Noguchi's lost heart.

November 17, 2004, marks the centennial of Isamu Noguchi's birth--an event being celebrated with the renovation of New York's Noguchi Museum, a sculpture retrospective now on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, and even the release of postage stamps. For the occasion, art historian Anne M. Wagner reconsiders the political implications of Noguchi's work, while artist Josiah McElheny turns to Noguchi's prescient shuttling between the worlds of art and design.

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CONTEXT MATTERS. When I first came across Isamu Noguchi's astonishing carving, 1000 Horsepower Heart, I was leafing through Stanley Casson's Sculpture of To-day--the "day" being 1939. The book's date and title say it all: Not only is it one of those texts that aim to characterize a moment, but it also casts its net wide, as if to acknowledge that the moment in question demanded a serious effort at breadth. The result, unsurprisingly, was dismal. The year 1939 was not a great one for anything much, sculpture included. Within Casson's pages, a few survivals of avant-garde abstraction rubbed elbows with many strong, striding manly figures, pieces by the now-unsung likes of Ivan Mestrovic, Romano Romanelli, and Hermann Pagels. And then there was Noguchi's carved heart of 1938. The thing is presented like a motor extracted from a chassis; from what might be lobed ventricles rises a terrifying superstructure, all cylinders and manifolds, its jutting pipes and hoses (or do I mean aortas?) severed or detached. Never did any mechanical prosthesis lay more possessive hold on any organ than does this motorized extrusion from the body's core. Yet, oddly enough, no one seems to know where the Heart ended up.

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If only we could be sure how Noguchi fixed on exactly how many horsepower his heart should have. Maybe a cool thousand just seemed right, or perhaps this highly technology-conscious artist had been keeping an eye on developments in areas even further afield than metallurgy and plastics, whose innovations his sculpture was among the first to employ. Consider aeronautics: In the 1930s, bomber design, for example, was urgently pushing forward its investigations into engine strength and speed. The advances gathered a momentum fuelled by the tenor (the terror) of the times. Already by 1931, Boeing had unveiled the B-9, which with the help of two 600 hp engines set a short-lived speed record (186 mph). Noguchi's sculpture clearly intended to keep up the pace.

All this goes to show that Noguchi's heart-engine presents itself as a specimen abreast of the latest technology. No doubt it offers clear advantages, whether for love or war. The binary is the right one, I think, and characteristic of the artist's temperament. For his mind seems to have thought in terms of linked oppositions: Valerie J. Fletcher tells us that in his 1935 solo exhibition (his first) he planned to show Death (Lynched Figure) paired with a carving called Birth, both 1934. (1) The juxtaposition, though scotched by his dealer, who deemed parturition a taboo topic, would have pitted bright white marble against gleaming metal, as well as life's violent beginnings in childbirth (a key avant-garde topic) against its violent end. Both sculptures are violent, certainly, but both speak to decisively different outcomes, just as surely as they speak of race. And even on its own, Death, cast in an innovative alloy of nickel and copper, is as extreme an effort at sculptural expressionism as any the twentieth century saw. In its rigid flexions and broken-backed posture can be read not the smallest hint that in 1927 its maker had spent six months in Paris learning technical precepts at Brancusi's meticulously dispassionate knee. For Noguchi, passions are everything. The hanging figure--it was first suspended from a single rope, dangling at the end of a metal upright and knotted in a noose--condemns race hatred by summoning the nightmarish forms of its "strange fruit." Such a setup invokes scenes of torture from Dixie through to Abu Ghraib.

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When Noguchi later modified Death--as we now have it, the figure hangs from two ropes within a quasi pavilion, an open box of space--he took direct aim at another source of inspiration: Giacometti. The latter is invoked particularly as the author of the sexy Bottle suspendu, 1930-31 (for Salvador Dali, the prototypical "symbolic object"), whose crescent-shaped hanging ball and opposing wedge almost kiss inside their own open cage. Giacometti's erotic volumes are replaced by Noguchi's extreme figuration, yet the echo is strong enough to insist on another encounter, this one staged in the viewer's mind. Surely Noguchi is enlisting Giacometti's own violence--and correcting it--for a particular heuristic purpose; now the implied contrast confronts the physical pulse of desire with the heavy weight of death. The strategy is repeated and varied more than once: Giacometti's No More Play, 1932, seems to lie buried within Noguchi's design for a playground, just as others of the Swiss artist's horizontal game boards lose their sepulchral geometries to the deep cuts and bombed-out furrows of Noguchi's 1943 bronze, This Tortured Earth.

