By Objects of Common Interest

Introduction
By Dakin Hart, Senior Curator (2013–23)

Maybe you lay on a rock by the shore, or in a sunbeam on the floor of your room. You were young, just coming into conscious being. You closed your eyes, turned your face to the sun, and let the wave of warmth flow through you. For a moment your mass became energy.

Who would you be and what would you expect from the pitiless waste of existence if you had not been that sort of child? Had you not drunk life from the source? Been baptized in light? Had the opportunity to learn what it means to be at once nothing and part of everything?

To those who are open, some environments have that potency: the power to suffuse and alter our core matter. There are as many names for this as there are ways to think and talk about it. But the search for such experiences of place is why many of us travel: looking to be marked. There are minds with the force and consistency to burn through and remake us too. If we’re lucky, maybe we have a few such encounters in a lifetime.

Greece, and all that the word connotes about how we absorb history, culture, and place, is one of those nexuses. For some, Noguchi’s way of thinking—an ocean of clarity worth drowning for—is another.

Objects of Common Interest

As Greek designers and architects living and working in New York we share with Noguchi the in-betweenness of two worlds. Our cultural split, like his, lies within the essence of our work. We have long been intrigued by Noguchi and have informally researched him for some time. A few years ago, our interest became more formal when we began talking with The Noguchi Museum. With the publication of the Museum’s archives online, we gained access, along with the rest of the world, to the specific information we needed to make sense of our intuitive connections.

As Noguchi’s friend R. Buckminster Fuller wrote, “Isamu traveled on and on … as the intuitive artist precursor of the evoluting, kinetic one-town world man.”¹ Noguchi first became acquainted with Greece through the classical myths his writer mother read to him and later on through his own travels. As Noguchi told it, “I started a custom of stopping in Greece on my various trips to and from Japan. There I had found a worker who could block out simple forms in Penteli marble which I could work on later in New York.”²

This feature unfolds the significant connection between Noguchi and Greece that goes well beyond the artist’s quest for the country’s magical white marble, tapping into the transformative relationship between him, the place, and its people. A place he was initially introduced to through mythology but later discovered so personally that he once described it as his “intellectual home.”³

“Isamu [has] always been inherently at home—everywhere,”⁴ Fuller explained. Living and working between East and West, with a dual identity and a borderless freedom, he was intuitively receptive, continuously absorbing inspiration and abstract references that sculpted his work and personality in a unique, unparalleled way.

Through a creative and investigative approach, we have combined an amalgam of information, experiences, and moments in time into this interpretative documentation, which allows the reader to embark on a nondirected, visual journey inspired by Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi, which Noguchi carried with him. Of Greece, Miller wrote:

Noguchi in Greece

“I think of Greece with greatest fondness and would like to visit there again as I used to during the ’50s when I would get marble from a dealer there. There was a group with a gallery–they had a magazine in which I was reproduced, and my friend Nata Melas who married the architect who did all those lovely places for tourists, and there was Mr. Kapralos, and of course during the early times, Kiriokos Ghika and his wife who I took to an Italian opera.”⁶

Noguchi traveled frequently and was introduced to Greece’s creative and intellectual scene during his visits, creating strong friendships and bonds. He exchanged correspondence with many of the friends that he made until his death in December 1988. On his last trip to Greece in the summer of 1988 he had attended the Delphi Conference at the personal invitation of the curator Katerina Koskina.

Presented here in a visual collage are letters, photographs, and notes related to the network of people that surrounded Noguchi while in Greece, alongside works of Greek artists and elements that seduced and captivated Noguchi under the Greek light. Together these offer a framework for introducing and understanding the context within which Noguchi circulated.

Greece Within Noguchi

“I believed in Apollo and the Gods of Olympus before I knew of any other.”¹²

Archaic figures, standing columns, marble paved paths, recalling childhood memories and feelings surfacing upon facing places for the first time, the sight of untouched landscapes under the bright sun and light breeze, myths and history, poems and haiku. These are some of the notions, elements, experiences, and ideas that shaped Noguchi’s impression of Greece, and which he would continually draw on and translate in his own artistic work.

Tracing Noguchi

Throughout the duration of this research, we have had the opportunity to take a step back and see our own work—which has always been driven by intuition, creative and conceptual curiosity, and material investigation—through a personal critical lens. 

Noguchi has been a reference for us not only because of the diversity of his work, and because he never accepted the confines of borders and creative limits, but also because of his open-mindedness, and how motivated he was by inspiration. Since our earliest days in New York, The Noguchi Museum has been a sanctuary for our creative meditations.

As our work has matured and our exploration expanded in scale, from objects to installations to architecture and space-creation, we have connected more with our Greek roots and have naturally turned to blending notions of our history, memory, and experiences in an abstract way. Here too Noguchi has provided many hints and signposts. As we investigated, it became almost essential to express how our study of Noguchi has affected our quest for abstraction. Noguchi’s impact on us is not unlike that of the Greek landscape, sun, and culture: not in any direct way related to formal expression, but the essential backdrops to our journey. 

