(pensive music) If you think about the most powerful forces that unite us, they're all invisible: love, gravity, the wind. Noguchi spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to shape or sculpt those things, and it took an enormous amount of work and practice to figure out how to manipulate them. But that's what this show is really about, are small examples of ways that he manipulated the invisible in order to affect and adapt our perspective on things. Noguchi was really interested in what he called the in between spaces. He thought a lot about the invisible connections that hold everything together and that unite us. He was really inspired by what he called that ritual of rocks from Japanese culture. If you think about the way a rock garden works, every rock that's buried in a garden is at least two thirds of the way buried underground, and the idea of that is really to make sure that they continue to be connected down where we don't normally see it. This show specifically comes out of an idea of George Nelson's. Nelson was the director of design and many other roles at Herman Miller, and was a writer about design and really just an incredible idea person, and he wrote an essay that was about an idea that he coined as the Subscape, and that really meant everything below the level of the tabletop and the chair seat. He said that that was the source of his interest in trying to lighten up the Subscape and make it transparent and visually more interesting, which is a feature of a lot of mid-century modern design. And in some ways, Noguchi's coffee table, which he designed at Herman Miller's behest and for George Nelson really is kind of the perfect archetype of the modern way of thinking about the Subscape, both making it accessible, visible, transparent, but also kind of revealing the structure of things. So he was really excited by the idea of making a transparent table that was, in the parlance of the day, knock-down, which really means disassemblable. It's basically just three elements. It has these two legs and a top, and it's all flat parts, which is another metaphor for transparency. It's basically just an empty frame that frames the void of space. Noguchi's very good at harnessing the mystery of the unknown. So Origin, as it sits in the gallery, is half a work. Sometimes this was shown as something called Origin with Young Balloon, and it had what looked like a gigantic weather balloon attached to one side of it, but it also is a work in and of itself. It's really sort of a cast aluminum cave, freestanding cave. It's playing with the idea of the origins of everything. It's painted red inside, which suggests that there's some kind of energy in there. You could interpret it as, say, the mouth of a volcano, a small volcano. But really, it's just being a source of anything significant, anything important. There's a photo on the wall of Noguchi sitting inside it and just poking his head up out of the top of it as if he's a blooming flower. This is a lovely early self portrait. It's carved from a single piece of wood, and it shows himself as around probably a 10 year old, and he's doing his morning exercises. He also looks like he might be ready to spring off of a diving board into the ocean. It has some really beautiful details. It has bright blue eyes. It's one of the most important things to know about Noguchi, but one that's hard to access usually because so much of the portraiture of him is in black and white, but he had bright blue, cerulean blue eyes. Even though at times he looked Japanese or kind of Asian, pan-Asian, because of blue eyes, he never could pass anywhere, and it's really the root of what he always said about himself, which was, I'm not really at home anywhere because I never feel like I belong precisely anywhere. But what he did is he took that and made that a source of feeling or making himself feel at home everywhere. It's really the reason he became a global person, a one world man, as Bucky Fuller put it. (somber music) Once we decided to do a show about the Subscape, we had to show the set that Noguchi made for Igor Stravinsky and George Balanchine's Orpheus, which is the story of Orpheus and Eurydice. It's from Greek mythology. Orpheus was a demigod who was famous as a musician, so it was said that he played so beautifully that he could make rocks dance and that nature would all come into him, sort of like a Snow White situation. He could conjure this incredible connection with nature and everything around him through the beauty of his playing. So very sadly, his bride Eurydice died. Orpheus decides that he's going to try to save her from Hades. He resolves to go to the underworld and to play for Hades, the king of hell, and try to win her back, and Noguchi wanted to do something very modern, very different. He focuses in with his set on very basic settings. So to start, we've got a grove of rocks, so that it's kind of very austere here at the grave, and then his lovely, simple idea for the descent into hell is that these glowing rocks lift off the ground and rise gradually as to dramatize the idea of descending. And then you get to hell, and hell is a whirl of bone and flame. The minions of Hades are carrying rocks around, and Hades, actually his whole costume is a cave. In the cave, he's hidden initially, and then he turns to the