. . .'Momotaro' contemplates the enormous psychic distances across fields of lonliness, abandonment, uncertainty and identity. These were distances Noguchi crossed and recrossed many times in the course of his artistic and personal life. But, whether it was his 'maiden' voyage at the age of two on the steamer Mongolia from southern California to the suburbs of Tokyo or splitting Italian marble from a quarry face, Noguchi was never simply a traveler from point 'A' to 'B'. He was a space-bender, and for him the shortest distance between to points always seems to have been along contour lines and 'great circle' routes created by the denser objects in his field of travel.
to momotaro . . .
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While he broke easily and cleanly from canonical human form that had dominated sculpture from earliest history, Noguchi was not disposed to follow the mixed urging and envy of his mentor, Brancusi, to the freedom of a younger generation of artists quit of their attachments in the heady freefall of abstractionist idea. Instead, he played at the margins of familiar shape, using the simplest suggestions of the mind's inhabitants to accelerate into the spaces of gardens, playgrounds, toys and lamps, furniture and metamorphising insects, converging horizons and ghostly clouds.
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Some art historians may ultimately conclude it was personal hesitancy or some innate conservativism that stayed Noguchi's hand from cutting his way to 'free flight'. However, it is just as plausible to suppose that instinct or maybe just old-fashioned problem analysis argued in favor of him retaining the core human interest with its mythic and psychic structure, even while he sought to overthrow the dominance of a human-centered art. To do otherwise might have left him with a capacity to bat a ball a million miles, but without a single anvil to bend and shape the space it traveled. To the space-bender, that condition describes a failed mission.
Form, myth and community are the elementals in Noguchi's space-sculpting lexicon. A seeming endless variety of materials, from rice-paper to the hardest granite, could be invested with these basic structures through their placement, shaping, relationship, location and community context. Once in operation as environments, objects, gardens or monuments, the surrounding space itself was 'bent' to the presence of meanings and realities which the elemental forms brought with them. Noguchi was very interested in such state transformations. In 1936 in Mexico he asked of his friend, Buckminster Fuller, to remind him of another order of transformation, Einstein's formula, E=MC2, that he wished to incoporate in a work he was doing. Fuller replied with a fifty-word telegram, that was as poetic a rendition of the subject as it was scientific. Once mastered, the art of space-bending has no practical limit in scope.
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Translated into the tablature of sculptural space-bending, a material sufficiently dense in form, mythic relation and human context might shape even larger-than-planetary distances. The powerful earthscape in "Sculpture to be seen from Mars" is a good example. Contours of iconography are used to engage interplanetary neigbors, perhaps long after our own self-annihilation. The steep, hard-edged techno-pyramid , the soft erroded brow-berm and small lunar-like crater-eyes all conspire to recall a distant future in which the signfied, itself, has disappeard. To the contemporary human viewer, the mythopoeic density of such a work as "Sculpture to be seen from Mars" clearly brings the aliens of some distant martian future (or some dune-swept interstellar habitat) into cell-phone range.
now that we've talked it to death, let's go take a look.
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Smoked Glass Lobby
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To Noguchi Lobby