Sculpting Space: Isamu Noguchi
My first job out of college was kind of terrible. I was the executive assistant to the publisher of a boutique art-book press – Soviet Propaganda Art of the 1950’s, Odalisques, An Illustrated History, that sort of thing. Think The Devil Wears Prada, but with radically less attractive people and you’ll have a fairly good approximation of My Life in Publishing. I lasted about six months before a Big-Bang-blow-out between the publisher and myself sent me (happily) to the classifieds (I ended up writing really awful jokes for the radio, but THAT is a story for another time).
I mention this small episode not to rehash the proverbial slings and arrows of my own outrageous fortune, but because – strangely enough — of Isamu Noguchi. The publisher had a small Noguchi sculpture installed in the center of his office. Carved from green stone, the piece was squat and heavy and shaped like a hollow triangle whose point had been sheared off. It was kind of an ugly thing. Or at least, that’s what I thought until one early blue morning. I was in the office and dawn was just breaking; sunlight streamed into the room and the sculpture was suddenly dressed in a gown of warm gold. Looking at the sculpture…well. I can’t describe it, can’t quantify it, except to say that I experienced, however achingly brief, a profound moment of stillness, space and light.
Ever since (many, many years ago), I’ve had a emotional connection with Noguchi’s work and this past Friday, I paid an overdue visit to the Isamu Noguchi Museum in Long Island City, Queens. 
First, you should know that Noguchi not only designed the museum himself, but he personally arranged the sculptures’ placement. The bulk of the museum’s permanent collection has not moved from their original placement in over twenty years and with good reason. The man understood space and light, a truth you grasp immediately on entering the museum’s first gallery. Defined by rough cinderblock and a stone floor, the back wall of the gallery is “pushed” forward into the street and beyond the exterior of the building, creating a thick band of air and light that streams around the gallery. Noguchi doesn’t merely invite nature into his museum (although the pigeon I saw flapping through the gallery certainly accepted), he incorporated the natural world into his own work. Through this melding of the artificial (the worked stone) with the natural (streaming light) Noguchi revealed the transcendent nature of the common, the ordinary, the everyday, the taken-for-granted. The openness of the gallery, combined with the looming ceiling, makes the museum a simple Chartes, transferring a loose and easy holiness onto the roughhewn stone. Of all of Noguchi’s work, his own museum may be his most impacting sculpture.
Many of Noguchi’s pieces are abstracted geometric shapes — a ring, a rectangle, a triangle — that are hollow through the middle. In these, Noguchi’s focus is on the emptiness of space. Like the Buddhists, Noguchi doesn’t mean “nothingness” when he speaks about emptiness, but means it more as a continuum. Confronted by one of the Voids (as they’re called), you realize that the space and the stone, these two primordial elements, are not distinct and individual and more importantly, that neither are you. Space, stone and body are part of a continuing circle of energy, sometimes stagnant, sometimes raging, but always continuous. The Voids speak to us of a fundamental community, communion and unity. The fact that the sculptures in the museum aren’t labeled and nor is any text supplied for them, reinforces the deep-down thrumming you feel when moving through the space — the sculptures on display can’t be explained, but just experienced and in experiencing them, you become a part of them. 
Lastly, you can’t write about the Noguchi Museum without mentioning the garden. Both sculpted and wild, the garden makes Central Park look tawdry and reduces Brooklyn Botanical to a string of over-manicured flowerbeds. But again, like all of Noguchi’s work, it’s best not talked about, as much as lived.
~cpd
The Isamu Noguchi Museum is FREE for all New York Cit public school students. For all other students, admission is $5 . Visit www.noguchi.org for tickets.
