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Arts & Entertainment

The Last Word on the Laguna Art Museum's Noguchi Show

The exhibit proves that the artist's legacy is solid.

In the main gallery, you find yourself standing before “What is Sculpture? Akari from the Venice Biennale,” one of the exhibits that’s part of the current “Noguchi: California Legacy” show, and you could swear something shifted in the Earth’s gravitational field.

And if not just for you, then for the Akari light sculptures as well. And if not just for you and the glowing/floating lanterns, then for the entire museum. But the Akari, which means “illumination” in Japanese, are what connect you with the illusion of weightlessness (a quality implied by the word’s definition), and the rest of the situation disappears: how you got here, what comes next. It immediately becomes clear you are experiencing the work of an artist intent on nothing short of total environmental transformation through the synthesis of fine and applied art; defying convention, categories, trends—even the definition of “art” itself—relying on a kind of balancing play between the elements of the Earth, light, and space.

And relying, of course, on you—you who have graced the presence of these light sculptures that appear to be floating around the main gallery, ever-so-slowly twirling in place, casting light according to the twirl. And the twirl of Akari VB-2 or VB-5, for instance, may or may not be in direct response to your presence, the opening of a door, a change in temperature, invisible currents of air pushed around as you walk.

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Other Akari suggest a struggle against gravity. VB-13 is a grouping of six lanterns on a platform low to the floor, each shaped like a worm or an underwater eel, or even a sprouting seed squirming up from the soil, trapped between worlds, unable to fully form and float like VB-7. Still others, like VB-4, depict a glowing pyramidal structure hovering in the air. And if it wasn’t tethered to the ground by stones wrapped in handmade paper, it’s not a stretch to imagine the pyramid floating away like the traditional Japanese candlelit lanterns.

For Isamu Noguchi, who kept designing new shapes from 1951 on, culminating in his representation of the United States at the 1986 Venice Biennale, these career-spanning Akari dissolved any boundaries that may or may not have existed between fine art and design. The mass-producible lanterns gave people all around the world intimate contact with Noguchi’s work in ways that could never have been realized otherwise, made possible by the affordability of the materials used: handmade washi paper, bamboo ribbon, a metal frame. In other words, Noguchi allowed the materials to guide their way into rooms, spaces and IKEA stores far and wide. He did not stand in the way on some artistic principle and turn the paper structures into bronze statues, for example.

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“Probably I could cast the lanterns in bronze if I wanted to, and probably I could get a good price for them,” Noguchi said in a 1973 interview. “But, you know, what’s the point?”

The actual point, at least for Noguchi, was for the ephemeral nature of the Akari to be embraced as the artwork’s intrinsic lifecycle (even his stone sculptures have lifecycles, they just have an extremely wider arc than a human lifecycle, so we consider them “timeless”). The fragile-looking sculptures are intended to be experienced, enjoyed, illuminated from the inside until made useless. Then, if you so choose, replaced … perhaps with a different shape.

Here, Noguchi walked two fine lines, simultaneously challenging the perception that certain materials (bronze, stone, marble) are more artistically legitimate than others (paper, bamboo, balsa wood), as well as the perception that legitimate art is not supposed to be useful—certainly not consumable. There was (and in many ways remains) a sense that if a piece of art can be used for something, then it can’t be fine art, or at the very least it should cost significantly less than a piece of fine art that can’t be used for anything other than a piece of fine art. With the Akari in particular, Noguchi undermined such firmly-held tendencies in the art community, blurring distinctions between what he felt were unnatural categories (e.g., industrial design, architecture, landscape design, sculptures and craft). Hence, the title of the exhibit, a rhetorical question: “What is Sculpture?”

“The tendency has been to call art which was not called art before by a different name,” Noguchi once said. “These categories, these names, have become sort of blurred, and purposely blurred, and it sells better as art. I have a tendency to do exactly the opposite: don’t call it art, call it something else. Call it a chair. Even if it doesn’t function very well as a chair, it’s a chair. I mean, it’s part of my orneriness to not want to ride on the coattails of art.”

And Noguchi had his fair share of experiences to be a little ornery about. Born in Los Angeles an illegitimate son of an acclaimed Japanese poet who essentially abandoned him, he was raised by his American mother (who fled the U.S. partly due to anti-Japanese sentiment over the Russo-Japanese War) in Japan, where he felt like he didn’t belong, before being sent back as a teenager to the U.S. for schooling in Indiana, where he earned his way cleaning furnaces, mowing lawns, delivering newspapers; where he again felt like he didn’t belong.

