<p>“I think of sculpture as something to be completely experienced, not just looked at. You’re an integral part of it […]. Your environment is your sculpture, your world. It is the world, and the world then becomes a sculpture”. Stating thus, American Japanese artist Isamu Noguchi (1904–88) considered the sculpture as “the art of space”. The museum that he himself founded in his later years in Long Island City (New York, United States) should be the very embodiment of such an idea; whereas the natural light shimmers into the interior through the shade of trees swaying in the wind, the plants in the garden are constantly changing with the seasons, and even with the years. Along with another museum of him in Mure (Kagawa, Japan), where he had an outdoor studio close to the quarry, each of these places creates a holistic space where the individual works are interrelated with one another and with the environment. From as early as the 1930s, Noguchi worked on stage decoration, then gardens, playgrounds, and installations in public spaces. While saying that he did not want to make small sculptures anymore because he did not know where to put them, he continued to make pieces throughout his life. Bringing careful examinations of theses individual pieces and its stonework especially from the 1960s onward, this paper offers to reconsider Noguchi’s idea of sculpture as “the art of space”. To this end, we revisit the idea of “in-between” in his art. “In-between” has been discussed as one of the key notions to understand Noguchi and his art. On the one hand, from a conceptual aspect; between Western and Eastern, United States and Japan, modern and archaic, life and death, etc. On the other hand, from the aspect of each work; as Dario Gamboni(2020) pointed out in Noguchi’s works such as To the Issei (1980) and Energy Void (1972–73), the notion can be associated with negative space—literal space between blocks of sculptures, or simply a void, a hole—that leads to the Japanese notion of “間(ma)”. However, it is not the “in-between” of two dichotomous poles nor “in-between” as a negative space that we want to investigate in this presentation. Although it can be regarded as quasi-equivalence of “in-between”, “間(ma)” cannot be reduced to the meaning of blank space. This Japanese word first and foremost means “place”, a positive space. If we take into account of this complexity involved in the notion of “ma”, each piece of sculpture itself, which is nothing but a solid substance, couldn’t it be considered as “in-between”? The question is, in other words, what kind of space did Noguchi seek to create with these individual pieces? This paper is an attempt to explore a possible answer to this question, in the hope of uncovering the full meaning of “space” in Noguchi’s art.</p>

Experience of in-between: Isamu Noguchi’s Stone Sculpture and his Idea of “The Art of Space”

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发表日期：

2025年12月22日

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Rie Kodera

摘要

“I think of sculpture as something to be completely experienced, not just looked at. You’re an integral part of it […]. Your environment is your sculpture, your world. It is the world, and the world then becomes a sculpture”. Stating thus, American Japanese artist Isamu Noguchi (1904–88) considered the sculpture as “the art of space”. The museum that he himself founded in his later years in Long Island City (New York, United States) should be the very embodiment of such an idea; whereas the natural light shimmers into the interior through the shade of trees swaying in the wind, the plants in the garden are constantly changing with the seasons, and even with the years. Along with another museum of him in Mure (Kagawa, Japan), where he had an outdoor studio close to the quarry, each of these places creates a holistic space where the individual works are interrelated with one another and with the environment. From as early as the 1930s, Noguchi worked on stage decoration, then gardens, playgrounds, and installations in public spaces. While saying that he did not want to make small sculptures anymore because he did not know where to put them, he continued to make pieces throughout his life. Bringing careful examinations of theses individual pieces and its stonework especially from the 1960s onward, this paper offers to reconsider Noguchi’s idea of sculpture as “the art of space”. To this end, we revisit the idea of “in-between” in his art. “In-between” has been discussed as one of the key notions to understand Noguchi and his art. On the one hand, from a conceptual aspect; between Western and Eastern, United States and Japan, modern and archaic, life and death, etc. On the other hand, from the aspect of each work; as Dario Gamboni(2020) pointed out in Noguchi’s works such as To the Issei (1980) and Energy Void (1972–73), the notion can be associated with negative space—literal space between blocks of sculptures, or simply a void, a hole—that leads to the Japanese notion of “間(ma)”. However, it is not the “in-between” of two dichotomous poles nor “in-between” as a negative space that we want to investigate in this presentation. Although it can be regarded as quasi-equivalence of “in-between”, “間(ma)” cannot be reduced to the meaning of blank space. This Japanese word first and foremost means “place”, a positive space. If we take into account of this complexity involved in the notion of “ma”, each piece of sculpture itself, which is nothing but a solid substance, couldn’t it be considered as “in-between”? The question is, in other words, what kind of space did Noguchi seek to create with these individual pieces? This paper is an attempt to explore a possible answer to this question, in the hope of uncovering the full meaning of “space” in Noguchi’s art.