Noguchi

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
June 28, 2015

Noguchi
by James Panero

A review of LISTENING TO STONE: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi, by Hayden Herrera, Illustrated. 575 pp. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $40.

The art of biography is not unlike the creation of sculpture. Out of a raw material of artifact and anecdote must emerge the semblance of living form. There may be no one right way to animate such matter. Certainly, there are plenty of wrongs: from hazy abstraction to overwrought realism, from misapplied attention to mannered application. Whatever the approach, however, the spirit of the subject must somehow guide the telling. For Isamu Noguchi, the great border-crossing sculptor of the last century, the art came, he said, from tapping into “the materiality of stone, its essence, to reveal its identity — not what might be imposed but something closer to its being.” The genius of “Listening to Stone: The Art and Life of Isamu Noguchi” is how its author, Hayden Herrera, inhabits the sculpturing hand of its subject. Rather than focus on the surface, Herrera gets “beneath the skin,” as Noguchi would say, to the “brilliance of matter.”

In Herrera’s elegant account, the “stone” of Noguchi’s “art and life” is left quiet enough for us to hear. Distracting ­voices, whether they be the author’s or those of Noguchi’s many friends, lovers and critics, are kept to a minimum. The story that emerges is therefore not unlike one of Noguchi’s gardens, or his playground designs, or his dance sets. Space and spareness balance matter and articulation. “An important element in both Japanese stroll gardens and Noguchi’s sets was the experience of the body moving through space,” Herrera writes. Arranged along the path of Herrera’s chronology, Noguchi’s words and deeds similarly convey their affinities without overly determining one step to the next. “If sculpture is the rock,” Noguchi once wrote, “it is also the space between rocks and between the rock and a man, and the communication and contemplation between.” Both artist and author leave room for us to drift around and listen.

The writer of biographies of Frida Kahlo and Arshile Gorky, two artists who make intimate appearances in this latest work, Herrera understands creative people. In Noguchi she follows a life that rarely departs from the realm of artistic mythology. Noguchi’s Japanese father, Yone, was a rising poet living on Manhattan’s Riverside Drive. He met Isamu’s American mother, Leonie Gil­mour, through a classified ad he took out for freelance editorial work in 1901. Following their brief affair, he returned to Japan. Yone bequeathed his name and poetic sensitivities to his son but withheld just about any other consideration one might expect. “He appears to have had little regret at leaving the six-months-pregnant Leonie behind,” Herrera writes.

Because of his father’s fame, Isamu’s birth in 1904 elicited a newspaper headline in Los Angeles, where Leonie came to live in a tent town: “Yone Noguchi’s Babe Pride of Hospital. White Wife of Author Presents Husband With Son.” The remarkable article foretold much of what Isamu would contend with in life: his estranged father, his Japanese and white-American backgrounds, and the public recognition he would attain by giving form to mixed identities. This forming took shape as a continuous process over Noguchi’s long creative life, beginning with himself. ­“After all, for one with a background like myself the question of identity is very uncertain,” Noguchi said in 1988, the year of his death. “It’s only in art that it was ever possible for me to find any identity at all.”

Noguchi’s mother became the sculptor’s “strongest influence.” Far more than his father, it was his mother, a fascinating and tragic figure, who haunted Noguchi’s expression, and she likewise haunts the ­pages of Herrera’s biography. “I think I’m the product of my mother’s imagination,” he once said. Leonie was a graduate of what became known as the Ethical Culture School, which stressed both “manual and academic training.” She followed this with a scholarship to Bryn Mawr College and studies at the Sorbonne. “She kept hoping I would eventually become an artist,” Noguchi said. She got her wish — but, dying of pneumonia in 1933 at age 59, never saw his artistic promise fulfilled.

