Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony at The Noguchi Museum

Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony at The Noguchi Museum

Through Sunday, July 24, 2016 The Noguchi Museum’s 30th-anniversary programming is marked with an installation by Tom Sachs. This major exhibition is the first at the Museum to present work by a single artist other than Noguchi. The exhibition focuses on an immersive environment representing Sachs’ reworking of chanoyu, or traditional Japanese tea ceremony—including the various components integral to that ritualistic ceremony.

Why Tom Sachs: Tea Ceremony at The Noguchi Museum? A Formal Proof in Noguchi’s Words

1. I believe in the true development of old traditions.
2. To be hybrid anticipates the future.
3. The future does not belong only to the futurists.
4. Nothing is new, but everything’s new.
5. I like the Japan that I know and want to know, not the Japan that is imposed upon me…I am not about today or yesterday, but only that which is useful to me. Many people live in Japan historically; I don’t.
6. I expect Japan to be the first country to take off as a whole into outer space!
7. Ultimately, I like to think, when you get to the furthest point of technology, when you get to outer space, what do you find to bring back? Rocks!
8. I don’t look at art as something separate and sacrosanct. It’s part of usefulness.
9. Consult NASA.
10. So that art might have the kind of authority that religions have had in getting people to respect and value their part of the earth.

From Noguchi.org: Among the large stone sculptures by Isamu Noguchi in the Museum’s indoor/outdoor galleries, Sachs has set a tea house in a garden accessorized with variations on lanterns, gates, a wash basin, a plywood airplane lavatory, a koi pond, an ultra HD video wall with the sublime hyper-presence of Mt. Fuji, a bronze bonsai made of over 3,600 individually welded parts, and other objects of use and contemplation. Sachs has also produced a complete alternative material culture of Tea—from bowls and ladles, scroll paintings and vases, to a motorized tea whisk, a shot clock, and an electronic brazier.

Supplementing the tea garden are three additional installations covering consummate examples of Sachs’ Tea tools, a brief history of Tea as it developed out of Sachs’ Space Program 2.0: MARS, and a small retrospective of the artist’s two decade–long career as a cultural hybridizer.

During the course of the exhibition, Tom Sachs and his friend and colleague in Tea, Johnny Fogg, will perform tea ceremony for two or three guests.