Michelangelo and Isamu Noguchi

In my free time this summer, I've been reading an analysis and biography of Isamu Noguchi because I've volunteered to make myself write a paper about his art before school reconvenes. I took the book with me on a vacation to Idaho--accompanied by some people (who shall not be named but know who they are!) who think, when it comes to art, that there's nothing better under the sun than the Renaissance, and therefore Modern art is hooey.

I won't start a fight with the Renaissance but I will say this: the moment I sat down and really, truly, thought about my opinions of, say, Michelangelo's painting and sculpture, I realized I wasn't much of a fan. There's something about that kind of monumental and dramatic religiosity that doesn't really work for me. All right, so if I saw these famous works in person maybe I'd feel differently--but I doubt I'd be impressed at much more than their scale. I just don't care all that much for overdramatic nudes flailing all over the place. And when it comes to expressiveness you can't dispute that his works are ... but expressive in a theatrical, not natural, sense. They feel contrived and overly perfect though I suppose this was the point.

It may also be that Michelangelo is one of the most over-exposed artists of all time; everyone's seen his works copied, used in advertisements, and splashed across TV screens ad infinitum. Works like the Creation of Adam, or the Pieta, or the Last Judgment have become such a part of our culture that they have certainly lost a lot of their impact, meaning, and impressiveness. Maybe I'd like Michelangelo more if he wasn't so famous?

Well, maybe a little.

I didn't start this blog intending to rant about Michelangelo, but instead to reflect on Isamu Noguchi and Modernism. To bring this tangent around to my point, let me give a bit of an introduction--Noguchi was a sculptor, as well as a designer of furniture, parks, gardens, and theater sets. He was half Japanese and half American. Though he studied under the Modernist Constantin Brancusi, he also looked back to ancient Greek and Japanese traditions of sculpture. As a matter of fact, he picked stone from some of the same quarries that Michelangelo had used hundreds of years before.

I am interested in Noguchi partly thanks to an exhibition devoted to his art taking place at the Portland Japanese Garden (and ending soon--sorry!), where I'm volunteering as a gallery assistant. And also, partly, because of my interest in intersections in art--especially cultural ones.

One of the works on display references Michelangelo directly. There's a well-known story that Michelangelo claimed to be able to visualize a figure asleep inside of the block of stone he was carving; he was just waking it up by taking away the outer stone. This suggests that Michelangelo visualized exactly what he was going to do before starting.

I have walked around Noguchi's Asleep in a Rock one day a week for about three months, trying in vain (and aware of how vain it was) to make sense of this stone. Trying to see who's asleep in it, I guess. And I'm not the only one--many visitors consider the piece, shrug, and move on. Some mention that same old story about Michelangelo, then shrug and move on. The correlation is obviously there--but what is it?

Isamu Noguchi's Asleep in a Rock, at the Portland Japanese Garden

Awareness of Noguchi's interests and some of his other works help in understanding Asleep in a Rock. Considering the themes of balance--of east and west, man and nature, and new and old traditions--inherent in so much of his work, Asleep in a Rock is not divergent, but rather, representative. Unlike Michelangelo, he hasn't taken a stone and transformed it into a figure, or even the recognizable beginning of one. It seems like he's stopped just where an artist like Michelangelo would be getting started.

And I think, after all these weeks of mulling, that this is the point. Stone and figure have balanced in this work. Noguchi suggests that there is a figure to be discovered inside the stone, but the stone itself is just as important as the discovery. The qualities of the natural material--its form and intent and history--balance with the artists' contributions (or removals) in importance. Noguchi is acutely aware--attuned--to his material, to the point that it becomes a collaborator in its own content and meaning.

Rather than shaping nature, or forcing the discovery of the sleeper in the stone, Noguchi lets us contemplate the balance he's created, and decide where the incidence of nature ends and the intention of the artist begins.

Which is all summed up quite eloquently in a quote by Noguchi which also makes the title of the exhibition: "We Are the Landscape of All We Know."