“It was a real American story,” Noguchi recalled. “I mean, it was not unusual, and I’m not claiming anything unusual about me except that, as I say, I was a stranger and I had no relatives, no sense of belonging really.”

Cutoff from his family, using the pseudonym “Sam Gilmour,” surrounded by the social realities of racism, Noguchi found that art enabled him to discover his own identity. Right out of high school, he went to work in Connecticut as an apprentice to Gutzon Borglum, the Ku Klux Klan member and sculptor, best known as the creator of the Mount Rushmore National Memorial. Although, Borglum was far from a mentor to Noguchi, which is not to say the young apprentice didn’t learn anything.

“I would say one learns by osmosis almost. It’s not a question of formal education. I don’t say that I learned to be a sculptor at Borglum’s. I learned being in the country and working. He didn’t make the slightest effort to teach me anything at all. He was an irascible fellow who enjoyed having people feel badly. I was cutting wood most of the time for his furnaces.”

It is fitting that Noguchi first learned to sculpt by chopping wood in a forest, since most (if not all) of his work expresses a desire to return to nature; to transcend social contracts, the whims of personality, and explore in as pure a sense as possible a person’s relationship to the world (not exactly the motives behind Borglum’s work). Driven to art out of a genuine desperation to belong, Noguchi found that “only in art could a person who does not belong with any social contract find a viewpoint which is free of social contracts.” And for Noguchi, that viewpoint could never be found in another artist’s discoveries, but rather through one’s own relationship to nature, since “all our imagination derives very much from nature, and, however we stretch it, it alludes to things in nature.”

The Gemini sculptures, for instance, are based on Noguchi’s freehand drawings of shapes inspired by his place of birth in California; shapes that appear both elusive and familiar. You’re not sure if it’s a mountain, a lake, a boulder, a cloud, a cactus, a rabbit, a landscape, but you feel you’ve seen it before. In the flame-cut, galvanized steel plates of blue-silver-gray used for Kaki-Persimmons, Magritte’s Stone, or Space Blot, made smooth like underwater pebbles, you know there is an aura plucked from nature embedded in the inorganic metal—you just don’t know where it came from.

This prompts your mind to travel back to (or imagine) places, coordinates, memories in search of that shape. As you walk around the exhibit, rendered with a modern sleekness singular to Noguchi, the sculptures flatten from the side until there’s nothing but a quarter-inch line of A-36 steel, further supporting the emotional depth inherent in the shapes—for there is not much physical depth to the harsh material. In effect, the curves of the two-dimensional metal plates accentuate three dimensions of space.

However, Noguchi always desired to go beyond mere accentuation of three dimensions—he wanted to place you inside the sculpture. He wanted the most intimate of contact with the public possible. He wanted art and social functions to become an interwoven reality. On a small scale this was accomplished with pieces like Akari PL-1, which is simultaneously a light fixture, a room, and an environment. On a large scale (which was probably Noguchi’s preferred scale … free to the public and the closest thing to timeless), he accomplished this through dozens of public works projects all around the world, from a children’s playground in Japan to Sky Gate in Hawai’i, from a sunken garden in New York to California Scenario in Costa Mesa.

Featured at Laguna Art Museum in the form of blown-up aerial photographs, schematic drawings, handwritten correspondence, a scale model, and a video loop of a documentary about its construction, the California Scenario exhibit offers insight into one of Noguchi’s most enigmatic fusions of sculpture, landscape, and plaza. Access to the sculptor’s visionary blueprints is a privilege that should not be taken for granted, especially if you make the 20-minute drive up to South Coast Plaza after you leave the museum, where the 1.6-acre park remains hidden in the midst of office buildings, banks, restaurants, and miscellaneous street noise hushed by the flowing water—truly an oasis in the midst of Shopping Mall Central.

Inspired by the gardens and temples of Japan, the piazzas of Italy, the ancient pyramids all around the world, the temples in India carved out of bedrock, and of course his love for California, he combines a modernist slant with an approach and understanding closer to the artists of Ancient Antiquities, if not the Stone Age (if not much much earlier).

From early in his career, Noguchi designed and pitched ideas for large-scale projects that would make the builders of the Great Pyramid proud, many of which were promptly turned down. Like Play Mountain, his idea for a pyramidal playground in New York the size of a city block, or Monument to the Plow, a pyramid on the plains topped with a plow, an American invention brought about by correspondence between Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson.

Unfortunately, Noguchi seemed perpetually ahead of his time, opposed by the powers-that-be, and thus left with countless ideas never realized. After the Pearl Harbor attacks, for instance, Noguchi volunteered to work in an internment camp in the hopes of designing parks and recreational areas for the internees. Once there, however, the intelligent officers accused him of “suspicious behavior” and wouldn’t let him leave for several months, followed by ridiculous accusations of espionage and an unwarranted attempt by the U.S. government to have him deported.

