Uchiyama, Naoko; (2021) Beyond received American Modernism: Isamu Noguchi’s art practices and itinerancy 1930s-1950s. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

Abstract

Since the 1980s when multiculturalism became a critical perspective for narrating modern art, the sculptor and designer Isamu Noguchi’s (1904-1988) affiliation with Japanese/Asian culture has attracted considerable attention. However, some scholars are critical of biological readings, preferring to address the context-oriented complications of Noguchi’s cultural relationship with ‘Japan’ and the ‘Orient’. Sharing such a critical perspective, this thesis locates the traveller Noguchi, and his works and practices from the 1930s to 1950s, within individually unique socio-cultural settings and further complicates the genealogical approach to the artist of an ‘ethnic minority’. Six case studies act as exemplars of the diversity of Noguchi’s art. My historiographic study reveals, first, the establishment of his ‘world citizen’ identification in accordance with the development of modernist aesthetics in the West from the late 19th to the first two-thirds of the 20th century. Then, that Noguchi participated in the construction and reconstruction of cultural images of ‘race’ and ‘nation’/‘region’ not only in the USA but also en route while on his multiple travels during the period in question. Noguchi’s itinerancy was not that of a neutral ‘rootless cosmopolitan’, but rather was a searching for an art practice driven by social engagement while also committed to modernist aesthetics and experimentation across a number of art forms. In addition to revealing the socio-cultural settings that enabled Noguchi’s travels, my research criticizes ethnicisation for its essentialist perspective. My context-specific examination of Noguchi brings to multiculturalism the potential impact of an itinerant individual to acknowledge the limitations of fixed and singular cultural affiliations. It also questions persisting dichotomous preconceptions: West/non-West, centre/periphery and majority/minority. Furthermore, addressing the cross-media, socio-conscious and transnational aspects that Noguchi’s modernism embraced, the present study further complicates and decentralises the accepted narrative of received history of American modernism, its aesthetics, geography and periodisation.

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