In his formative years, as his mother attempted to reconnect with his father, Noguchi lived for a decade in Japan. Here he became “knowledgeable in the ways of nature” with “respect for materials and how things are made.” Leonie read Greek mythology to Noguchi while encouraging him to “learn how to build a Japanese house.” Then in 1918, she sent her 13-year-old son on his own back to America to study at a progressive hands-on school in Indiana. From then on, fortune and talent saw this self-described “waif” through artistic and spiritual mentorships that included studying Italian sculpture-casting at a school on Tompkins Square Park in New York and interning with Gutzon Borglum, the future creator of Mount Rushmore (who told Noguchi he would never be a sculptor). In Paris, an apprenticeship in the studio of Constantin Brancusi, a “laboratory for distilling basic shapes,” gave Noguchi his modernist bequest, to which he added a traditional Japanese sense for the “value of nonassertiveness.”

Just about every famous and interesting person of the 20th century seems to have crossed Noguchi’s globe-spanning path. Perhaps most significant was the futurist Buckminster Fuller, whom Noguchi called a “messiah of ideas.” At only two points did Noguchi’s associations touch down to earth. Patriotically American, denouncing the militancy of his father’s Japan, Noguchi voluntarily locked himself in a Japanese internment camp during the war. For a brief moment some years earlier, he also studied pre-med at Columbia University — news that his mother “hotly denounced.” She wanted her son to “be your own god and your own star.”

It was Brancusi who taught Noguchi “you’re as good as you ever will be at the moment. That which you do is the thing.” Noguchi could be as artistically astonishing in his portrait busts of the 1920s and ’30s, where innovative materials reflect the nature of his sitters, as in his enigmatic stone abstractions of later life. Just as he crossed borders, he crossed disciplines to work with others. Some of his greatest output came from these collaborations: dance sets for Martha Graham; garden designs with architects; his coffee table for Herman Miller; and his Akari light sculptures, the paper lanterns now universally copied, which came to overshadow his other work. Herrera’s book also tells how some of Noguchi’s most startling concepts were never completed: Robert Moses killed an innovative playground design for the United Nations; Thomas Hoving prevented another destined for Riverside Park. One hopes this last design, a collaboration with Louis I. Kahn, might still someday be ­realized, as we’ve seen with Kahn’s posthumous Four Freedoms Park on Roosevelt Island.

Rather than for a particular body of work, Noguchi said he hoped to be remembered for contributing “something to an awareness of living.” As a “magnificent gift to the people of New York,” Herrera writes, 30 years ago the artist created the Noguchi Museum out of his studio in Long Island City. To this legacy of awareness we can now add the present biography. Walking in his museum garden with his friend Dore Ashton, Noguchi once said, “I have come to no conclusions, no beginnings, no endings.” With minimal intervention, Herrera helps all of us walk beside this “nomad” who “sought and found, by making sculpture, a way to embed himself in the earth, in nature, in the world.”

This Week: High Bridge

 

Excited for this! Beautiful Highbridge

A photo posted by James Panero (@jamespanero) on Jun 13, 2015 at 8:42am PDT

James writes: 

Please forgive my unrestrained civic excitement at the reopening of The High Bridge, the Roman-style aqueduct and pedestrian footbridge that first brought Croton water over the Harlem River from the Bronx into Manhattan in 1848. Shuttered and neglected for over forty years, the bridge has once again reopened to foot and bike traffic, allowing us to walk in the footsteps of none other than E. A. Poe, who as a Bronx resident used to frequent this engineering wonder.

From Manhattan, the bridge can be reached directly by staircase at 172nd Street and Amsterdam Avenue, just past the Highbridge Pool (the site of a former reservoir). Access at grade for strollers, bikes, and wheelchairs is at 168th Street and Edgecombe Avenue, followed by a short, restored path north through Highbridge Park shown here. (All photos: James Panero)

Here is the original restored iron stairway that leads directly down to High Bridge from the Highbridge Tower and pool at 172nd Street. Compare this to pictures of how it looked just a few years ago. 

The restoration of the bridge and surrounding park is a dividend of the Bloomberg administration, which spearheaded the revitalization of city parks in underserved neighborhoods. A sign of thanks welcomes visitors.  