audience and he's got a flower of flame in his mouth. So he's a creature of real horror. And then Eurydice, she's like a kind of melancholy ray of late afternoon light. She's pulled taut between life and death, between the underworld and the surface. She's been turned into this pure abstraction. And then you come back to the surface of the Earth, and we just have the little suggestion of a hillock and the skeleton of a tree, which is another beautiful Noguchi idea. It's very ascetic, but it has little sprigs of growth to it, the suggestion being that after Orpheus died, his spirit sort of merges with nature, and that something new is growing, something new is being born, but it's both kind of terrifying and beautiful at the same time. This lovely mask that he made doesn't cover the eyes. It's really more like sort of a prism for refracting his vision. But in the ballet, it symbolizes Orpheus's blindness while he's in despair, and then trying to make this journey where he sort of has to shut everything else out and just focus. The Subscape notion that's buried in it, which was this sort of Jungian idea that we're all connected at the level of myth, that there are common stories. The stories that Noguchi was really attracted to are ones that there are versions of on every continent where mankind is, because we do have some shared experiences. So he didn't really care about whether it was the Greek version or the Roman version of this particular myth. It was a starting point for him that helped him tap into something that was universally human, which is this idea of losing the ones that we love, which is incomprehensible to those of us who remain alive, and we would do anything to reverse the flow of time and the natural order to get back what we've lost. And if you think about humanity's shared history and all of those who have gone before us, they are the great Subscape of the human experience. (pensive music) Noguchi had this idea of the imaginary space or the imaginary landscape or the mindscape or the landscape of the mind. He had lots of different ways of talking about it. All of that is about talking about that interior life, what's hidden, what we should try to connect to, the subconscious. These are objects that create imaginary and physical spaces for us to plug our minds into and let our minds go into from very simple things like The Seed, which can be interpreted in many different ways, but my favorite way, at least in the context of this exhibition and this space, is it has a very simple ground plane that's on an angle, and we're at the same time seeing the shoots that are coming up out of the ground and the root ball, the core of the seed that remains, that's starting to put tendrils down into the earth. If you think of a seed, it's really a remarkable thing, because a seed is this little ball that's bidirectional, right? It has two components. It's got to be able to go up, and it's got to be able to go down at the same time, and a seed actually figures it out and will turn underground to orient itself so that it can get roots down and growth up. Noguchi captures that all in this just little bundle of marble, and it's a really nice way of thinking about how life depends on these kinds of connections. When you think about the root ball of the tree, you think in terms of it being at least as big as the canopy of the tree, so there's as much tree or more tree underground than there is aboveground. Noguchi gets that in a piece like Seen and Unseen. We're looking at maybe two parts of a sea serpent that's moving through the ocean, and maybe we're just seeing where it's surfaced and a couple of its rolls, but most of it is, again, below the surface. This is one of those ones that's named from a poem of his father's. His father was a famous Japanese poet, and Noguchi loved to take poem titles or little phrases from his father's poetry and use those for titles, which is nice too, because that's tapping into his whole biography and this profound but very complicated relationship he had with his father and with his father's country, Japan, which was also part of his legacy. When it came to trying to come up with a concept for a memorial to the dead of Hiroshima, which he was commissioned to create and then ultimately wasn't built because when they commissioned him, they weren't thinking about the fact that he was an American artist. I think the decision was taken in the city of Hiroshima at the time that it was just fundamentally inappropriate to have an American artist memorialize the dead of these two American bombs, which is totally understandable and I think he ultimately understood. But the memorial itself is beautifully conceived. So it has a gigantic stone arch aboveground on a platform, and then the legs of the arch continue down underground into a subterranean chamber, where the actual cenotaph for the dead would be, and I think of it as a gigantic circuit trying to kind of recreate the circuit, a circuit of healing, to recycle the energy of all of the dead and to kind of create the possibility of healing and renewal and rebirth in a way that creates a profound experience. He was really good at making sculptures, these ones that connect to the ground and seem to disappear into the ground, that are like transistors. They're plugged into the planet. So, below the