The Noguchi Museum garden, with robin at The Well

Distance Noguchi

One way to approximate an understanding of change as it is experienced by long-lived entities such as stone is to try to be still enough to experience the presence of the passage of time.

In these extended films of The Noguchi Museum (each between one and eleven hours long), the camera is fixed. What moves—under the influence of regular Noguchi collaborators like gravity, wind, the rotation of the Earth, and chance—are things like light and shadow, branches and leaves, birds, motes of dust, sound, and the feeling of being here.

As a “sculptural situation,” the Museum is an intentional hybrid of changing (organic) and supposedly unchanging (inorganic) things. Here, categories such as rock and birdsong, sculpture and tree canopy, the texture of cinder block and light on old brick melt and meld together. The careful reconsideration of sculpture, art, and being that these combinations produce—the essential enduring thing—is what Noguchi called his point of view. By making it available in the form of this “Garden Museum,” he hoped to provide direct experience that we all might use to make ourselves more site-specific to the scale of our existence.

But to communicate, much less effectuate, its operations at a distance—an especially ironic undertaking given that Noguchi conceived the Museum as a testament to empirical thinking and actual physical experience—is arguably not just impossible but criminal. Where would one even begin to digitize the Museum’s preternatural restless calm, or the invigorating sense of elsewhereness, otherness, and timelessness one feels here?

The Well (Variation on a Tsukubai), with mockingbird

In an interview with a filmmaker preparing to make a movie about his work, Noguchi explained,

“[I]t is your contact with reality that is the sculptural experience, and I wish you could get this into the movie and into this film. If you’ll find, for instance, some way of making it not a monologue, I’d appreciate it so much because a monologue is so boring. I mean, I would suggest, if you just cut out everything I’ve said, practically, and replace it with silence if you will, or music—if you can’t have silence or something…[Some other kind of noises than me, I mean, you know, any kind of noise, you could have crickets, or what have you, anything but just not me…] Shock people into appreciation that sculpture is a matter of silence, and that all the noise in the world doesn’t help one little bit and speech is a real hindrance, because it puts ideas into people’s heads that don’t belong there.”1

Noguchi goes on to lament the inadequacy of photography for communicating sculpture, but says that motion pictures might just possibly be more adequate—so long as they really move.

Nevertheless, these fixed, nondirective, durational experiences of the environment of the Museum are an effort to produce an analogy to time spent absorbing Noguchi’s patterns of thought: “The space always dominant, the enduring background of silence.”2

So, please, pick an area, enter “the stream of time,”3 and stay as long as you like.

Dakin Hart
Senior Curator


Special thanks to photographer and artist Nicholas Knight who gamely accepted the daunting challenge of helping us to render Noguchi’s concept of sculpture in (un)moving films. A former Noguchi Museum staff member and commercial photographer, Knight shoots many of the Museum’s exhibitions and installations. In his own work he explores and exploits the potential for surreality in architectural models.
Viewing Suggestions
If you have the bandwidth, set playback to 4K, which is to 1080P what being at the Museum is to watching a video. How well the soundscape in each video works will depend on your setup, so if you have multiple options, it’s worth experimenting. Built-in laptop speakers, for example, may deliver better results than headphones.
Technical Note
Video was captured using two identical setups. Camera: Canon C300 Mark II cinema. Lenses: Canon 17mm, 24mm, 45mm TS-E, and Extender EF 1.4x III. Microphones: 2 x Sennheiser MKH-416 Shotgun Condenser. External recorder: Atomos Shogun Inferno with Sandisk Ultra 3D SSDs. Format: ProRes RAW DCI 4K (4096 x 2160) at 24 fps. Editing: Final Cut Pro X.

Area 1

Area 1 Facing Southwest
Artboard

Area 1
Facing Southwest
May 25, 2020, 9:12 am
4h 28m 49s

Works (L to R): Break Through Capestrano, Deepening Knowledge, Human Sacrifice, The Whole, Brilliance, Venus

Area 1 Facing Northeast
Artboard

Area 1
Facing Northeast
May 25, 2020, 2:16 pm
4h 15m 29s

Works (L to R): The Whole, Mountain Breaking Theater, Break Through Capestrano

Area 1 Facing West
Artboard

Area 1
Facing West, Part 1
May 31, 2020, 10:29 am
3h 40m 17s

Works (L to R): Sunken Garden for Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza Spin-off #3, Brilliance

Area 1 Facing West
Artboard

Area 1
Facing West, Part 2
May 31, 2020, 2:09 pm
3h 57m 49s

Works (L to R): Sunken Garden for Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza Spin-off #3, Brilliance

Area 1 Facing Northwest
Artboard

Area 1
Facing Northwest
May 25, 2020, 2:16 pm
4h 15m 2s

Works (L to R): Awa Odori, Mountain Breaking Theater, Duo


Area 2 (Garden)

