Best of Friends

I went to the Noguchi Museum last Friday to check out Best of Friends, a show about the relationship between Buckminster Fuller and Isamu Noguchi, two incredibly brilliant people. The show wasn't that exciting. I think it may have just been kind of thin on quanitity of work and specifically work that really exemplified how they influenced each other. Maybe I wasn't paying attention but I also felt that the show focused heavily on how Fuller's obsession with geometry and physics influenced Noguchi's work but less how/if Fuller was influenced by Noguchi.

The thing that fascinated me the most was that apparently Noguchi had gone down to Mexico and made a giant mural typical of the revolutionary themes of the time, workers rights, opression by the government and the church. First of all, its fascinating to see Noguchi's paintings and to see how his painting style even when within a very specific genre and style of social(ist) revolutionary realism still echoes his sculpture as I saw in the angular features of this skeleton:
















But secondly, it was a trip to see Noguchi associated with such a blatantly political piece. He had organized artists of Japanese descent during the internment and even entered an internment camp voluntarily (he was a NY resident) but the closest I am aware his work taking on an public bent was his public playgrounds. It was fascinating to see him wrestle with this political language.

The museum in general is a great place. Its inspiring (and disheartening) to see the life work of someone so brilliant. In an era when I feel like people are told to specialize here was a man who could do anything in art. Sculpt from life-check. Landscape architecture-check. Abstract sculpture-check. Amorphous forms ala Brancusi-check. You walk around and see how limitless his curiosity and talent were just by looking at his output.

You can't ever stop being interested in shit.