Unruly Cyborgs: The Relational Set Designs of Isamu Noguchi

Abstract

The modern is the frictionful boundary where the body encounters mechanization. As such, the modern raises questions of how bodies move within this industrial logic—how and when do they transgress this boundary? Do they control, or are they controlled by, the systematic arrangement of objects and spaces in their environment? Artists and thinkers working across sculpture, architecture, dance, and informatics all contended with these questions in the 20th century. Norbert Wiener, a founder of cybernetics, expressed concerns about mechanization’s effect on human subjectivity even as he worked to advance the synthesis of humans and machines. Karl Marx wrote about the subordination of individual subjects to the industrial apparatus, “converting the workman into a living appendage of the machine.” Isamu Noguchi’s collaboration with Martha Graham presents a cybernetic counter-narrative, using frustration as a tool of resistance. The set designs produced by this sculptor-dancer partnership delineate hostile terms of behavior at the human-object interface that frustrate the seamless, symbiotic narrative of perfect cybernetic union. Considered in the context of industrial political economy, this innate hostility—unruliness, delinquency, chaoticness— designed into the form and arrangement of his sculptures subverts the mechanization of human labor and resists alienation under capitalism.