Sculpture to Be Seen From Mars, 1947
A ten-mile-long earthwork depicting an abstract human face, Noguchi’s Sculpture to Be Seen From Mars was, as the artist himself once put it, “a requiem for all of us who live with the atomic bomb” and alternatively “a flight of the imagination.” Prompted by the World War II atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which horrified Noguchi—“he often spoke of his fear of atomic annihilation,” Hayden Herrera writes in Listening to Stone—he began thinking about end-of-mankind scenarios. “It was in 1945, wasn’t it, when we dropped the atomic bomb?” Noguchi once reflected. “All of us were concerned about our place on earth, and that it might be rather precarious.”
For Noguchi, the monumental work was intended to be “an eternal reminder to the rest of the solar system that the planet earth, seemingly bent on self-destruction, once had its civilizations,” writes Friedman in the Imaginary Landscapes catalogue, hailing it as the artist’s “most impressive memorial to the futility of war.” The work, as Friedman points out, was also Noguchi’s way of showing his respect and reverence for ancient and indigenous monumental forms, such as the pre-Columbian geometric earthworks in the Andes. “‘Earth sculpture’ is nothing new,” Noguchi said. “It’s just a new name for an old thing.”
The earthwork also connected to Noguchi’s ongoing interest in outer space and the cosmos. When the art critic Lucy Lippard asked Noguchi to use a photograph of the project in her 1983 book Overlay, paralleling contemporary art with prehistoric sites and symbols, Noguchi replied, “I recently saw a reproduction of a face which was found in the landscape of Mars taken by the Viking Satellite. I think it would be very appropriate to show this version along with mine. I have written to the Mars Research Laboratory asking for this image and will send it to you if you are interested.” The connection of rocks across the universe was not lost on the artist. “Ultimately,” Noguchi told Calvin Tomkins in The New Yorker in 1980, “I like to think that when you get to the furthest point of technology, when you get to outer space, what do you find to bring back? Rocks!”
An incredibly moving, visionary concept that, as Friedman notes, in many ways preceded the land art and conceptual art movements that would emerge and flourish in the second half of the twentieth century, Noguchi’s memorial to mankind was intended for “some desert, some unwanted area.” It was, as the artist put it, “a sculpture just to be seen from the air so that, when you come to a landing, you will see the sculpture there.” That Noguchi was concurrently working on the Jefferson National Expansion Memorial suggests he was balancing both a belief in America’s future technological prospects and an acknowledgment of the bleak potential for mankind to destroy the planet and itself. Sculpture to Be Seen From Mars is today only memorialized in a single photograph of a model Noguchi had formed out of sand.
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