Essay #3 Nouchi Museum

 

                The Noguchi Museum and Socrates Sculpture Park both located in Long Island City, Queens provide amazing spaces filled with art, specifically sculptures. The Noguchi Museum featured works created by Isamu Noguchi over his lifetime, and for the first time in the history of the museum another artist other than Noguchi, Toms Sachs. Socrates Sculpture Park, similar to the Noguchi Museum, features sculptures throughout the park integrating art with nature and open spaces.

                While visiting the Noguchi Museum the class and I had the great experience of a guided tour which provided some insightful information to Noguchi’s life and helped interpret some of Noguchi’s pieces. We learned that Noguchi’s complicated family background led to a big discord between his Japanese and American ancestry which becomes a theme prevalent in a lot of his pieces. The first piece we looked at, Fudo, was one which was created out of a granite commonly found in Japan and stainless steel. The two materials used in Fudo are meant to represent Noguchi’s two heritages and how he believes they come together. I thought his choice of materials and the way he formed them together created a very pronounced contrast. The stainless steel embodied a very modern and “advanced” feeling often associated with America while the granite gives more of a natural and traditional impression commonly associated with Japanese culture. Fudo is an example of a free standing sculpture created by two different techniques specific to each material used in the sculpture. The metal aspect of the sculpture is created by an additive method of sculpture called casting which utilizes a mold into which liquid metal is poured into. The stone aspect of the sculpture was created by carving, a subtractive method of sculpture that requires removing parts of a material with a tool, more often some sort of chisel.

                The Sculptures in Socrates Sculpture Park consists of different types, ranging from free standing sculptures to assemblage sculptures. Similar to Tom Sachs’ sculptures displayed within the Noguchi Museum, the sculptures found within Socrates Sculpture Park contain many unconventional materials and elements such as live bees, glass bottles and keys. The initial sculpture I was drawn too was one that resembled a ship wrecked boat. Visible from the entrance of the park, the sculpture needed to be seen from quite a bit of a distance to really see the shapes the artist was intending to make.  When I continued to get closer to the sculpture it was then I noticed the types of unconventional material the artist used. The title of the piece is Half Moon created by artist Abigail Deville, the piece offers viewers another perspective on items if seen separately, someone would associate with trash. Half Moon is an example of an assemblage sculpture, created and assembled by found objects, displaying them in a new light.

 

                Overall I thought the trip to the Noguchi Museum and Socrates Sculpture Park really introduced me to different types of sculptures. I think prior to my interaction with the sculptures I viewed throughout the trip I had a really limited knowledge of sculptures, naturally just picturing a statue when hearing the word sculpture. It was awesome to see that materials like rocks could be sculpted to take on different contexts and that sculptures could be created by essentially people’s trash and emit a completely different message than junk.