surface of the Earth, there's this entire civilization of worms, and it has highways and byways and passageways, and it's just this little stone pyramid, but the idea is that it's sort of the tip of the iceberg of worm civilization. You know, who would think about worms other than Noguchi, or set himself the task of thinking about what worm civilization looks like. That's a very Noguchian idea, to try to take his mind and push it down underground and to see that and inhabit it mentally as a space. Another example of that further behind me is The Mermaid's Grave. It's a very strange thing. It's very heavy, solid. It's in basalt. It has a square base and then a round top that sits on top of it, so in a way, it kind of recalls Egyptian sarcophagi. The weird thing is that the circular top doesn't fit properly on the square base, so there are gaps in the base, which is open, and if you think about it through the lens of the idea of The Mermaid's Grave, it's very beautiful, because if you think about the cycle of life on Earth, we're used to thinking of solid matter. So we have phrases like earth to earth, dust to dust, this idea that we come from the dirt and we go back to the dirt when we die, and I think Noguchi was thinking about what happens to a mermaid who is of the sea and of the ocean. I mean, the interesting thing is that we're 80% water, but we don't think and act that way. But a mermaid does, so a mermaid buried in this sarcophagus that has water circulating through it would just naturally go back to the ocean. So a mermaid's grave ultimately, at least if Noguchi makes it, ultimately ends up empty with just water flowing through it. One of the beautiful things about it is it's not at all pretentious, and again, there's always a sculpture, design, architecture, environment, landscape design, all those things blend around for him, so we also have a model in this same space of a swimming pool that he designed that would have been, he believed, the first biomorphic shaped swimming pool in history, which became a kind of mid-century trope, the idea of the kidney-shaped pool. But he designed one for what became a very famous house for a Hollywood director. The swimming pool didn't end up getting built, but he was very proud of the shape, and the idea of creating, you know, a miniature ocean for the home is a very attractive idea. (pensive music continues) So I'm sitting in a space right now that is inspired by an idea of Noguchi's. He created something that he called the garden of bases for the quarry where he worked in Italy in the 60s and the early 70s, and it is a display space, in a way. It is in an open patio area, and the idea is that it's basically pedestals that create an environment that is sufficient unto itself. It really didn't need sculpture, per se. It was sculpture. It was trying to confuse the idea in a place with a very specific notion of what sculpture was, which is figurative sculpture, even modern, abstract sculpture. Instead, he took the same material, which is this precious marble, and he just made pedestals, and these pedestals were all asymmetric, various heights, and arranged in an environment, and that was it. Now, they ended up putting sculpture on them, and he put sculpture on them, and people used them as working platforms, so it became a sort of more conventional space, in a way. But the root idea was there, which is that he could use bases to make an environment that was worth thinking of sculpture just in and of itself, and the question that we're asking in this gallery is, does putting something on a base make it sculpture? And in a way, obviously the answer is yes, but Noguchi had a complicated way of looking at it. In here, there are objects that seem like they are just bases. There are objects that seem like sculptures made out of multiple bases. We're showing a whole range of Akari bases, which is sort of the hidden part of the Akari lamp, whether it's a table lamp or a floor lamp. Noguchi was always trying to figure out how to look past whatever the limiting factor in anything is, so he talked about looking beyond the false horizon of the museum pedestal, which is a really beautiful metaphor, because it pulls in all of the assumptions that we make and everything that we think about in terms of how we limit our vision, in terms of thinking that sculpture or art is something that belongs in museums, and he just fundamentally didn't believe that. He was really not interested in making art for museums and art for rich people's living rooms. He wanted art that was connected to daily life for as many people as humanly possible. [Noguchi] I think of sculpture as part of the enjoyment of living. Of my living, that is. Things should result from it that other people can enjoy in a vicarious sense. It would seem to me kind of a reflection of that which I experienced in making it. Since I have this rather puritanical aversion to sculptures as merely objects of value for the rich, and would like very much that sculpture should be enjoyable, something that would go into the homes of everybody, costing little and with the maximum enjoyment for the minimum of investment. (pensive music) [Hart] Previously we've looked at different kinds of Subscapes, the spaces themselves, but they're made by various creatures and forces, and Noguchi was as interested