T.T I-A 002 | Listening to the Voices of Relics, the Garden of Applied Archaeology
Isamu Noguchi's stone garden《Heaven》
December 22 to 29, 2024
The setting for the second part of "T.T I-A (Institute of Archaeology)" was the stone garden 《Heaven》 (1977 to 78), which Isamu Noguchi designed together with Kenzo Tange. The relics Takahashi had gathered, vintage clothing from the early 1900s, and his own works were placed within it, rebuilding 《Heaven》 as "the garden of Applied Archaeology."
Listening to the voice of stone
Noguchi was one of the artists who most strongly shaped Takahashi, who had himself worked on stone sculpture at the atelier of Masatoshi Izumi. As Noguchi's words go, "when you face natural stone, the stone begins to speak." A dialogue with stone means listening not only to its material qualities, but also to the time the stone has lived through. To learn the philosophy of those who came before through relics, and to connect this to the making of the future: this too is where the heart of Applied Archaeology lies.
Sculpture《Celestial Robes of Time》
《Celestial Robes of Time》, placed in the stone garden, grew out of the drapery of the standing Taishakuten statue (Tenpyo to Kamakura periods) at Akishinodera. Takahashi had long been drawn to the drapery of cloth that appears in sculpture and painting across all times and places. The folds of the "draped robe" of ancient Greece were signs that showed wealth and social status. Over time, beyond eras and regions, they connected to the drapery folds of Buddhist statues, growing into a universal motif that brings forth "majesty" and "dignity."
The starting point was the robe fragment from the standing Kudatsu Bosatsu statue (Tenpyo period) at Akishinodera in Nara, which Takahashi owned. He traced the fragment through 3D scanning, drew up sketches with his own interpretation added, and then had these crafted into stone sculpture and cast bronze. To trace the folds was also to touch the very idea of what richness meant to people in ancient times.
Vintage clothing
At the core of the garden was the vintage clothing collection. Garments from Britain, France, and the United States from the 1910s through the 1950s, which were the starting point of Takahashi's creative work, were arranged by genre and era. From here, the process by which three dimensional clothing slowly flattened into simpler patterns after the Industrial Revolution rises into view.
Sabi of the Bamboo Window
On the second floor, the show presented Takahashi's representative work 《In Praise of Shadows》, which focused on the drapery of sculpted figures, alongside "Sabi of the Bamboo Window," a rebuilding of the tea room "Sabi" within T.T made in collaboration with the Sogetsu school.
《In Praise of Shadows》 is a work in which Takahashi built the original form himself by soaking sailcloth in plaster and laying it onto a canvas with the folds intact. The canvas, which as a support for painting is meant to hide its own material quality, instead gathered folds to bring forth shadow. Starting from the drapery of sculpture, the work fixed not the folds themselves, but the shadows the folds produce. For this exhibition, the two pieces closest to the original form were on display.
"Sabi of the Bamboo Window" took its inspiration from the bamboo tea space that Hiroshi Teshigahara, third generation grand master of the Sogetsu school, built for the great tea gathering in Paris in 1993. The shitajimado, a window design that turns bamboo into the motif of the window, casts a distinctive shadow inside the tea room. Teshigahara is said to have chosen this material because he found a strong life force in bamboo, which holds up under the weight of snow. Stone, by contrast, is the buildup of long time, a material that stands for the past and for death. As the stone garden on the first floor and "Sabi of the Bamboo Window" on the second floor answered each other, the cycle of life and death rose up, and the garden of Applied Archaeology, where relics of the past circulate into the future, was completed here.
