Although Louise Noguchi’s Selected Works 1986-2000, currently on display at the AGO, might be smaller than most exhibitions - it consists of just three artworks - it is still able to highlight the major themes within Noguchi’s work and above all, to say something. If anything, the exhibition’s small size enables each artwork both to assert itself and to function as part of a coherent whole. What, then, are these Selected Works saying? Like much of Noguchi’s work, it deals with questions of identity, and how simple images (or stereotypes) can hide complex truths. At the heart of these questions is Noguchi’s Japanese-Canadian identity, a dichotomy tinged through with bloody history; a dialectic of oppressed/oppressor, colonized/colonizer, and as she herself puts it, “[t]he artist as hunter and prey simultaneously.” In this vein, Selected Works questions the ideals people aspire to: wide-ranging ones, from technological progress to the Biblical Garden of Eden to American imperial masculinity - but in the final analysis, Western-centric ones. The exhibition (concisely, because it must) points out that these ideals have become the norm only through violence so overwhelming that it too is seen as normal. Shock and violence are major elements in Noguchi’s work, and apart from being artist’s tools they highlight the ruptures that Euro-American colonialism (and its most recent iteration, neoliberalism) has wrought upon the world and those who live in it. Attempting to locate herself in the maelstrom of modernity - “I slip through many boundaries, being neither one nor the other, nor both” - Noguchi asks a question that all must ask sooner or later: who am I?
The question is posed to the viewer in Eden (1990-1991), a wall-mounted mirror marked with the titular word “EDEN”. Only the word, however, is actually reflective; the viewer can only see themselves within Eden. Taken more broadly, Eden critiques the ways in which Western ideals are seen as universal ideals. Masquerading as a tabula rasa for one to project themselves onto, the reflective EDEN is actually limiting; a viewer would be unable to fit their body within it and some parts would have to be cut out. More broadly: traditional cultures and ways of life are discarded in order to ‘fit in’ to the Western world of capitalism and consumerism. Eden thus invites viewers to reflect upon themselves and who they are. Should they find themselves unable to move within the confines of Western ideals, it is clear that EDEN only takes up a fraction of the mirror’s total space. The viewer is induced to move beyond this ‘fraction’, not by the work itself but by its limitations. Metaphorically, Noguchi says, it is not that the system intends for the subject to move beyond it, but simply that its inadequacies force one to look for alternatives. And if one desires to move beyond even those, mirrors can always be broken.
The concept of Eden is also critiqued in Fruits of Belief: The Grand Landscape (1986), a piece consisting of a cornucopia projecting the image of a landscape painting, and a human head with an exposed brain, which faces the cornucopia and blocks the view of the painting. The ‘painting’ itself is Thomas Gainsborough’s A Grand Landscape (c. 1770), an idealized landscape that depicts nature in an idyllic, Edenesque manner. Used here by Noguchi it becomes a critique of the ‘virgin lands’ colonial justification - the myth that settler colonists did not steal land from Indigenous peoples but rather ‘happened’ to find ‘unused’ lands of plenty - a critique furthered by the fact that Gainsborough himself had several links to the British monarchy as well as slavery. The head which jarringly blocks the landscape suggests human action; this, together with the exposed brain which suggests technology while also hinting at horrific violence (scalping), highlights the actual colonial violence that Gainsborough’s patrons carried out. Fruits of Belief further highlights the incompatibility of Western ideals with Western realities - equality, freedom, and pastoral fantasies against imperial violence, colonial plunder, rampant industrial growth, and climate change. It questions the Western ideal of permanent ‘progress’, highlighting the now-ubiquitous problems caused by new technologies, both in 1986 and now. Moreover, through the motif of the cornucopia, it critiques the idea of ‘plenty’ - under the inequalities of capitalism, ‘plenty’ exists only for the wealthiest, and any concessions given to the white Euro-American working class are taken by force from colonies internal and external. Finally, Fruits of Belief asks viewers to critically consider their relationships with nature and the land - how one’s mind might shuffle the two aside while their destructive way of life (on stolen land, no less!) continues to wreak havoc.
These notions of shock, identity, rupture, violence - and all the ways they are intertwined - coalesce most strongly in Crack (2000), a 3-minute video work. In it, Noguchi - in traditional Japanese clothing - plays the role of assistant in a wild-west act, holding a chrysanthemum branch. Out of nowhere, the thunderous crack of a bullwhip rings out - the sound reminds one of a gunshot - and the chrysanthemums (incidentally, the national flower of Japan) explode, struck down with incredible violence. The sequence then repeats, and it is no easier to watch a second time - the writer can attest that although she knew the crack was coming, it still made her wince. The contrast between the bullwhip of the ‘Wild West’ and the traditional symbols of Japan calls to mind not only the internment of Japanese-Americans (and Japanese-Canadians!) during the Second World War but also the inferno that America inflicted upon Japan towards the end of that war, culminating in two atomic bombings. Crack highlights the violence with which identities are established and normalized, as though they had always been the case. That is not all. Through the specific sound of a whip, Crack also invokes the horrors of chattel slavery. The blast rings in one’s ears, reminding viewers of the enduring traumas and effects caused by such violence. Furthermore, Noguchi’s identity as a woman is also significant - placing the utmost trust in the person with the whip, she holds the flowers each time. Viewers see her face, the deep V-neck of her robe, and her arm. The person holding the whip, however, is faceless. His masculinity can be implied through the traditional view of the ‘Wild West’ - an image of a romanticized ‘macho’ cowboy who serves to hide the incredible violence against Black, Indigenous, and Chicano-Mexicano peoples carried out by ‘frontier’ settlers in those days, all in the name of the US government and Manifest Destiny. Pivoting back to womanhood, how ‘trusting’ can Noguchi really be when she is not the one holding the whip? Does she have a choice, under the cis-hetero-patriarchal regime of sexual oppression? This question, like so many other ones Selected Works asks, can be extended outwards to any oppressed peoples. Yet while Crack highlights the American culture of hypermasculinized and racialized violence, it also represents resistance and tenacity. The flowers fall, but they rise again.
In the face of doom, Noguchi tries to continue living, as many did. In fact, she stands firm and unmoving, locating and anchoring herself within the maelstrom. She faces the faceless executioner proudly. Throughout Selected Works, Noguchi implores the viewer to do the same; to look past stereotypes, simulations, and so-called universal ideals in order to understand the violence that brought these things about - to find themselves, and beyond that, perhaps to resist.