in them and as respectful of them as he was of the spaces. So really, architects of the Subscape in this case are all of these creepy crawly creatures. We have worms, we have centipedes, we have snakes. Serpents are very important in this story. Snakes end up being the moving connectors that connect us to the underground, the underworld. They're very comfortable underground in ways that we are not so in a way, they're also our ambassadors. They lead us into those hidden spaces. And it's not just creatures. So, Noguchi was also interested in the forces, so this gallery also contains an example of erosion and the way that it shapes the landscape and creates hollows where there was solid matter. We also have tectonic shift and we have gravity, which Noguchi thought and talked a lot about, because gravity is something that's totally pervasive and is the most powerful and dominant physical force on the Earth. Noguchi was constantly trying to make it visible, and he drew on lots of different traditions of thinking to do that. One of those is tea ceremony, Japanese tea ceremony. He loved the idea that in tea ceremony, you handle heavy things as if they're light to create a sense of ease and elegance, light things as if they're heavy in order to create a sense of occasion and a momentousness. That is like a perfect metaphor for understanding the way that Noguchi thought of sculpture, as trying to take materials and the way of handling them and to try to create these kind of countervailing feelings and senses. Noguchi had the opportunity to make a studio in Japan. He was invited by the great cook and ceramist Rosanjin to use a farmhouse on his property. Noguchi had just gotten married. He had a new bride. He wanted to stay in Japan and make ceramics. So it all kind of perfectly came together, and he had the chance to make this studio, and he began by digging out a hillside and then built a studio around this earthen wall. In a way, I think it was kind of a private joke, because you had a new group of young, brilliant rebel ceramists forming in Japan, the Sodeisha group, and their name literally means the Crawling Through Mud Association, which is their way to twist or turn this very revered tradition of ceramic making on its head and make it into something much more visceral and physical and sculptural, which they did, in part inspired by Noguchi. So he himself is one of these creepy crawly creatures digging into the earth, doing it both to get the raw material to make ceramics, but also to make an environment for himself. MoMA, Museum of Modern Art in New York, owns the biggest ceramic that he ever made, which is a multi-part sculpture that stands on a big post that's here and barely fits in our gallery, but is sort of ascending up into the ceiling here at the museum, crawling the way that centipedes do. He loved the idea of small things that aggregate into much larger and more important things, and the centipede is like the archetype of that. The title of the work is Even the Centipede. It's great to think about, what does he mean? What is it that even the centipede can do? Noguchi's version of sculpture and sculpting is shaping the world. It's not making things to be sold on pedestals or shown on pedestals. A great example of that is behind me on the wall. There are these two panels that have teeny little clay sculptures, some glazed, some unglazed, and they're mostly just little twists. I always think of them as the stem cells of sculpture, or they're like little ideas, just a physical idea or a reified version of a fleeting thought passing through your mind. What's so neat about them, he called them beginnings, and what's neat about them is that also, almost all of his sculptures started that way. So when he would make a gigantic sculpture, he usually started with just a little blob of plaster. We have hundreds of these little blobs of plaster, and they basically all look the same, and they don't look like very much, but for him, it was a way of getting the idea out of his head in a concrete form that allowed the process of shaping the world to begin in it. I'm standing in front of a rock that is from the Uji River. Noguchi did not touch this rock other than to pull it out of the river. He didn't do that literally himself, but we have photographs of him doing it with a team of divers. As I was talking before about forces that shape our world, one of those is water. Water is hugely important as a shaping force. So this rock was sculpted by the Uji River. It turns out that the Uji River, like many rivers, is a truly great sculptor, because it works very slowly over time through very gradual erosion with silts dissolved in water, so it has a very, very fine tool that it uses very well. What's beautiful about these Uji River rocks that are basalt is that they maintain the sense of flow of the river. So it still feels like the water is flowing through and over it, but in this incredibly heavy, dense, dark form of this Japanese basalt that Noguchi loved so much. If you think about the Uji River as a mentor to Noguchi, as a sculptural mentor, it makes a lot of sense, and if you think about flowing water as one of these hidden forces that create the Subscape, that's what he wanted his sculpture to be. [Noguchi] I change. Time changes. Everything changes. (pensive music continues)
