Essence of Noguchi, plus flash

For the second time in two years, the Japanese American National Museum is hosting an exhibition of work by Isamu Noguchi, the L.A.-born son of Irish American and Japanese parents who spent his boyhood in Japan, teenage years at an Indiana boarding school and early adulthood in Paris, apprenticing for the likes of Alberto Giacometti and Alexander Calder, before settling in New York.

Following on the heels of the 2004 exhibition “Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics” comes “Isamu Noguchi -- Sculptural Design,” which considers how the artist’s sculptural inclinations fed into design -- for furniture, utensils, theater sets, monuments, even swimming pools and playgrounds. As a recording of his words reminds viewers, Noguchi saw no need to distinguish between sculpture and design.

Like the 2004 exhibition, this show reveals how Noguchi (1904-88), regardless of media or context, infused everything he created with a blend of austerity and sensuality, producing concisely abstract yet powerfully evocative forms that draw from Western and Eastern, traditional and modern sensibilities.

Although the design of the 2004 show picked up on the distilled drama of Noguchi’s works, the design of the current exhibition -- a much touted aspect of the show -- misses the mark despite the best of intentions.

Organized by the Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein, Germany, in cooperation with the Isamu Noguchi Foundation in New York, the exhibition is packaged in a series of themed rooms developed by theater director and set designer Robert Wilson.

In a poetic tribute to Noguchi published in the accompanying exhibition catalog, Wilson notes that he saw the essence of Noguchi’s work in an abstracted rocking chair that was a set element for Martha Graham’s 1944 “Appalachian Spring.”

Here, Wilson is right on the money. The chair, reduced to the geometry of an X balanced on a single rocker, with one diagonal extended to form a back support, is iconic of what this show is about and of what Noguchi was about. But the exhibition design suggests that Wilson started with that essence and simply got carried away.

The first gallery is filled with props and set elements that Noguchi designed for productions staged by Graham and also George Balanchine. Because these objects had to function as sets and props, they had to mimic functional objects -- a tent, a bed, musical instruments -- and thus had to be more representational or referential than much of Noguchi’s art.

Yet because they needed only to imply functionality, he was able to take great liberty. Here, as in many of his works, form follows function less than it negotiates with it.

Theatrical spotlights and documentation of the productions seem apropos in this room, but the constant music and general funhouse-like atmosphere, intended to provide context, end in distraction.

Stacked hay bales make an appropriate organic / minimal backdrop for another gallery, this one filled with plywood furniture and Akari lamps, made of paper, bamboo and wire. But the arrangement feels like showroom merchandising, with stools levitating by way of fishing line, a bothersome urban hustle-bustle soundtrack and a trio of biomorphic 1952 benches designed for Graham’s studio and hung on the wall to form an abstract composition. The benches look nice as a wall hanging, and Noguchi might have approved. But given that much work in this exhibition derives nuance from positions pinpointed on sliding scales of function and aesthetics, and given that Noguchi considered the key to his practice to be the ordering of space, such recasting and reshuffling seems brazen.

A third gallery offers a field of raked gravel dotted with furniture, sculptures and models for larger commissions. The attempt at cultural connectivity via the Zen context becomes a cluttered cliche, and the stepping-stone path that guides viewers along a prescribed route restricts the intimate pleasure of examination that the works invite.

A final gallery, apparently trying to emphasize the sleekness of Noguchi’s designs, delivers slickness instead.

The show catalog -- laced with historical photographs of stage sets, arrangements in the artist’s studio, interiors he designed and promotional displays for his furniture -- reveals that Noguchi had his own flair for the theatrical. But these same photos also show a restraint and subtlety against which the exhibition’s design becomes a caricature. It’s as if Wilson and his team summoned the spirit of Noguchi and then tried to give it a makeover.

Nonetheless, this exhibition of more than 75 Noguchi works spanning 60 years is worth seeing. You have to do a good bit of blanking out the background, but luckily, you don’t have to do all the work. Simple and minimal as they often are, Noguchi’s works usually manage to hold their own.

It takes a lot to diminish the power of “Endless Coupling,” a progression of stacking and interlocking iron forms that nod to the “Endless Column” works of Constantin Brancusi, with whom Noguchi also apprenticed in Paris. Equally irrepressible is his now-classic 1944 design for a coffee table, manufactured by Herman Miller, with a glass top supported by two simple arcs of wood that are evocative of two hands touching at the thumbs and rotating in opposite directions.

Many of Noguchi’s most lyrical and playful designs take inspiration from landscape. The 1968 “Water Table” is a simple slab of dark granite with two basins carved out of its surface. His 1944 “Chess Table” inverts landscape, providing players with a flat surface, while underneath, the uneven hills of an undulating relief are matched with legs of varying lengths.

Others among the best works look to the body, as with stone garden furniture that suggests reclining figures, or the striking “Madea’s Dress,” another Graham production set element, this one comprising nothing but fluidly bent brass rods that follow the implied lines of the body and dart outward like flames.

As much as the exhibition design hinders the work it seeks to highlight, it also -- as a strange side effect -- reinforces the elegant strength of Noguchi’s designs, which mostly prove able to withstand the case study in flash, fuss and funk amid which they find themselves.

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‘Isamu Noguchi -- Sculptural Design’

Where: Japanese American National Museum, 369 E. 1st St., Los Angeles

When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays, except 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Thursdays.

Ends: May 14

Price: $8 to $12

Contact: (213) 625-0414; www.janm.org