of this project.

Thanks to Dan Giles, Jacqueline Decter, Allison McCormick, Louise Parfitt, Louise Ramsay and Liz Japes at D Giles Limited for their estimable professionalism in the production of this book. Thanks also to my many colleagues at Western who have helped organize exhibition-related programming, in particular Tami Landis, Pam Kuntz, Gail Kuromiya, Jeff Purdue, Julia Sapin, and Massimiliano Tomasi. Two persons who have not been directly involved but who have helped me understand Noguchi’s work in wider context are the art historian, artist, and curator Barbara Miller, whose latest project is an exhibition and book on Nancy Holt’s Stone Enclosure: Rock Rings, and Ken Tadashi Oshima, Co-Chair of the Japan Studies Program and Professor in the Department of Architecture at the University of Washington, who has researched Noguchi’s work in context of transnational architectural history and theory. Finally, I thank the Henry Luce Foundation for believing in and generously supporting this project. The objective of the Luce Foundation’s American Art Program is “to support museums, universities, and arts organizations in their efforts to advance the understanding and experience of American and Native American visual arts through research, exhibitions, publications, and collection projects.” That is the effort behind this book and exhibition, and I thank everyone who has made it possible to pursue.

Hafthor Yngvason Director of the Western Gallery, Western Washington University

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Pl. 20 ISAMU NOGUCHI Ghost, 1952 Seto stoneware 125/8 × 93/8 × 31/8 in. (32.1 × 23.8 × 7.9 cm) The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York

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oguchi’s preoccupation with ephemeral paradigms is clear in many of the objects in this exhibition. This one is adapted from a near-universal human superstition with a particularly trenchant Japanese heritage: the existence of ghosts. Ghost is unlike his other larger sculpture with the same title or Mrs. White (1952), another phantom in ceramic that references a specific story and is, like many Japanese folktales involving the supernatural, extremely harrowing.

This Ghost seems to suggest a less formidable type, also drawn from the lexicon of Japanese phantasms: a floating spirit, maybe that of a child, often thought to be more mischievous than dangerous.

Employing a generalized biomorphic abstraction, using the quality of this specific clay, and mounting it to hang, Noguchi has produced a creature full of charm and pathos that appears to float through the world. The number and nature of Noguchi’s multiple supernatural ceramics demonstrate that he did not take the solidity or visibility of the real for granted, nor that of sculpture.

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Pl. 32 ISAMU NOGUCHI U.S. Pavilion Expo ’70, 1968 Plaster, wire, paint 157/8 × 23 × 33 in. (40.3 × 58.4 × 83.8 cm) The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York Plates 32 and 33 n 1968, in preparation for the 1970 world exposition in Osaka, Japan, Noguchi and five others were asked by the United States Information Agency to propose a conceptual plan for the American pavilion. Noguchi’s friend Kenzo Tange (along with Uzo Nishiyama) had been charged with coordinating the entire site program at Osaka, and even within the general world’s fair template of presenting a face of progress and hopefulness, the Osaka fair promised to be a showcase of technological novelty. Noguchi’s U.S. Pavilion design amplified his own perspective on technology to nearly hyperbolic levels. Noguchi’s team’s proposal emphasized an “interactive and participative experience”25 that would simulate the future, rather than a typical exposition-style pavilion demonstrating material advances.

That Noguchi’s plan was ultimately turned down by the commission can be attributed to the amount of research and development it would have required for delivery within a two-year timeline (Noguchi envisioned NASA’s involvement).

Noguchi’s polychromatic painted plaster project model is a compendium of his varied and long-standing interests. Dotting the “totally artificial”26 astroturf moonscape are scenic devices and multifunctional structures, including a pyramidal form and various portals connecting to lower-level exhibits—many of them previewed in models he and Louis Kahn had devised for their (unbuilt) Adele Levy Playground at Riverside Park in New York earlier in the decade.

Play equipment, such as his modular play structure Octetra, in its pyramidal mountain configuration, are scattered across the “lunar garden.” A feature he described as a “World Mound,” a sunken amphitheater, emerges from the far end of the pavilion in the form of a tumulus, its rim characterized as a mezzanine-like tsukimidai (moon-viewing platform). Towering above the mound is a massive floating orb, described on paper as a gas-filled balloon, which would have served as a movie screen at night and during Osaka’s sweltering summer days as a shade to shelter the field below.

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As outlined in his first typed conceptual scenario, with accompanying sketches, Noguchi brainstormed on the theme of “The World and Its Dream — A treatise on the Moon as a symbol of our changing aspirations, and on Nature as a new awareness through science.”27 He envisioned a number of floating, gas-filled “membranes” and balloons, metaphorical stand-ins for “changing aspirations” which functioned as “echo satellites and dish antenna,”28 walls, and shelters. Characterizing the entire concept as a “garden on the moon,” Noguchi was focused on what the first extension of human consciousness to another celestial body should comprise.

