‘Sculpture to Be Seen from Mars' sets the tone in a deeply stirring exhibit about time and our place in it
"Isamu Noguchi: Landscapes of Time," at the Clark Art Institute, as seen from across the museum's reflecting pool.
Courtesy Clark Art Institute
You're most likely to know him from his still readily-available consumer product design: his delicately gorgeous Akari light sculptures, fragile rice paper stretched around twiggy armatures in an array of shapes and sizes (though most famously, spheres); a dozen or more hang here in a cluster, casting the room in their warm glow. They both reassure the casual viewer with familiarity, and confirm that, for Noguchi himself, it was all of a piece. 1947, the same year he conceived 'Sculpture to Be Seen from Mars,' he signed on with the
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It's not here, but the table's aesthetic — contoured, spare, elemental — is pervasive. Noguchi's work, varied across media like stone, steel, wood, bronze, and in one delightful surprise here, Bakelite has a particular cast, like DNA, and the show confirms it, with a notable exception: 'Measured Time,' 1932, the aforementioned Bakelite, a clock/timer made for Fisher Scientific. Squat and shiny-smooth, it helps clarify the parallel lines of his art/product practice from the very beginning. ('Everything is sculpture,' Noguchi, who died in 1988, once said. 'Any material, any idea without hindrance born into space.')
Isamu Noguchi, "Measured Time," 1934.
Courtesy Clark Art Institute
Here, its job is symbolic. This is a show about time, and the static objects in Noguchi's world that mark its passage — through the workaday, through trauma, and everything in between. Coolly, obliquely, 'Landscapes of Time' is about mortality, imagined remnants of an expired civilization left behind on an indifferent planet. 'This Earth, This Passage,' 1962, a rough, broad disc of bronze, hollow at the center, lies splayed on the floor. To make it, Noguchi paced barefoot on a mound of clay, slowly marching it flat before casting it in bronze. It's a record of hours and days spent. 'Time Thinking,' 1968, a bulky fragment of basalt, perches on a rustic wooden plinth; Noguchi gave it the barest of form, chipping into rocky hide, but largely let it be.
Its rust-colored skin, a natural oxidation process, is intact. It's an expression of the light imprint any of us makes in our brief moments on earth.
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Within Noguchi's notions of mortality is an inevitable fatalism, I think, and it's hard to blame him. Born in Los Angeles in 1904, his early childhood was marked by strident anti-Japanese sentiment that bled over into public policy. His father left for Japan while his mother, Leonie Gilmour, an Irish-American teacher, was pregnant with him. In 1906, San Francisco, where they lived, mandated segregated schools for Japanese children, and Gilmour took her son to live with his father in Japan.
Foreground: Isamu Noguchi, "Time Thinking," 1968. On view in "Isamu Noguchi: Landscapes of Time," at the Clark Art Institute.
Courtesy Clark Art Institute
Celebrity portraits were a means to an end, a funding stream for more challenging work before his commercial design work took off.
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Isamu Noguchi's signature scored into "This Earth, This Passage," 1962 (detail).
Murray Whyte/Boston Globe
Then living in New York, he was exempt from the federal government's Japanese internment program, enacted in 1942; even so, amid rising anti-Japanese animus, he made the extraordinary decision
vast fenced-in tent city in the Arizona desert where 18,000 Japanese Americans were imprisoned for years. It was an act of inexhaustible optimism amid the trauma of mass displacement that would see 100,000 people interned in 10 locations nationwide. A well-known artist by that time, with a network of connections in Hollywood and New York, Noguchi meant to use his status to establish arts and recreation programs in the camp to buoy the internees' spirits.
By fostering creativity in the Japanese-American community from within the camps, he argued in an unpublished essay for Reader's Digest, he was serving 'the cause of democracy in the best way that seemed open to me.' In an echo with clear resonance to our own moment of upheaval, he was both an artist of uncommon courage then, and of uncommon relevance
right now
.
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From left, Isamu Noguchi, "Remembrance (Mortality)," 1944; "The Seed," 1946. On view at "Isamu Noguchi: Landscapes of Time," at the Clark Art Institute.
