Masaaki Noda: The Spirit of Hermes (Catalogue Essay – Marathon, Greece)
By Annie Wharton, Los Angeles, California, 2010
“All of Noda’s
works in fact involve purposive design and free flow, fused to suggest heroic
determination and the timeless Tao.” – Donald Kuspit
The resolute determination Kuspit refers to is reflected
in The Spirit of Hermes, a monumental
gift Masaaki Noda has given to the city of Marathon, Greece. Via passion and
feeling in his work, the artist seems to quote the raw emotion of Abstract
Expressionist icons like Wassily Kandinsky or Jackson Pollock, while there also
exists in his creative output a sensibility similar to mid-century Lyrical
Abstractionists. Upon closer look,
however, highly polished surfaces and stylized, precisely machined lines reveal
a delicate contradiction by use of a streamlined, Modernist approach to
methodology. Each work is meticulously crafted and each sculptural component
purposefully positioned, thereby rendering emotionality almost irrelevant.
Born in the aftermath of nuclear destruction in Hiroshima,
Japan in 1949, Noda as a young artist moved to New York in 1977. He has since
produced important works and exhibitions throughout the world and developed a
sensitive East/West dialectic along the way. His bird-like sculptural flames
reach high into the atmosphere, bringing to mind a variety of references -- the
contemplative sculptures of Brancusi, Los Angeles low-rider automobiles painted
with airbrushed flaming iconography, and Tang dynasty-era Chinese ribbon
dancing. This fluid commingling of divergent artistic styles and materials reveal
Noda’s dichotomous approach to working with extremely heavy materials like
steel or marble with the thoughtful sensitivity of a Japanese Sumi painter.
Losing their excessive weight via careful choreography, hard and heavy media
become airy and light as his forms dance and emanate the infinite gesture of
time.
The Spirit of Hermes, his newest public art piece,
installed at the starting point for the Olympic marathon, succinctly brings
Noda’s stylistic production to contemporary society. Hermes (also referred to
by the Romans as “Mercury”), in addition to being Zeus’ herald and the patron
of Greek gymnastic games, was the multi-talented god of animal husbandry,
roads, travel, hospitality, heralds, diplomacy, trade, thievery, language,
writing, persuasion, cunning wiles, astronomy, and astrology. He wore winged
boots and sometimes a winged cap that he used to fly between the mortal and
immortal worlds, and Noda alludes to this flight with arching spontaneity and
grace that traces the ludic gestural prehension of infinity.
In ancient Greece, boundary marking stones called “Hermai”
were square pillars carved with ithyphallic images of Hermes and served as
rural markers erected at crossroads and in gymnasia as apotropes for good luck.
The speed and virility of Hermes’ legend is reified through Noda’s sleek and
sexy modalities, and the sculpture particularly resonates by virtue of its
placement where many athletes begin their heroic 42.195 kilometer journey.
Noda’s formalist approach shows the artist as a maker of
objects whose aspirations supersede the thing as end in its self. Rather, Noda
engages a reunification of techne and poiesis—the art and craft of bringing
forth....
In Noda's Formalism one is reminded of Plato, who posed
“eidos” as the “theory of forms,” a theory to resist the natural cycle of
decay. Plato's resolve was to counter the notion amongst his contemporaries
concerning the perceived problems with material flux and the affection of
ideas, and posited that ideas exist apart from the material world and within
the continuous unbroken line of inherited knowledge, thereby causing ideas to
become durable—simply put, physical objects decay where as ideas endure. However,
as much as western civilization has traditionally desired the sustainable, we
can also view this wanton superiority of the head over the hand with a grain of
salt. For as much as this sort of philosophical tradition might seem
anachronistic, we have come to view the necessity of the artist hand to remind
us of changing minds.
In viewing The
Spirit of Hermes, one also encounters Heidegger’s concept that the
fundamental temporalizing structures of human experience [relational totality]
are not staid idealized forms, but in a state of constant historical flux (and
are thus not fixed and universal).
The reflective attributes in Noda's work makes the viewer
an intrinsic component to the overall visual experience; the mirror-like
stainless steel adds the observer to the equation and gives greater
dimensionality and depth. The act of seeing the sculpture outdoors in Marathon
changes infinitely—weather conditions, time of day or night, angle or distance
from the artwork, even the height of the person looking, have the potential to
change the meaning and perception of the piece. This myriad of ways to see a
work of art ultimately creates a unique encounter for each viewer/participant
in Masaaki’s interactive endeavor.
