Museum of Stones grew initially out of the artist Jimmie Durham’s critique of sculpture and architecture as stone denaturing regimes that advance the Western European notion that we need to establish impenetrable bulwarks against time, nature and each other. Much of Durham’s work aims to restore to stone some of the capriciousness, liveliness, transience and impressionability it exhibits in nature. The exhibition is an attempt to fuse Durham’s critique with an appreciation for the ways in which rock and stone act as barometers of civilization and its disconnects. Noguchi believed, as the Japanese tend to, that rock and stone have a lifecycle they should be allowed to experience in full, but he also recognized rock and stone as the seminal raw materials of technology and believed deeply in their use.

Noguchi learned to square a block of marble—and then to transform it into an abstract icon of Modernism—from Constantin Brancusi, the high priest of command and control carving, and he ended his career, at least in one of his many modes, as something closer to a process artist: not conjuring images from stone but exploring materials, often through processes at some remove from his own hand. It’s not that he gave one approach up for another so much as that he allowed different paradigms to accumulate, complicating his thinking and his work, over time.

His ambivalence is encompassed by one definition of the semantic difference between rock and stone: nature makes rocks; we make stones. If all goes to plan, the exhibition will create a series of boundary layers in which rocks and stones are difficult to differentiate from each other.

Museum of Stones is the first exhibition in the Museum’s history to insert the work of contemporary artists into the original Noguchi installation. As well as sculptures by Noguchi there are over fifty works by thirty major international artists, including Mel Bochner, Dove Bradshaw, Bruce Conner, Jimmie Durham, Ian Hamilton Finlay, Jochen Gerz, Janine Antoni, Gabriel Orozco, Bosco Sodi, Keith Sonnier, Stephanie Syjuco, Toshiko Takaezu, Lawrence Weiner, and Tarek Zaki. There are stones from the ancient fortifications of Jerusalem, rocks used by mathematicians (the Latin word calculus means a small pebble used for counting) and fifteen Chinese rock-related objects on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, including scroll paintings dating from the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries.