On Gardens as Sculpture

Isamu Noguchi On Gardens as Sculpture

"I like to think of gardens as sculpturing of space: a beginning, and a groping to another level of sculptural experience and use: a total sculpture space experience beyond individual sculptures. A man may enter such a space: it is in scale with him; it is real. An empty space has no visual dimension or significance. Scale and meaning enter when some thoughtful object or line is introduced. This is why sculptures, or rather sculptural objects, create space. Their function is illusionist. The size and shape of each element is entirely relative to all the others and the given space. What may be incomplete as sculptural entities are of significance to the whole.

Such sculpture is eliminative, it is neither this nor that but a thing in space that affects of consciousness --a node in the void -- without content related to or derived from anything exterior to its purpose -- in effect subliminal. These sculptures form what I call a garden, for want of a better name.

Its viewing is polydirectional. Its awareness is in depth. With the participation of mobile man all points are central. Without a fixed point of perspective all views are equal, continuous motion with continuous change. The imagination transforms this into a dimension of the infinite."

http:// www. noguchi.org/intextall.html#gardens

The above text is excerpted from Isamu Noguchi, A Sculptor's World (New York and Evanston: Harper  Row, 1968)