Distance Noguchi’s films show the museum’s famous sculptural lawn stirred by the wind, the gentle splashing of a fountain or the possibility of a bird’s arrival.
The Noguchi Museum in Long Island City is the only museum in America that has no living soul, because he already has a soul: this place.
At least that is the logic of the very specific reaction of the institution to the closure of the coronavirus. Titled Noguchi Distance, the exhibition is made up of 22 separate films (the two longest films had to be split in two to be effectively uploaded to Vimeo), running from one to the other. 11 Hours, filmed in different parts of the museum, are not action movies. To make them, artist Nick Knight used a high-resolution still camera, superbly composing each shot and then simply zooming out. The movies you shot with an inside look as photographs at first; However, if you wait long enough, you will revel in the silent and dazzling delight of seeing the light of the herbs slowly gliding slowly over the surface of a sculpture. soft lick from a fountain. The possibility of the arrival of a bird becomes a main event.
In short, what Andy Warhol’s empire has done for film, Distance Noguchi does for online programming. In their slowness, the films, which in total are about 75 hours in total, serve as a break with the norm and a slight provocation. Curator Dakin Hart, who conceived the commission with Knight, says he was encouraged by an anti-intuition thought: the forced closure of his museum had led him to a kind of ideal state. It is not uncommon to hear this position described as a position of pilgrimage, where one does not look so much at art as to be in communion with it. But Hart goes further. ” The museum doesn’t want you,” he says with a smile. “He doesn’t want you. You’re no more interested in this than the ocean, I mean, not at all.
This sentiment effectively goes against the strategy of the top museums in those days. Most institutions have moved relentlessly toward expanding rates of improvement, and not just for monetary reasons. The highest number of climbers indicates that a museum connects with its community, demonstrating its value. But Noguchi didn’t see his museum that way; he created it towards the end of his career to maintain his own point of view without interference, when he had moved to appear before anyone. As he told the museum’s director at the time, Allan Wardwell (formerly at the Asia Society), in 1988: “Personally, I am not at all concerned if other people have stopped coming to the museum. Perhaps everyone interested in what I am doing has noticed. As he wondered, by shaping stone or metal, “how not to ruin nature and yet be equivalent to it”, he conceives his museum as something like a forest, a habitat that can be found. definitely stopover and enjoy, but that operates on its own time scale and doesn’t require any external validation.
This would possibly seem like a high vision, even elitist (and can only be maintained through the museum’s relatively giant endowment and the continued revenue of Noguchi’s extensive design efforts, such as its Akari lighting). But the opposite, an obsession with the public, is also not such a smart thing. The relentless preference for increasing museum attendance is no more sustainable than any other perpetual growth edition; is, as Hart politely says, “a shark-like way of thinking, absorbed by American industry. “And, like capitalism as a whole, this set of sectoral priorities has been called to a probably existential explanation with the emergence of Covid-19. Since attendance is likely to remain artificially low for the foreseeable future, in the interest of public health, museums will want to locate other signs of success.
This will undoubtedly lead to additional reallocation of resources in the virtual space, if only to collect public participation statistics, but this will pose their own problems, because museums are forced to compete to attract the attention of an audience that is already hugely distracted, probably in charge of rigor and conservation care. In this potentially unedifying context, Distance Noguchi announces a very different, qualitative than quantitative set of values. His masterful rhythm is not so much elitist as olympian, indifferent to scrum.
Ideally, the films would be placed on a wall, as big as life, as a backdrop to yours. However, even in this case, the assignment would not become a (inadequate) replacement for a face-to-face visit, as this is the case with online museum content. Rather, it is a poignant reminder of what we are missing while the doors are closed, and at the same time, a useful decentralization. Here, to paraphrase Noguchi, how not to ruin a museum: You’ll have to remember that at the end of the day, it’s not just about us.
The highlight of its first virtual edition comes with Spike Lee’s david byrne documentary, a forged variety of native-directed films, and a review of the FBI’s efforts to defame Martin Luther King Jr.
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