Wikio - Top Blogs - Religion and belief

Saturday 20 November 2021

Artlyst - Isamu Noguchi: Socially Engaged Art

My latest review for Artlyst is of Noguchi at Barbican Centre:

'Rarely exhibited archive materials and photographs offer illuminating insights into Noguchi’s life and highlight his humanist values. Less clearly articulated is the extent to which Noguchi engaged with spirituality in his practice. Embracing social, environmental, and spiritual consciousness, Noguchi thought art ‘comes from the awakening person’. Awakening is what we might call the spiritual or a linkage to something flowing very ‘rapidly through the air’. Artists are those who ‘come with less obstruction’ to this flow. To be open to flow, artists try to ‘overcome barriers’ such as ‘habit and convenience and fear and accommodation’ or ‘barriers of the self and what everyone thinks about art’. As such, Noguchi saw ‘no conflict between spirituality and modern art’ as art ‘opens another channel to our non-anthropomorphic deity’, the invocation still being to God. He did, however, view Zen as providing a more direct linkage [to art] than through other mystical forms’ with the spiritual being’ direct appreciation of the thing itself’. As a result, he believed ‘you can’t say whether art came from the spiritual or vice versa’.'

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -
Articles -
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Velvet Underground - Beginning to See the Light.
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 18:00
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