Murray Whyte/Boston Globe
But the misery of the camps left a mark. He was largely unsuccessful in his pursuit, and even though he was there voluntarily, he was not allowed to leave; extracting himself took months. Many of the works in 'Landscapes of Time' are shot through with specific wartime anxieties. 'Remembrance (Mortality),' 1944, disheveled and forlorn, groups together an interlocking amalgam of sculpted fragments in dark American mahogany; it feels like mourning in physical form.
The atomic bombs would drop a year later, and 'Sculpture to Be Seen from Mars' shortly after. Its aftershocks would resound in his work for years. 'Bell Tower for Hiroshima,' 1950, a spindly tower of pale wood with dangling clay bells, feels as much like skeletal remains as a memorial. 'Skin and Bones,' from he same year and hung nearby, seems to confirm it: an oblong ceramic loop in bone-gray, it's pierced at odd intervals by spears of dark wood. Another, in gray stoneware, has the softened contours of a human heart; he called it 'Ghost,' 1952.
Clockwise, from left: "Bell Tower for Hiroshima," 1950; "Skin and Bones," 1950; "Ghost," 1952; "My Mu," 1950. All on view in "Isamu Noguchi: Landscapes of Time," at the Clark Art Institute.
Murray Whyte/Boston Globe
While his work grew increasingly abstract, it remained tethered to the real world. In the 1960s, as space-age optimism ran parallel to growing Cold War dread, Noguchi embraced the long view: In heavy granite, he seemed to celebrate the advancements: 'Lunar Table,' 1961-65, with its undulating regularity, seemed to imagine a landscape of wonder in the years before American astronauts would see the moon's surface for the first time.
But the resonant piece here, for me, is 'Origin,' 1968. a dome of black basalt flecked and chipped along its flanks as it rises to the smooth curve of its apex. It is, to me, in a permanent state of becoming — an emergence never over, or complete. Noguchi may have liked to imagine himself in the same way.
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'Sometimes I think I'm part of this world of today,' he told an interviewer in 1972. 'Sometimes I feel that maybe I belong in history or in prehistory, or that there's no such thing as time.' But as he reached back and gazed forth, he knew the truth. 'Origin' sits at the foot of that photograph, a primal face scored into the earth's skin after all human life has departed. We are temporary, it says, in Noguchi's own voice; time is forever, and always wins.
ISAMU NOGUCHI: LANDSCAPES OF TIME
Through Oct. 13. Clark Art Institute, 225 South St., Williamstown. 413-458-2303,
Murray Whyte can be reached at
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New York Times
9 hours ago
- New York Times
Ranking every Premier League away kit for 2025-26: Batman shirt, inspired by a leisure centre, and… brown
Our keen eye has been cast over the Premier League's home kits, so now it's time for the away outfits. This is typically where chances are taken, outlandish designs come in, shirts that could be brilliant and beloved classics or could be complete duds. As a rule they tend to be more interesting…but will these be? Advertisement This season we have a garish copy of a cult classic, a shirt inspired by Pot Pourri, a Batman black shirt, one that looks like the walls of a provincial leisure centre, and perhaps the biggest disparity in quality between an away and a home design we've ever seen. Read on, and we're sure you won't be shy of telling us what you think… You have to marvel at the brass neck of football clubs. We all know why Newcastle's away shirt is green. It's not OK that their owners are using the club to spruce up the image of Saudi Arabia, to provide a glossy sheen to their seat of soft power, to use kits as walking billboards for their regime. But it would be insulting to anyone's intelligence to pretend this shirt is green for any other reason. Over to the Newcastle website, then, which declares that the shirt "draws inspiration from Newcastle's iconic riverside", and "features a striking green arch inspired by the legendary Tyne Bridge". Get lost. Do they think that sort of thing is funny? Or that people won't notice? Aesthetically, the shirt is fine, but if you're wondering why it's in last place, that's why. Oh. Oh no. Oh dear no. The history of the brown football shirt is short: Coventry City's away top of the late 1970s inspired some misty-eyed affection but then again, some people get nostalgic for the days of rationing, so you can't necessarily trust that. St Pauli's home shirt is brown (although this season, with white stripes), but those guys are a law unto themselves. If you want to tell their ultras they look stupid, then go for it, but I'm not going to. Otherwise, there's not much