The hollow, aluminum Origin with Young Balloon appears to relate to the fundamental relationship in the Expo proposal between a symbolic presentation of humankind’s origins as thinking beings in caves and the altered landscape of the planet that modern humanity has wrought and ultimately now devised ways to escape, or at least symbolically transcend. This is what makes the balloon such a potent symbol for Noguchi. The hot air balloon is actually quite old technology. The fact that NASA and the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) continued to have a use for balloons nods to the continuity of aspiration that Noguchi always sought. In the Expo model the relationship between below and above was reworked into a granite-surfaced tumulus and a balloon floating directly above as a roof. Whatever its relationship to the Expo pavilion plan, Origin with Young Balloon is an important memorialization of this key moment of reflection produced by the Apollo program. Noguchi was, like so much of the world, thinking about the apex achievement of human ingenuity and technology, reaching the moon, knowing that all we would find would be the most desolate and primitive environment imaginable, a dusty landscape inhabited by rocks. It is a paradox Noguchi adored.

25 Isamu Noguchi and Pavilion Associates, “U.S. Exhibit for Expo ’70 at Osaka, Japan” proposal, ca. 1967: 4. The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum Archives (MS_COR_248_006).

26 Isamu Noguchi, draft for “U.S. Exhibit for Expo ’70 at Osaka, Japan” proposal, ca. 1967: 1. The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum Archives (MS_PROJ_037_009).

27 Isamu Noguchi, draft, 6.

28 Isamu Noguchi, draft, 2.

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Pl. 43 ISAMU NOGUCHI Space Blot, 1982–83 (fabricated in 2020) Hot-dipped galvanized steel 52¼ × 15½ × 11¾ in. (132.7 × 39.4 × 29.8 cm) The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York Pl. 44 ISAMU NOGUCHI Sky Mirror, 1982–83 Hot-dipped galvanized steel 103/8 × 25 × 22½ in. (26.4 × 63.5 × 57.2 cm) The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York

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n 1982, Noguchi worked with the Los Angeles-based artist workshop and publisher Gemini G.E.L. to produce a new editioned series of twenty-six hot-dipped galvanized steel sculptures. Building on his earlier experiments with interlocking forms and folded metal, Noguchi returned to the idea of making self-contained space sculptures from planes: constructing three-dimensional forms from two-dimensional materials.

Although the twenty-six sculptures in the series differ in scale and subject, together they encapsulate a striking range of Noguchi’s broader concerns: a long-standing formal interest in abstracted movement and implied weightlessness, his philosophical approach to the atomic age, and a striving for a new cosmic awareness. This is particularly obvious in these two examples. Space Blot is not his first foray into sculpting the amorphousness of the universe and its structures (see pl. 5), but it is his most clever and amusing. Here the scale is an attempt to pioneer a cosmic, sculptural equivalent of aerial perspective to achieve something like the view of a nebula we can access with current technology. That same technology is not particularly well represented, except from a Noguchian perspective, by the galvanized steel Sky Mirror, the third of three such devices included in the exhibition (see also pls. 30 and 38). This one, which gleams brightly but is not reflective when it first emerges from the zinc bath, and then becomes only duller and less reflective over time, is an indication of Noguchi’s increasingly abstract, inward-looking, and ever less material understanding of what it meant to seek inspiration in the stars. It is also a beautiful testament to Noguchi’s unfailing desire to find aspiration everywhere and anywhere, not merely in apex achievements such as the space program and networked arrays of ground-based telescopes.

While Noguchi’s aspiration “to reveal an awareness of nature and its continuity” perhaps more obviously motivated the artist’s sculpting of gardens, landscapes, and stones, this lasting concern for the “allowance of nature’s own intrusion” crucially extended to his work with industrial materials and processes.38 After they were modeled, cut, and welded, these steel-plate sculptures were hot-dip galvanized, a process by which the steel is submerged in a bath of molten zinc to produce a chemically bonded outer coating, a protective zinc patina.

Commonly used for industrial objects like gutters, lampposts, and corrugated roofs and highway guardrails, hot-dipped galvanization is intended to preserve steel from environmental corrosion—to effectively keep nature out. Noguchi, however, was drawn to what he saw as the “secret nature,” within the industrial process, which he believed had “its own entropy, its own cycle of birth and dissolution.”39 Emerging from the chemical bath with a uniquely spangled zinc patina, the irregular specificity of each of Noguchi’s sculptures only develops with age as the outer layer of zinc oxidizes and changes.

Despite their artificial manufacture, Noguchi’s galvanized steel sculptures both express and record the flow of nature.

38 Isamu Noguchi essay, in Isamu Noguchi at Gemini 1982–1983, exh. cat. (Los Angeles: Gemini G.E.L., 1983), unpaginated.

39 Isamu Noguchi and Nancy E. Miller, “A Conversation with Isamu Noguchi,” transcript of a video interview for the Albright-Knox Gallery, July 8, 1977. The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum Archives (MS_WRI_046_001).

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Pl. 46 ISAMU NOGUCHI Model for Challenger Memorial, 1985/1986–87 Steel rods, plastic, masking tape 297/8 × 2¼ × 2¼ in.

(75.9 × 5.7 × 5.7 cm) Plastic base: 4½ × 31/8 in.

(11.4 × 7.9 cm) diameter The Isamu Noguchi Foundation and Garden Museum, New York Pl. 47 ISAMU NOGUCHI Challenger Memorial, 1985–87 Steel, paint 100 ft. (30.5 m) height Bayfront Park, City of Miami