Noguchi in a box.

My experience visiting the Noguchi Museum in Queens was a strange one, and for this reason my writing it comes belatedly. I was unsure how to language the feeling, now I feel more confident to attempt.

Monolithic lumps of rock huddle between walls of cinderblock and steel as winter takes its first bite out of spring. Some looming and leaning, towering like a giant's planted walking stick; others rising up like super-natural portals, an elliptical loop of silken stone bent barely forward, backward, leaning at an impossible angle and seeming to be what could only be described as striding forward, propelled by the bar of ether vibrating between its legs, in the loop's center; others sinking into the concrete floor like primeval snakes, coiled and fossilized, broken and split by time, honed and resurrected by some acolytic archaeologist; some like phantasmal hammers or phalluses hovering above the ground to meet your stare as its edges quiver and shimmer; and others slouched like great lumps of clay, clawed at by the quarry, by wind and rain, and cracked by Isamu Noguchi, by wind and rain, a face or two polished, maybe cracked again, twisted and reassembled. In a few broad, deliberate strokes, each time the brush pulled carefully and forcefully along the grooves he searches for, and finds, pregiven by nature and process and time. Even the quarry marks are respected. Noguchi pours mind into material and lets the two mingle, and as they dance he follows closely and inserts himself in rhythm. The miracle of life.

Without question, each piece is alive. Independent and freestanding, practically walking and talking, certainly emanating, vibrating the air as any body does as its boundaries tremble at gravity and magnets, the relationships to other bodies, and so do Noguchi's pieces commune. Huddled, as I said, mumbling to each other in a singsong voice too low for human ears. Hosannas, invitations, anxieties wrenched from the spine and shaped in the air. I did not try, but I imagine that if I fell to my knees and put my ear to the concrete, I could nearly hear their muffled cadence.

But I did not, because I did not feel entitled to hear. I was an outsider, an intruder into this gutted old gas station, hollowed, preserved, and tucked away to give sanctuary to this heard of stony unicorns. Sacred ground upon which I did not feel quite welcome. When the sculptures' specters were not breathing, whispering over my shoulder, they turned their backs to me. Of course I found moments of harmony, certain spaces, conversations into which I felt embraced, but my dominant feeling was of being lost, confusion, alienation. I think of my grandmother, hard of hearing. Though she has hearing aids, sat in a bustling restaurant her ears resound with nothing but noise as each voice, each shout, each clatter blurs into the next. Here I wander through this cold, cavernous gallery and echoes are bouncing off every wall as Noguchi's stones chatter to one another in the dim. I feel like my grandmother, the harmony and grace of each encounter, the subtleties of each attempted dialogue lost to the noise encompassing my head. Indeed Noguchi believed very much in the relationality of his pieces, their ability to 'converse,' and I believe in it as well. But on that windy fall morning spent in that concrete castle in Queens, (even in the warm wood-floored floating gallery, where, although many pieces gestured at the domestic, sculptures resembling coffee tables, or holding an arrangement of branches on the floor with a small cushion, or being based on a wooden table, or the shelf of small works lining the long wall, set in a row like random household objects of kitsch or a display of decor at Restoration Hardware, some of them leaning against the wall. I mean the given sense that the objects could exist anywhere, that they do not require any frame or plinth or white box in Chelsea, as opposed to a Rodin for instance. They are not separate from, above or below our phenomenal, social world as the museums and galleries would have you believe art is. Rather they are a part of it, and inhabit it as well as we ourselves do. And this feels strongly indicative of the way in which Noguchi's work ought be enjoyed. I want to sit on that cushion in the elbow of that granite snake and meditate with a cup of something hot. I want that little piece now aligned neatly on that sterile shelf instead tucked into my bookshelf, that little idol resting on my kitchen table. I want just to exist alongside them and absorb their emanations, drink in their company.) I found my belief waver as I felt myself drowned in a cacophony of performative conversations and pronouncements echoing from all sides and bouncing off every harsh brick wall.

In their confidence and excitement about the monumental oeuvre of Noguchi and their expansive collection of it, I think the Noguchi Museum ends up muting the most resounding tones of the artist's work. I believe the pieces were made to exist alongside nature, to inhabit the world and breathe, but the Noguchi Museum arranges them like dolls or historical reenactors. Like objects on display in a luxury furniture store or an ethnographic exhibit. Like mannequins in a shop window or the castle and scuba diver waving from the bottom of the exotic fishbowl. There's even flora planted in the Fruity Pebbles pebbles.