The water tower, directly in line with the bridge, was added in 1872 along with the high reservoir to provide pressure for water distribution in the developing heights of Manhattan. The tower was heavily damaged by arson in 1984 and is now restored but closed to the public. 

The approach to the bridge now includes both stairs and ramp access. The metal span of the bridge was added in the 1920s when central stone arches were removed at the request of the Army Corps of Engineers to facilitate boat traffic on the Harlem River.

 The view from the Bronx, at 170th Street and University Avenue, looking back to Manhattan. 

Looking south over the Major Deegan Expressway. 

The view north in the Bronx with approaches to the Cross Bronx Expressway. 

Looking north up the Harlem River. The Robert Moses-era connection from the Cross Bronx Expressway to the Harlem River Drive (built on top of the nineteenth century Harlem River Speedway) references the arches of the bridge.  

The High Bridge in New York history. 

Heartland Art

Artist and scientist Isabella Kirkland depicts an imaginary rainforest canopy (Isabella Kirkland, “Emergent.”)

PHILANTHROPY MAGAZINE
Winter 2015

Heartland Art
by James Panero

A new exhibit at Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum showcases the full range of American artistry. An extended look at "State of the Art." 

Tucked in the northwest corner of Arkansas, in so-called “flyover country,” the town of Bentonville may not be the first place that comes to mind when thinking about innovation. But take a closer look. There’s the bustle of the glistening airport next door in Fayetteville, where 50 flights a day now converge from 14 cities coast to coast. There’s a healthy population that looks as if it’s been making good use of the town’s network of hiking and biking trails. There’s the sparkling town square.

And facing the town square is an unassuming storefront that reads “Walton’s 5-10.” This is where it began, when Sam Walton opened a discount store in 1950. His enterprise has since grown into the world’s largest private employer—with 2.2 million people on the payroll across 11,000 stores in 27 countries. And just up the road from the original discount store, Walmart continues to maintain its home office.

Behind its working storefront, the Five and Dime today leads into a small Walmart Museum. Featuring a re-creation of Walton’s office, one of the pickup trucks he used for hunting, and banners and brochures bearing the slogans that informed his personality and sense for business, the museum is a reminder of how Walton worked against the grain as one of the twentieth century’s most revolutionary market disruptors. Before there was Amazon or Uber, there was Sam Walton on a mission to give his customers the nation’s lowest prices, which he saw as a liberalizing force for good.

Walton had a friendly, open, small-town personality that was reflected in the culture of his stores. He cared little for establishment thinking or the trappings of trendy acclaim. “Swim upstream,” Walton wrote in his 1992 autobiography, published the year he died. “Go the other way. Ignore the conventional wisdom. If everybody else is doing it one way, there’s a good chance you can find your niche by going in exactly the opposite direction.”

This spirit lives on in Bentonville’s latest innovation. The Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art opened in 2011 less than a mile from the original Five and Ten. Founded by Alice Walton, Sam’s only daughter, and constructed with funds provided by the Walton Family Foundation, Crystal Bridges bucks the conventional thinking on who, where, when, why, and what a major museum should be.

Even before it opened, there was the name. By identifying the institution after the natural water source that bubbles up beneath its patch of hill country, rather than after the patrons, the museum signals the middle-American modesty of the gift. A Walton museum could have gone anywhere—to Alice’s adoptive state of Texas, to expanding some famous existing institution, to creating a new edifice in one of the urban areas already known as a locus for art. Instead, Alice Walton brought her American treasures to the Ozarks, to a densely wooded ravine, and gave north of $1 billion to erect a striking new museum (designed by Moshe Safdie) for them.

Meg Hitchcock, “Subhan’ Allah: The Lord’s Prayer,” 2013. Letters from the Koran and Bible on paper.

Sam Walton once wrote that his daughter was “the most like me—a maverick.” A hint of confirmation comes from the fresh and unexpected exhibition that has just been shown at Crystal Bridges. “State of the Art: Discovering American Art Now” looks to ­America’s two-million-odd working artists in an attempt to uncover those whose “engagement, virtuosity, and appeal” have gone underappreciated.

