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.