Seeing Noguchi anew: for an exhibition that has toured Europe and will come to New York in the spring, Robert Wilson turned his theatrical skills to providing environments for Isamu Noguchi's sculptures, furniture, lights and other designs

Art in America, Dec, 2003 by Phyllis Tuchman

Almost 15 years after Isamu Noguchi's death, his reputation would not seem to need burnishing. From Albany, N.Y., to Yokohama, Japan, his art is found in more than 150 museums, sculpture gardens, foundations, libraries, plazas and an airport or two. Besides garnering international honors and prizes before he died in 1988 at the age of 84, he saw the Isamu Noguchi Garden Museum in Long Island City, Queens, open to the public. Yet now, in the first major exhibition of Noguchi's art and design mounted by a European institution, a dynamic display designed by Robert Wilson--an artist who is Noguchi's equal in appreciation of the power of light, space, color and placement to evoke emotion--shows how an 'artist's work can benefit from altered circumstances.

Wilson's installation, which traveled Europe for two years and will come to the U.S. in 2004, is not spare, clean and modernist. With a touch of mystery, a dose of folksiness, considerable showmanship, cues from merchandising and only a bit of East meets West, Wilson transforms the way Noguchi's art is usually approached. The components--including wall treatments and floor coverings--are altered to some degree in every museum and gallery space to which the show travels, though the installation design is unchanged. For Wilson, this project is a slight shift from his theater concerns: here he has had to consider not stages and auditoriums but whether galleries are narrow or wide, squarish or rectangular, where viewers should stand and how they should encounter the work physically and sequentially.

Organized by the Vitra Design Museum in Germany in collaboration with the Isamu Noguchi Foundation in New York, the exhibition features, in fear viewing spaces, a select sampling from the artist's abundantly varied work. On view are stone carvings, bronze portrait busts and ceramics; maquettes for a fountain, a sunken garden, a bridge ramp, a contoured playground and even a swimming pool for director Josef von Sternberg; bamboo-and paper Akari lamps; assorted tables, stools and chairs manufactured by the Herman Miller firm; costumes, props and decor for the dance companies of Graham and Balanchine; and industrial objects. Many of the almost 80 items on display are less than a foot high, which presents yet another design problem for Wilson: how to bring attention to work measured in inches and how to avoid the appearance of clutter. Each of the spaces Wilson filled with Noguchi's art and design had its own special character, and each was entered via a distinct path that winds through the show.

While it seems astonishing that this is the fast time that Europeans have taken an extended look at Noguchi's oeuvre, Wilson has long enjoyed stardom on the continent. This is the sort of offbeat project he gets invited to do outside America (and which, incidentally, he develops in brainstorming sessions during his summer residency at the Watermill Center on Long Island). Vitra made a perfect match.

A prop shaped like a lyre--designed for Balanchine's Orpheus--appropriately hangs at the entrance to the exhibition. What a metaphor for a walk through a sequence of displays! Beyond the entry door, you find yourself in a darkened "theater" housing several spotlit elements, including an abstracted bed, tent bars and other set pieces from three dances choreographed by Martha Graham around 50 years ago. As you get your bearings in this jet-black interior, you essentially move from one well-lit prop to another illuminated piece of decor, as if you were a performer onstage. It is possible to feel as if you have stumbled into a movie by Jean Cocteau--say, a version of Orpheus Descending.

The next viewing area could not be more different. With a nod to Graham and Aaron Copland's Appalachian Spring, it is barnlike. Celebrating curves, Wilson installs a number of Noguchi's splendid Akari lamps as well as his wood furniture on a low platform strewn with straw and set against a wall fitted with bales of hay. A portrait bust of George Gershwin is shown on a pedestal, and dance music emanates from an unseen source. You see a haystack near the door to the next "room," but only if you turn as you exit will you see the monitor inserted in the columnar pile showing a filmed segment of Appalachian Spring being performed.

Then, in another remarkable change of pace, you find yourself tiptoeing from one flat rock to another among banded stone sculptures set in a bed of sand. This area also displays a number of maquettes for large-scale projects. Given that the models are small versions of what could become monuments and are seen among stone works of intermediate dimensions, you get a sense of the way Noguchi worked with scale.

The originality of Wilson's interpretation of Noguchi is readily apparent in this third section of the show, as you face a maquette for the Horace E. Dodge and Son Memorial Fountain at the Renaissance Center in Detroit (1971-79). Behind the painted-wood model, water runs down a sheet of glass, suggesting how the fountain looks and sounds. Moreover, through the wall of water you can watch slides of the actual fountain in operation. Noguchi's models are never dull and uninspiring, even when shown without a proposed context, hut Wilson's assistance gives these projects for outdoor placement even more life