Fortunately, Noguchi’s constant explorations into new arenas of art persisted, in spite of (if not because of) his perpetual experiences of not-belonging, and by extension, his perpetual need to break away from the norm; his playful willingness to risk rejection and/or failure. After all, his middle name Isamu means “courage” in Japanese.

“To break away is very important to me, because then you suddenly find that these things that you thought were yourself may not necessarily be, and the fact that you trip yourself and fall on your face gives you a chance to get up and shake your head.”

Noguchi never wanted to be tied down to a certain kind of art, for he felt this would diminish a deeper connection with how we function on the Earth, which is the silent, underlying theme of his work. And California Scenario encapsulates Noguchi’s central aspiration: the longing to connect with people through socially functional art that enhances a personal connection with nature.

Commissioned by Orange County developer Henry T. Segerstrom, whose family had once been the largest farmer of lima beans in America, with the dream to develop this plot of agricultural land into a community-enriching garden, Scenario translates into stone, soil, and water—not just the many environs of California (mountains, rivers, deserts, red wood forests), but also California’s georelational context with the rest of the globe, expressive of Noguchi’s far-reaching international travels.

Staring down at the scale model, six pieces are connected by sandstone walkways, and like so many ancient structures the world over, from the pyramids in Egypt to the Nazca Lines in Peru to Stonehenge, the aerial view completes the story. From the south, Water Source brings water down the side of a pyramid and into a north-flowing stream, like the north-flowing Nile, before turning east and running into Water Use, a pyramid covered in limestone. When you visit the site in person, Water Use becomes a functional sundial, starting each day in the neighboring parking structure’s shadow, which slowly climbs the pyramid face according to the sun’s westbound arc.

Opposite Water Use, the sun eventually sets behind Land Use, an oval mound covered in honeysuckle, reminiscent of the hundreds of pre-historic mounds that can be found throughout the world. In the far northwest corridor of the park, you can find the cone-shaped Energy Fountain, which brings to mind the ancient sculptures of Buddha, and the even older depictions of Hindu gods, portrayed with a cone-shaped head as if receiving divine energy from above.

Besides completing the auditory transformation of the plaza into an otherworldly experience—almost like discovering the site of a civilization that has just moments before vanished without a trace, leaving only the flowing water—the central stream of California Scenario marks a division between The Desert Land in the southeast, a circular island of desert landscape doming out of the sandstone with cacti and other succulents, and the Forest Walk in the north, an elevated horseshoe trail through tall, dew-covered grass amid California redwood trees rocketing to the sky.

Lastly, the one piece created from Noguchi’s own hands is Source of Life (renamed The Spirit of the Lima Bean out of respect for the Segerstrom family and the land’s history), a 12-foot-high sculpture of a dozen or so granite boulders interlocked as if molded from clay, not unlike the incomprehensible stone walls throughout the Machu Picchu complex in Peru. Naming a granite sculpture after something organic (life, or a lima bean), undermines the typical assertion that stone is an inorganic, lifeless, soulless thing. For Noguchi, stone was the purest material to sculpt, for there is the greatest amount of freedom (any shape is possible), with the least amount of pressure to sell (for most of his stone pieces were simply too large and heavy to be shown anywhere, save for a few of his public gardens). In other words, when sculpting from stone, Noguchi usually did so out of a desire to continue an ongoing dialogue with the material.

“I might say I do it for my pleasure. That’s the only reason I can give. I can’t say that I’m so historically oriented as to think of myself in historical terms. I’d rather not. But I do think it’s because it’s essentially sculpture. And if I’m looking sculpture, instead of crushing an automobile, I’ll crush stone. I don’t deny that an automobile fender or something could be a medium of sculpture. Maybe I don’t do something so different after all. But still, if I succeed, I have transcended not just our time, but all time.”

At least until the stone crumbles away, but given the longevity of the Great Pyramid, Machu Picchu, and the like, chances are high that California Scenario will stick around a great deal longer than the corrodible structures that surround it. And by extension, so will Noguchi’s legacy.

All quotes by Noguchi are from "Oral History Interview with Isamu Noguchi, 1973 Nov. 7-1973 Dec. 26, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution."

Noguchi: California Legacy runs through October 2 at the Laguna Art Museum, 307 Cliff Drive. 949-494-8971; www.lagunartmuseum.org. Click here for details on an August 7 lecture about Noguchi by UC Irvine professor Bert Winther-Tamaki.

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