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‘Sculpture to Be Seen from Mars' sets the tone in a deeply stirring exhibit about time and our place in it

That image covers a whole wall of 'Isamu Noguchi: Landscapes of Time,' the brand-new, deeply stirring exhibition of the artist's work, just opened at the Clark Art Institute in Williamstown. I would say it sets the tone here, but given the thrumming sense of low-level dread cloaking the space, sunshine be damned, no tone needs setting. Along with nearly three-dozen works, each somber, spare, and disarmingly gorgeous, 'Landscapes of Time' affirms the resonant depth of Noguchi's thinking, and profoundly resituates him in the culture. "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 Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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. Advertisement 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 . Advertisement 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. Advertisement '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