Area 2 Facing East, Morning
Artboard

Area 2 (Garden)
Facing East, Part 1
May 27, 2020, 8:09 am
5h 10m 4s

Works (L to R): Unmei, To Darkness, The Well (Variation on a Tsukubai), Dance, Squares, Illusion of the Fifth Stone, Behind Inner Seeking Shiva Dancing, Miharu, To Tallness, Bench

Area 2 Facing East, Afternoon
Artboard

Area 2 (Garden)
Facing East, Part 2
May 27, 2020, 1:19 pm
5h 10m 4s

Works (L to R): Unmei, To Darkness, The Well (Variation on a Tsukubai), Dance, Squares, Illusion of the Fifth Stone, Behind Inner Seeking Shiva Dancing, Miharu, To Tallness, Bench

Area 2 Facing West
Artboard

Area 2 (Garden)
Facing West
May 25, 2020, 9:06 am
4h 47m 18s

Works (L to R): Practice Rocks in Placement, End Pieces, Sunken Garden for Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza Spin-off (CR 514-6), The Big Bang, Bench, Thebes, The Stone Within, Sunken Garden for Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza Spin-off #1, Illusion of the Fifth Stone, The Well (Variation on a Tsukubai), Basin and Range, Unmei

Area 2 Facing East
Artboard

Area 2 (Garden)
Facing East
May 26, 2020, 12:05 pm
4h 27m 6s

Works (L to R): [Table], Miharu, End Pieces, Bench (CR 588), Bench (CR 535), Core, Tsukubai, Practice Rocks in Placement

Area 2 Facing Southwest
Artboard

Area 2 (Garden)
Facing Southwest
May 31, 2020, 11:37 pm
2h 0m 8s

Works (L to R): Practice Rocks in Placement, Indian Dancer

Area 2 Facing West
Artboard

Area 2 (Garden)
Facing West
May 27, 2020, 12:19 pm
3h 22m 30s

Works (L to R): Sunken Garden for Chase Manhattan Bank Plaza Spin-off (CR 514-6), Thebes, Give and Take, Awa Odori

Area 2 Facing Southwest
Artboard

Area 2 (Garden)
Facing Southwest
May 29, 2020, 1:16 pm
4h 45m 11s

Works (L to R): Behind Inner Seeking Shiva Dancing, The Well (Variation on a Tsukubai)

Area 2 Facing East
Artboard

Area 2 (Garden)
Facing East
May 26, 2020, 5:01 pm
1h 54m 26s

Works: Helix of the Endless


Area 3

Area 3 Facing Northwest
Artboard
Area 3 Facing West
Artboard

Area 3
Facing West
May 31, 2020, 5:11 pm
1h 47m 54s

Works (L to R): The Void, To Bring to Life, Transformation of Nature, Magic Ring, In Silence Walking, Sun at Midnight

Area 3 Facing Northwest
Artboard

Area 3
Facing Northwest
May 31, 2020, 6:22 PM
1h 2m 27s

Works: Transformation of Nature

Area 3 Facing Southwest
Artboard

Area 3
Facing Southwest
May 26, 2020, 8:09 AM
3h 4m 14s

Works (L to R): [Bench], Magritte’s Stone, To Intrude on Nature’s Way

Area 3 Facing Northwest
Artboard

Area 3
Facing Northwest
May 27, 2020, 5:23 pm
1h 7m 33s

Works (L to R): Euripides (L and R), Walking Void


Area 7

Area 7 Facing South
Artboard

Area 7
Facing South
May 26, 2020, 8:12 pm
2h 58m 37s

Works (L to R): Ding Dong Bat, The Opening, Sun at Noon, The Mountain


Areas 9 & 10

Area 9 Facing West
Artboard

Area 9
Facing West
May 31, 2020, 1:46 pm
1h 45m 55s

Works: Ziggurat

Area 10 Facing West
Artboard

Area 10
Facing West
May 31, 2020, 3:40 pm
1h 12m 53s

Works: The Footstep


Area 11

Area 11 Facing East
Artboard

Area 11
Facing East
May 31, 2020, 10:12 am
1h 14m 47s

Works: Untitled (Small Torso)

Area 11 Facing Southwest
Artboard

Area 11
Facing Southwest
May 27, 2020, 8:09 pm
3h 24m 34s

Works: Zazen


Area 14

Area 14 Facing East
Artboard

Area 14
Facing East
May 28, 2020, 9:44 am
4h 54m 6s

Works (L to R): Entasis of a Pentagonal Helix, Water Table, Pylon


Distance Noguchi is supported in part by Bloomberg Philanthropies, and with public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council and from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo and the New York State Legislature.

 

1 Isamu Noguchi, interview with Bruce Bassett, September 2, 1978. The Noguchi Museum Archives, MS_WRI_049_006. (This quotation has been edited for clarity.)

2 Isamu Noguchi, letter to Tim Threlfall, July 20, 1981. The Noguchi Museum Archives, MS_COR_152_003.

3 Isamu Noguchi, “Bench,” The Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum (New York: Abrams, 1987), 50.