else, and there's probably a good reason for that. This shirt's only redeeming feature is the nice and striking bee logo that differs slightly from their usual crest, which is a bee inside a circle. But… they could quite easily have done that in a different colour. Bad. Very, very bad. Ah. Hmmm. Yes. Well. Forest's home kit this season is a pleasing nod to one of years past, a nice and clean design that is different to the last few years but is still identifiably 'Forest'. The away kit is… none of those things. The background design is a reference to the city's historical lace industry, which is a nice enough touch, the slight flaw being that it looks horrible and, somehow, quite boring for a shirt coated in an elaborate pattern. Maybe they would've got away with it if the Adidas stripes on the sleeves were the same blue contrast colour as the crest but for some reason, they're basically the same as the body colour. No bueno. Nope. Palace have announced this as a 'celebration' shirt, rather than their official away kit. Either way, this is clearly the shirt of a mid-range Championship team from 2005, rather than one embarking on European competition. Should that matter? Is it silly to expect a club to adhere to an arbitrary dress code that applies in some way to their general status? Of course it is, but, to bastardise the old Jerry Seinfeld quote, I'm ranking laundry here, so silly is probably the starting point. The thin stripy bits on the collars and cuffs and the piping around the shoulder redeem things slightly, but not enough. The important point is that this is not a good football shirt. You know in some films or TV shows where they will do a bit in black and white, which then dissolves into colour to symbolise a change in mood, or season, or something? No? Trust me, it happens. Can't remember any specific films, but just… trust me. Anyway, this shirt looks like the first part of that: the dreary, colourless past before life brightens up significantly. The blurb from Adidas declares that "on away days, this jersey reminds fans of the club's home city"… what, grey and boring? Now, I'm not a particular fan of Birmingham as a place, but you'd think if the club's kit was going to pay homage to it, they would find something a little more interesting than this. Yeesh. Bold. Still, you can't fault the commitment to the bit here: this shirt is a tribute to Fulham's striking 1999-2000 away kit, to the point where it's not really a tribute and more a direct copy, down to the placement of the contrast dark blue sections under the armpits and even using Fulham's old crest. The only real difference I can see is there's a buttoned collar as opposed to an open one. Is it good, though? 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How would you describe this colour? The Wolves website doesn't but if you were to press me for a description, I'd say 'provincial leisure centre green', which isn't necessarily one you'd choose for your bathroom (unless you were a trainee lifeguard who's really attached to the job, I suppose), but one they have opted for here anyway. The initial reaction was to turn away and wrinkle the nose but the more I look at this, the more I don't mind it. It's probably the collar that does it: pleasingly neat and in a dark enough green that it offsets the main body, but still goes with it nicely. It's faintly depressing for those of us with grey around the temples when clubs refer to "classic kits from our history", and it turns out they're talking about a time when the first of those greys started appearing. For example, the Bournemouth website reports that this simple but attractive blue and black striped shirt is "inspired by the club's classic kits from the club's history". 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Supposedly, the wavy white patterns across the light blue are "sound waves of chants and singing recorded in our home sections" — the sort of thing a manufacturer would say, safe in the knowledge that nobody is actually going to check. Burnley's main sponsor this season is one of these white-label betting sites that aren't actually available in the UK, so it can't be displayed on children's shirts. No problem, say the commercial team at Turf Moor: the junior version of this shirt is thus sponsored by Dude Perfect, which, if you're not familiar, is a troupe of whooping American YouTubers who do increasingly elaborate trick shots and sport-related stunts. A strange old state of affairs. This shirt comes with its own marketing slogan, "In darkness, we dare", a reference to Tottenham Hotspur's club motto ("to dare is to do") — but it does sort of imply that the club itself is in darkness, and is trying to get out of it. 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