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The Sound of Closed Doors
John Haberin New York City
Christian Boltanski: Archives of the Heart
Isamu Noguchi: Memorials to the Atomic Dead and Subscapes
With Les Archives du Coeur, Christian Boltanski achieves that rarity, a work of sound art that one can appreciate through closed doors. Just as remarkable, its visuals are as evanescent and persistent as its sounds, at the Isamu Noguchi Museum. It also shares the museum with Noguchi's "Useless Architecture" and unrealized memorials to silence at Hiroshima, a silence still heard after two years in "Noguchi Subscapes."
Watching the embers glow
With a show closing on Labor Day, Christian Boltanski makes good use of summer. On a sunny afternoon, light poured through the door to the garden, bearing with it reflections off the work. Sunlight picks out and surrounds the reflective surfaces as well—clear vertical strips barely larger than a human hand. 
They come in and out of view as they twist under their own weight and in the wind. If they seem to emerge and to vanish before one's eyes, the work is only, its title claims, the archives of the heart, not the thing itself. And if the title puns on cries of the heart, its sound component supplies the tears.
Both components become clearer out in the garden. Sound art always runs the risk of invisibility, as with "The Musical Brain" this same summer on the High Line. When it does become visible, it can devolve into sculpture as burdensome and routine as amps and speakers for roadies. Boltanski's trick is to make the work's physical component intrinsic to its design for sound. Dozens of small bells hang down over Noguchi's sculpture in the pebbled garden, their lightness in contrast to the sculpture's closeness to the ground and weight. The strips, at the end of the wires, merely ensure that the bells hang properly suspended.
As with his title, Boltanski has a weakness for metaphors, so allow me to supply one. Bringing peace to the garden museum is like carrying coals to Newcastle, and capturing its sunlight is like watching the embers glow. Seriously, though, he is working with his site. The wires and their weights do not obscure the sculpture but rather disperse and multiply it. The small bells vary in color and in their surfaces, with pleats or ridges, just as Isamu Noguchi incorporated rough and polished stone within a single work. Their cups might almost bear sake for the Japanese and California-bred sculptor.
Boltanski would also have known of a proposed bell tower that Noguchi hoped would stand in Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park. Sure enough, a model is on view in a concurrent show of his "Memorials to the Atomic Dead." As that suggests, two artists known for their polish and accessibility are not running away from horrifying memories. They are also remembering the same horrible war, much like Tsuneko Sasamoto in photography. With his largest and noisiest New York installation to date, covering the Park Avenue armory's floor in 2010, Christian Boltanski, a French Jew, paid tribute to his father, who hid under flooring from the Nazis. His contribution to "Haunted" at the Guggenheim that same year remembered European Jewish children.
His latest continues a series begun in 2014, not in an urban garden but in the Atacama Desert in Chile. (Boltanski, who has also curated a show of "relational esthetics," will go to extremes of physical endurance for you and for his art.) A film from 2016, also at the Noguchi Museum, shows La Forêt des Murmures, a more extended version on the island of Teshima in Japan. The cries and archives became murmurs of the heart. They complement Noguchi's unrealized work for Japan as well.
On film, in a dark room to itself, the open and well-tended garden in Queens gives way to a denser forest, with actual wood chips at the foot of the screen for a forest floor. Sunlight breaks through at the screen's center, creating its own forest clearing. The bells become accents of color in the woods. The chimes become more like the chirp of forest birds as well. It pays to step back into the garden one last time before leaving. Boltanski's sound art also has room for the loud rush of wind through the leaves.
An arch without triumph
Bell Tower for Hiroshima was not Noguchi's first attempt at a memorial to the atomic dead or his last. It may just have been the most resonant. If the bomb was on everyone's mind, in a time of real terror and existential doubt, how much more so for an artist born in the country that had gone to war and identifying with the country that had brought such mass destruction? A small exhibition includes a photo of Isamu Noguchi in 1951, standing among the ruins—his first trip to Japan since he left in 1931, at age twenty-seven. It had been on his mind, though, from almost the moment the bomb dropped. And it weighed so heavily that he wished his first attempt to be visible from Mars.
He imagined the spare features of a child's face, perhaps in tears, etched in the landscape, and no one was buying. Hiroshima was building its Peace Memorial Park, Japan was seeking a new way based on democracy and peace, and neither wanted to protract the tears. Besides, no one wanted a reminder that even two ruined cities might not mean much from Mars. Noguchi's subsequent attempts fared no better. Some protracted the cartoon tears on a more earthly scale, with creatures clinging to one another or crying out. His most eloquent proposal, though, was not just closer to planet earth, but sunk within.
He meant a memorial arch, but not a triumphal one. Its thick half circle low to the ground would have left no room for a march. A model close to full scale shares a room at the Noguchi Museum with only a black slab tilted off the vertical—a tabletop in a world gone topsy-turvy and a wall in a city cast asunder. Its mix of rough and smooth surfaces brings out how much Noguchi's polished art encompassed brute force and roughness. Neither display hints at what would have lay unseen. An underground chamber would have been anchored the arch, with a sealed container for archives.