The stories of how Crystal Bridges curators discovered these artists are part of the exhibition. The works on display were assembled through a 100,000-mile coast-to-coast-to-coast search that led to nearly 1,000 studio visits, with 102 of those artists represented in this show.

“The vision on which Crystal Bridges was founded, and its mission today, is to share the story and the history of America through its outstanding works of art,” Alice Walton tells me. “That’s exactly what ‘State of the Art’ is about—sharing works that are being created in artist studios all across the country, in our own time. They tell the story of America and enrich our understanding and appreciation of our nation.”

“State of the Art” stands in contrast to the existing “biennial” exhibitions that have purported to survey what’s going on in contemporary art and decide who’s in and who’s out. It cast its net far beyond the small subset of name-brand and trendsetting artists. “The mainstream is very narrow,” says Don Bacigalupi, the museum president who spearheaded the initiative with Walton. “Our exhibition is outside the mainstream structure of the art world.”    

”Bacigalupi says the inspiration for this project dates back to 2009, with the unorthodox location of the future museum serving as an impetus. “Since we have a new museum of American art in the middle of the country,” he told his board, “we have a vantage on what’s happening in the American scene that’s less biased, perhaps, than a New York perspective, or an L.A. perspective, or even a Chicago, San Francisco perspective. We might have a more open feel to what’s happening.”

The hard work began in early 2013, when Bacigalupi and his assistant curator Chad Alligood hit the road. Following the tips of 65 recommenders—curators, critics, collectors, academics, artists who run art spaces and programs—they worked their way across the country, region by region, in “a grassroots outreach effort.” At the heart of the search were their visits to the working studios of artists.

“Knowing the artists we all know wasn’t enough,” Bacigalupi writes in the exhibition catalogue. “We wanted to locate those who are not known to all of us. We would have to invent a new approach, or perhaps return to a long-gone, seemingly obsolete way of working. We’d have to get out there and see what art was being made, not just what art was being shown.”

The travel statistics from the ensuing year and a half illustrate how broadly the pair hunted for indigenous talent: 218 flights. 2,396 hours in rental cars. Temperatures ranging from 104 (San Antonio) to -16 (Omaha).

“We’d get to the region,” says Bacigalupi. “We’d rent a car, and we might see 12 artists a day for the next five or six days.” One time they covered 368 miles of territory in a single day. They were methodical in logging what they found, recording 1,247 hours of audio conversation and extensive video.

Bacigalupi was excited to return to the front lines of art. “I haven’t been a curator in 20 years. I’ve been a museum director since then. To be back in touch with so many artists, and to see the generation come up after me, new practices, new approaches, new artists, it’s incredibly exhilarating. Of course, it’s also exhausting to do all that work and all that travel,” he says, but it “makes me optimistic about the future of both art and the country to see these folks and ideas and the ways they are communicating and interacting.”

Bacigalupi characterizes the project as a “call to action—to ourselves and to our colleagues elsewhere—to get out and pay attention to the artists among us, in all our communities, big and small.” 

The grassroots process of conducting studio visits and face-to-face conversations across the country—rather than just tapping existing art networks and personal connections, art fairs, and websites—is as much what “State of the Art” has contributed to the art world as the work the curators unearthed. Their selections skew to art that evinces social engagement and tells a story beyond itself. Bacigalupi says they were particularly looking for “works of art that have a generosity of spirit, that open themselves to conversation, rather than works that are closed or hermetic.”

Take, for example, the three pieces from Meg Hitchcock. Born into an evangelical Christian household, Hitchcock has expanded her spiritual inquiry and devotional practice into her art. She constructs intricate collages of words cut from religious texts and reassembled into elaborate black-and-white geometric designs or organic patterns. “Meg’s work is incredibly evocative. It’s powerful,” says Bacigalupi. “It’s brilliantly made and executed, and it has a kind of immediate appeal.”