Through photography, a subject becomes an object in a new world. With that in mind, we invited a number of international photographers, in whose work we see an interest in the notions and values that we have tried to attribute to Noguchi and Greece in this feature, into a creative dialogue. We gave them complete freedom to interpret our work in relation to Henry Miller’s The Colossus of Maroussi, which Noguchi carried with him on his initial travels through Greece. We provided them with the following excerpts, which to us signify freedom and a familiar feeling of a first encounter with Greece.

Marco Arguello

Marble Mirror

Iwan Baan

Opal Bent Stool

Yannis Bournias

Relativity

Lauren Coleman

Offerings

Brian Ferry

Layer Mirrors

Adrianna Glaviano

Formations

Brooke Holm

Tube Chair

Naho Kubota

Tube Lights

Mathjis Labadie

Acrylic Bent Stool

Jana Romanova

Side Tables

Omar Sartor

Daydream

Matthieu Salvaing

Layer Stool

Stefanos Tsakiris

Hunky Dory

Eleni Petaloti and Leonidas Trampoukis are Objects of Common Interest (OoCI), a studio operating within the realms of art, design, and architecture, blending projects in scale, from objects and installations to interactive immersive environments and interior spaces. Eleni and Leonidas received their academic education at Aristotle University in Greece and Ecole Supérieure d’Architecture de La Villette in Paris. They both hold master’s degrees in architecture from Columbia University in New York. They are also founding partners of the sibling studio LOT office for architecture. Objects of Common Interest focuses on creating still-life installations and experiential environments and objects, with an emphasis on materiality, concept, and tangible spatial experiences. OoCI aims to create projects that balance in time between the long-lasting and the ephemeral, and objects whose creative approach stems from an abstract realm enriched with layers of conceptual readings: moments of unfamiliar simplicity, sculptural and material self-expression, structural articulation. The work is rooted in an amalgamation of thinking and making between two diverse poles, Greece and New York, switching between the formal and the intuitive, embracing the handmade and the tactile, the experimental and the poetic. Leonidas and Eleni share a common vision in flowing seamlessly through interdisciplinary practices, focusing on concepts that blur the boundaries between the artistic and the pragmatic, between form and abstraction, merging their backgrounds in architecture and art.

The exhibition Objects of Common Interest: Hard, Soft, and All Lit Up with Nowhere to Go was on view at The Noguchi Museum from September 15, 2021 through February 13, 2022. The related publication Noguchi and Greece, Greece and Noguchi is published by Atelier Éditions / D.A.P. 

Feature produced by Alex Miller.

Transcripts of archival materials are available by request to accessibility@noguchi.org.

¹  R. Buckminster Fuller, Foreword in Isamu Noguchi: A Sculptor’s World (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2015), 7.

² Noguchi, A Sculptor’s World, 35.

³ Isamu Noguchi, interview by Catherine Frantzeskakis, “The American-Japanese Sculptor Isamu Noguchi Talks about Greece,” Zygos (Libra) 17 (March 1957): 9. Translated by Daphne Kapsali. Courtesy of Aikaterini and Ion Frantzeskakis.

⁴ Fuller, Foreword, A Sculptor’s World, 7.

⁵ Henry Miller, The Colossus of Maroussi (New York: New Directions, 2010), 41.

⁶ Isamu Noguchi, letter to Zissimos Lorenzatos, July 5, 1979. The Noguchi Museum Archives, MS_COR_002_008.

⁷ Isamu Noguchi, interview by Freddy Germanos, “A Famous Sculptor in Athens,” Eleftheria (Liberty), February 20, 1958. Translated by Daphne Kapsali.

⁸ Isamu Noguchi, letter to Zissimos Lorenzatos, July 5, 1979. The Noguchi Museum Archives, MS_COR_002_008.

⁹ Isamu Noguchi, letter to Zissimos Lorenzatos, December 26, 1969. Zissimos Lorenzatos Archive, National Bank of Greece, Cultural Foundation/Hellenic Literary and Historic Archives (NBGCS/HLHA). Courtesy of Stephanos Troupakis (The Estate of Zissimos Lorenzatos).

¹⁰ Noguchi, “A Famous Sculptor in Athens.”

¹¹ Ibid.

¹² A Sculptor’s World, 12.

¹³ Isamu Gilmour (Noguchi), “The Greeks and Socrates,” 1922, high school essay. The Noguchi Museum Archives, MS_WRI_001_003.

¹⁴ A Sculptor’s World, 11.

¹⁵ Ibid.

¹⁶ Ibid., 29.

¹⁷ Noguchi, “A Famous Sculptor in Athens.”

¹⁸ Noguchi, “The American-Japanese sculptor Isamu Noguchi Talks about Greece,” 9.