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An East-West Master
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20671 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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9 / 1992 |
2,493 Words |
| Author
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Scarlet Cheng
Scarlet Cheng, based in Los Angeles, is a contributing editor
to the arts section of The World & I. |
NOGUCHI EAST AND WEST
Dore Ashton
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992
338 pp., $35.00
At a time when national borders are collapsing, literally as well as figuratively, many visual artists have taken to examining the ebb and flow of cultures, their blend and their clash. Being multi-culti-concious has become trendy.
At its most blaringly superficial, there is the cultural cannibalism of Robert Rauschenberg and his all-surface, no-substance series of works, Overseas Cultural Exchange, the subject of a major shows last year at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. Though whimsical and splashy, it is all too simple to mash together cultural signs, then call it synthesis.
Unfortunately, this superficiality is standard for much contemporary art professing to be "cross-cultural." It is far more demanding to truly understand different cultures, to truly understand different cultures, to assimilate and internalize their symbols and inherent values.
Before all this border crashing became quite so trendy, there was Isamu Noguchi, one of this century's foremost contemporary sculptors and designers, who spent his life reconciling East and West in his art. It is a subject explored at length, though unfortunately not at much depth, by art historian Dore Ashton in her new "critical biography" called Noguchi East and West.
Brought up in Japan and in the United States, Isamu Noguchi was also literally half Japanese and half European-American--his father was the Japanese poet Yone Noguchi and his mother was a Bryn Mawr graduate and writer named Leonie Gilmour. By the time Isamu was born of their romance in 1904, his father had already decamped to London, en route to homeland Japan. Two years later, Yone persuaded Leonie to bring their son to Japan. Once there, however, Leonie raised the boy largely on her own, and she imparted her love of Greek mythology to him.
At thirteen, Isamu, going by the Anglo name of Sam Gilmour, was sent back to the United States to attend an experimental school in Indiana. Later, though slated for premed studies at Columbia University, Isamu was drawn to a local art school in New York. Oddly enough, Ashton deals with this sudden turn in a couple of sentence, and one must
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