Despite opinions that he spoke in the rustic concretisms of the sculptor or employed the adroit mind-benders of the zen rushi, Isamu Noguchi was no wordmaster. Indeed, fluency rather than any real flair was probably the main distinction of his native English from his halting Japanese - which all agree was 'childlike' and rudimentary. Though he came from a house of letters (his parents, Yone and Leonie, both being writers), poetry and the fine points of wordsmithing were not in his portfolio. He did, however, write a mean title from time to time. And that was neither accidental nor incidental to his work.
In fact Noguchi's titles are nothing less than the sculptor's equivalent to what the poems of Chi Pai Shi are to his paintings, an essential element of the whole. Noguchi's titles however do not function with the kind of internal integration as Chi Pai Shi's do. Rather, they are Noguchi's personal keys to the space at hand, a functional door-stop to mark an important entryway to his work. Their importance is that it remains that the only way to understand many of Noguchi's achievments in sculpted space is to enter them. Without the keys, the titles through which his own entry was gained or some equally powerful access node, one may appreciate, even interpret a work. But they will still not be able to 'use' it. And, if anything, the large majority of Noguchi's work was meant to be used. He carved space like a cartographer surveys for a map. Each placement, each fissure, each piece of protruding material was as if to say, 'Here is an ismuth, and here are mountains, and over there are mythological creatures...'
Mentally, sometimes physically, one 'enters' a Noguchi work. 'Occupancy' is as important as form to the realization of a Noguchi sculpture. By and large, whether it is a bony little fragment of some insect carapace tossed in a corner, or the huge contoured field proposed to mimic the seasonal behavior of the steel plow in heartland America, his work is meant for residency -- for immediate occupation by the physical body or by the imagination. If one is not willing to enter the space, then the sculptural form itself is unavailable. The viewer will get only objects in space (no matter how pretty or prettily arranged). One cannot see sculptured space from outside.
In numerous cases, Noguchi's titles represented what the space begins to look like when entered by sculptor. Pieces, such as 'Momotaro', that are so generic in their physical reality as to defy any assignment other than as abstraction, are actually incredible landscapes of story and play. Noguchi himself argued, they are not abstract. And, it is in his titles that one often first discovers the very prosaic and representational human elements, stories, familiar landmarks, common experiences, ordinary images and relations that are ready and waiting for those who wish to enter their spaces. So, when titles such as "Monument to Man", later change to "Sculpture with Pyramidal Shape to be Seen from Mars", we have an instance of reformulated space, just as a poem changes with successive readings, and with as much legitimacy as a poet who revises a work some years after its first publication. It remains that the genius of Noguchi was that the carved space was sufficiently generic that it not only incorporated titles as part of the 'playing' experience, but positively invites us to make up our own.
"That (small column)," he might say, "could be a chair for you or me. But that (big) one, over there, well that might be a chair for Mussolini!" was his way of cluing the observer that one could engage the work at hand by imagining the different worlds that such things as relative size implied about the space around them - the difference between the ordinary and the monumental, in that case. I've no doubt, however, that if someone turned and said, 'No! that big one is the dragon-gnomon which will surely turn the smaller one to ash at the mid-spring setting of the sun - a virgin sacrifice!' Noguchi would have been delighted with the new territory being explored in the space he had charted.


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