Then there’s Isabella Kirkland, an artist based in Sausalito, California, who doubles as a research associate at the California Academy of Sciences. Working in a houseboat studio—with a cat whose hair forms her finest brushes—Kirkland paints astonishingly verdant scenes of nature in hyper-accurate, highly staged detail. She portrays species that live so far out of human sight—200 feet up in the canopy—that they have only recently been discovered. “I don’t want to be a scientific illustrator,” she writes. “I really want to talk to a different audience with this work. I want to celebrate this stuff and get people interested in it.”

Another highlight is Vanessa German, an artist based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who repurposes found materials to make totemic “juju” dolls. “It’s immediately evident that German is a force of nature,” the curators note in the catalogue, “and her presence is one of caring and protection in a notoriously difficult area.” Recently German created Art House in a once-derelict home known for its violent past. Here she now brings together neighborhood children to “create beauty.” As someone who was “surrounded by a lot of death” as a kid, German says, “I am always looking for a way to be the most alive while I’m alive.”  

Amidst the saga of their road trip (finding a studio tucked among weeds and broken glass in the back of a deserted Coca-Cola bottling factory in Mississippi; handling day-old goats with artist-farmers in Gainesville, Florida; meeting creators in a 22-inch January snowstorm that paralyzed Baltimore), Bacigalupi says he and Alligood uncovered “incredible life stories that lead to the work” the artists make.

Tim Liddy, an artist in his early fifties that they met in St. Louis, was a hockey player and “devoted to the notion of becoming a professional.” In “a tragic accident at 16 years old, he broke his neck and became paralyzed.” Left with few gross motor skills, therapists “put a pencil in his hand,” which “set him off on a lifelong course to becoming an artist.” Today Liddy paints exacting trompe l’oeil images, moving around his studio on a Segway.

Such encounters resonated with the mission of Crystal Bridges. “The populist notion of building a museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, in a place where there is no history of visual-arts institutions,” says Bacigalupi, “making this gift to this community, this region, this country, is very much the underpinning of the show.…That kind of openness is a big part of it.”

Dallas-based painter Kim Cadmus Owens illustrates a frenetic digital ruckus.

The intensive travel and research that made “State of the Art” possible could not have taken place without substantial funding, and Bacigalupi had initial concerns when describing the concept to the museum’s broader base of supporters. There were no big-name artists, he notes. “No big themes. No splash. No precedent. No imagery to show them. I had to sit before the potential philanthropists and say, ‘Here’s this idea of unknown artists that we’re going to bring together and build this grand show.’ And I thought I was going to be greeted with blank stares and they were going to laugh me out of the room.”

Instead, the opposite occurred, and the exhibition became a “remarkable lesson in philanthropy. To a person, everyone we spoke to, whether corporate, individual, or foundation, wanted to be involved. They got excited by the notion that we were expanding the field.…We raised all of the money we needed to do this big show in a very short space of time.”

Exhibition sponsors include the Willard and Pat Walker Charitable Foundation, Christie’s, Coca-Cola, Goldman Sachs, L’Oréal Paris, John Tyson and Tyson Foods, 21C Museum Hotels, and the museum’s Global Initiative Fund and Art Now Fund. Just as free general admission to the museum is underwritten by Walmart, complimentary admission to “State of the Art” has been sponsored by Walmart and Sam’s Club. Donor support not only created the exhibition, but is now enabling extensive educational outreach. Many of the featured artists are being brought in to meet visitors and lead discussions.

“This region,” notes Bacigalupi, “was once incredibly poor. People had to pitch in together to succeed, to survive. So there is this notion of community sharing, all in, everyone participates. It is part of the fabric, the culture. People want to help, to support each other, they want to share. They want to be a part of it.”

Surveying the 19,000-square-foot show now in place, Alice Walton couldn’t be more impressed with the communal result. “I’m amazed and so proud to see how it has all come together,” she tells me. “We were excited about the idea of ‘State of the Art,’ and firmly behind the concept of visiting artists, in their studios, all across the country. Now to walk through the galleries and see this variety of work, brought together in one place.…The art inspires and moves me.”