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The story of Birth and Death might suggest that showing Noguchi can be a time-sensitive affair. As is his art. Context matters. Consider the 1930s in New York, when lynching was apparently judged more exhibitable--less taboo--than the bodily labor of birth. But times change. In 1946, Noguchi showed again in New York as part of the Museum of Modern Art's "Fourteen Americans," an exhibition in which, according to Amy Lyford, the artist was included so as to make tacit amends for wartime prejudice against the Japanese. (2) There he presented a model of figuration that entirely reconsidered his basic understanding of form, and again he addressed the political climate of the day. Where horizontality and suspension had once mattered, now the standing figure ruled. Which is to say that in his sculptures of the mid-1940s--produced in a Greenwich Village studio after his voluntary internment in one of the West Coast camps imprisoning Japanese-Americans--Noguchi returned to that deep-seated sculptural archetype, the erect male form, and gave his re-editions the old primal names: Man, 1945, for example, or in the case of the great nine-foot carving at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Kouros, 1945.

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To use the term kouros is to take a title from a founding category, a figural type. It is hard to imagine a more declarative move. A single word lays claim to the young and virile male body, the athlete or warrior, and to the Western sculptural tradition, traced to its textbook source. This, says Noguchi, is the body of postwar man. The declaration announces standing figures still to come: the attenuated plasters and bronzes of Giacometti, certainly, and even the iron "Tanktotems" to be welded by David Smith in the early 1950s, all of which draw attention to the aggression or evanescence of their own upright forms. Noguchi's men, by contrast, not only had to be wood or stone or marble rather than constructivist figures, but they also had to invoke the long tradition of bodily carving by taking its key tenets actively apart. In place of solidity, find space and openness; in place of volumes, find planes that, like flat cutouts in a grotesque shadow play, often lewdly mime the body's organs and parts. But most important, like the other works in this series, Noguchi's Kouros is notoriously made out of separately notched and fitted pieces. It stands erect because of its own inner tensions, and were a single piece extracted, said the artist, the whole would fall apart.

If Kouros was a carving for a specifically post-war culture, this is because it is so portable, so temporary, so well designed for packing up and hauling away. The whole thing can be dismounted in ten minutes flat, or so the story goes. This is sculpture for nomads. And for nomads, moreover, whose own bodies have the same vulnerability, the fragile contingency, as their artworks, and who, looking at the ruined world around them, may well be wishing they themselves could be so easily transported and remade.

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Context matters. November 17, 2004, is the centenary of Noguchi's birth, and he seems to be well on the way to becoming an icon for our time. Having already joined the handful of artists, Georgia O'Keeffe and Andy Warhol among them, enshrined on postage stamps, he is en route to rehabilitation as a "master sculptor," as he is so ambitiously labeled in the title of the retrospective exhibition jointly mounted by the Whitney and Hirshhorn museums. Versatile to a fault, he was, we are told on the catalogue jacket, "one of the first truly global artists of the modern era": someone who might fit right into these ever-more-globalizing times. Traveler, designer, polymath, he was as interested in ideas and objects as in sculpture: He wanted to make things that could be used. Yet remember that the sculptor I encountered in Casson's photo collection was also trying to work as a politically committed artist, thus also potentially embracing the new global identity we ourselves are urged to seek. I think his efforts deserve considerable thought. On the one hand, remember those playground designs, which mobilize quite specific convictions about the formation of the social self. (In the mid-1980s, Kenneth Frampton insisted to an audience of young architects at RISD that designing kindergartens was the most politically responsible job they could take on.) Yet in 1938-39, by contrast, Noguchi did not mind attempting a Chassis Fountain, complete with Oldenburgian cogwheels and pistons, for the Ford Pavilion at the New York World's Fair: It's in this context, presumably, that 1000 Horsepower Heart was made. Unlike that sculpture, the Ford fountain is almost subversively comic, or so one might vainly wish. Perhaps such contradictions, pistons versus playgrounds, are inevitable, part of the same chain of binaries--birth and death, wholeness and dissolution--in which the artist found the resources of his work. If Noguchi is indeed the new "global" artist that our time is looking for, it is because he so insistently reminds us that our own range of commitments, like our founding categories themselves, are inextricably bound up with the hectic life of capitalism, and with its culture of death.

1. Valerie J. Fletcher, Isamu Noguchi: Master Sculptor, exh. cat. (London: Scala, 2004), 227, n. 30.

2. Anne Lyford, "Noguchi, Sculptural Abstraction, and the Politics of Japanese American Internment," Art Bulletin 85: no. 1 (March 2003): 136-51.

Anne M. Wagner is professor of modern art at the University of California, Berkeley. (See Contributors.)