Hero, filmmaker, and longtime greg.org reader Chris was surprised to realize that the hovering biomorphic forms of the screen elements of the set Isamu Noguchi made for the Martha Graham Dance Company’s 1950 production of Judith were affixed, not to chainlink fence after all, but to the much more delicate fishnet.
Unfortunately, when I clicked through to the Isamu Noguchi Collection, Catalogue Raisonné, and Archive to investigate further, I bound myself to some access agreement that strictly prohibits me from using any material from their collection without authorization from the Noguchi Museum, which also prohibited employees so strictly from wearing a keffiyeh [“bearing an abstract black-and-white fishnet pattern and the red and green colors of the Palestinian flag”] in support of Palestinian liberation, that it fired them.
I’d like to think if I were running the archive and museum of an artist who, after voluntarily incarcerating himself in a Japanese American detention camp, found out that oh wait what, what do you mean he could not just walk out when he wanted, I’d be a little more circumspect about dictating to visitors.
[s/o Bryan Hilley for the Noguchi Museum report that made direct mention of the keffiyeh’s fishnet origins.]