In turning him down, Hiroshima cited the usual objections to his Modernism, as too abstract for the occasion and too expensive. It must, though, also have seemed wrong for a city that wanted peace, not a cenotaph, not to mention something visible. The work anticipates the Vietnam War Memorial by Maya Lin in its refusal to fly high—just as the mission to Mars anticipates earthworks. Noguchi could not, though, supply their immersive experience. Still, the mayor and the architect of the memorial park, Kunzo Tange, invited him to visit and to design railings for a bridge from the mainland. And there his elegance really does speak of peace.
His designs also raise a tough question: how much can art reach a broader public, and when does it become architecture or useful? A display upstairs groups work from the museum under the heading of "Useless Architecture." The title quotes Noguchi's intended compliment for the art of past centuries, and it might not make a bad definition of art, period—even if you do not believe, with Oscar Wilde, that "all art is utterly useless." It also runs counter to Modernism, like the Bauhaus, and much contemporary art, with their breaking the boundaries between art and design. Noguchi himself was not giving up on public projects in the face of refusal.
He proposed a tiered white platform for New York's Riverside Park that, in a small black model, looks like sculpture in relief. He designed sets for Martha Graham with ropes, poles, and holes that look daunting but were tailor-made to her dance. He designed working lamps, and he catalogued the elements of his sculpture as a much-needed substitute for the decorative elements in architecture that he hated. The museum itself shows him quite capable of utility (thank you), at least the creation and display of art. Still, no one wanted a playground without playground equipment, and others saw not a place to play, but merely voids and new vistas. But then a site for new vistas might be a decent definition of art, too.
Beneath the surface
No one needs an excuse to revisit the Noguchi Museum, especially in summer, but it happily supplies one. "Noguchi Subscapes" invites a look beneath the surface at one of Modernism's finest sculptors. It may seem no more than an excuse at that. Its sections make perfect sense taken one at a time but hardly cohere into a greater whole. It centers on work for public performance, and it prizes masses and surfaces over the mysteries within. There is not an inner or outer landscape in sight.
Still, this is one of the city's most overlooked landmarks, designed by Noguchi as museum and workspace. Its neglect as landmarks go only adds to its precious silence, and visitors settle into its garden benches for just that. This is that rare museum in which the sculpture and the garden in a sculpture garden bear equal weight. One can regain a sense of community just up the block, to Socrates Sculpture Park on the waterfront, where Mary Mattingly has this year's summer sculpture in Queens, or just sit and take it all in. "Subscapes" has the entire second floor, nearly half the museum, and many of its works have a close match downstairs. One might treasure it most as a selective guide to more.
One might compliment the artist by saying he makes it look easy, but resist the temptation. In reality, he leaves every trace of his work. One can see it in those many masses and surfaces, from polished tubes of banded white and color to black stone stippled with white from hard, repeated punching. Much of his work looks torn off from a larger block of wood or stone. A particularly rough curved wall might serve as a cowl for someone willing to bear its weight. In a photo, Noguchi's head pops out from a hole in another, as if emerging from a white shroud.
Still, the themes add something, even if any one of them could apply quite well to work a room or two away. One speaks of humble but sly organic origins, in a caterpillar or a snake. Titles elsewhere speak instead of human bodies and longings, with Torso, Eros, or Philosopher's Stone. Another section had its beginnings in public performance. Blobs here and there on the floor might have served as obstacles or something to caress in Orpheus, a 1947 ballet by George Balanchine. Soon enough Robert Rauschenberg was collaborating in dance as well.
One last theme points to Noguchi's work in not just sculpture but also design, with work that defies expectations for either one. Its plinths might include two matching stone pedestals for a glass table, meeting at right angles at a single point, or the platform that raises them above eye level. Another table's wooden top echoes its smaller base on the floor, connected and supported by a angled steel rods. Still others seem to have lost everything but the plinth, like a black surface that might be a garden fountain if only it held water. Lamps or sculptures (your choice) are lit both within and, in this light-filled museum, without. Balanchine danced with one of them as well.
Noguchi never lost his ties to Japan and also designed those Memorials to the Atomic Dead exhibited here along with the sound art by Boltanski. I shall always imagine the moments after the bomb as an unearthly silence, although they must surely have contained crashing architecture, cries of pain, and anguished pleas for help. More than two years later, one can again hear almost the sounds, in photos of the dance with music by Igor Stravinsky. I could imagine that vertical caterpillar, too, as a column of more bells. Both bring out the garden museum's air of peace. Who would care to look beneath the surface for more?
Christian Boltanski ran at the Isamu Noguchi Museum through September 5, 2021, Isamu Noguchi's "Memorials to the Atomic Dead" and Noguchi's "Useless Architecture" though May 8, 2022, and "Noguchi Subscapes" through through September 3, 2023. Related reviews look at Christian Boltanski and sound art, Isamu Noguchi, the Noguchi garden museum, and the museum's fortieth anniversary.