|
In 1933 Isamu Noguchi proposed using the earth itself as a medium for sculpture to create a city block-sized playground, Play Mountain, and the mile-long pyramidal Monument to the Plough. Inspired by sources as diverse as Native American burial mounds, traditional Japanese gardens and the Neolithic sites of Europe, Noguchi sought to mold the earth in what he called the "sculpture of spaces", making sculpture a useful part of everyday life. This project reached fruition after the Second World War, when he carried out an ambitious program of building gardens, playgrounds and museum sculpture gardens around the world. What would have been Noguchi's largest earthwork was proposed in 1947, as he feared a future atomic war: Sculpture to be Seen from Mars, an abstract face sculpted in the landscape that would inform extraterrestrials that a civilized life form once had existed on our planet.
|
