2004 -2003- 2001 - 2000 - 1999 - 1989 - 1988
dArt International Winter 2004
Drawing Conclusions-Work by Artist-Critics NY Gallery December 12, 2003 - January 13, 2004
Curated by Jill Conner and Gae Savannah
"Alastair Noble’s sculpture is literally poetry. His drawing is shaped by a few lines of Mallarmé’s poem, Un Coup de Des. With the cut-out strips, the spare words of the poem, and the quadrangular shapes, the sails of sloops, the milky nebulous with space of the Japanese rice paper gently expands, enveloping us in the mist of timelessness. Likewise, Noble uses language verbally to laud Christopher Wilmarth’s use of aqua glass and light to compose physical poetry."
- An excerpt by Gae Savannah
The Brooklyn Free Press 'What's Going On' in DUMBO
21st Annual Outdoor Sculpture Show Set To Open This Weekend - July 18-July 24, 2003
"Perhaps the most scholarly, formal piece in the show, and one of the least
connected to a personal narrative is Alastair Noble's "Brooklyn
Bridge/Mayakovsky." Set at a sandy end of the park, with the full stretch
of the Brooklyn Bridge draped behind it, Noble's sculpture echoes the bridge's
structure. It also, at least ostensibly, celebrates the bridge's history.
Noble spreads a five-page-long poem, "Brooklyn Bridge, " (a 1925 ode by Russian constructivist poet Mayakovsky) across five, nearly ten-foot-tall, wire mesh panels, fanned and held aloft by steel cables. Instead of words though, Noble prints the poem as black rectangles of lengths and spacing corresponding to the original Russian text on the page.
The lines "I too will spare no words/about good things," become six black rectangles of varying lengths, and below them, a set of three rectangles of about the same length. IN other words, in Noble's work, you would never identify Mayakovsky without taking a hint from the sculpture's title and holding up the printed poem for comparison." - An excerpt by Abby Ranger
The Walton Reporter - Book is Sculpted...
"Blake Illuminated," a new sculpture by Alastair Noble of Andes, is in the
form of pages of a book, on which the first two poems of William Blake's
Songs of Experience, Introduction and The Earth's Answer are cut.
The actual text is represented by slits cut into Aluminum. During the day,
the sun's rays shine through the slits onto the bluestone, casting an image of
illuminated text on the foundation. The work by Noble, a Cornell
University professor, was made possible by a grant form the community arts
program of the state Council of the Arts, administered in Delaware County by the
Roxbury Arts Group, and may be seen next to the Andes Public Library. Dedication
of the sculpture will be held next fall.
L'ARCA, "Express Art from New York" Lattuada Gallery, Milan.
"The height of conceptuality is offered by the English artist Alastair Noble. What Noble really does, is he works on lines of verse, for instance on Mayakovsky, in the case of this exhibition. He transfers them to glass and the poetry is deleted by plays of shadows and reflections on the wall." - Carmelo Strano
Artforum International, Best of 2000 Critic Choice, Dec 2000 v39 i4 p112
"9 Alastair Noble
(Robert Pardo Gallery, New York) The sculptor leaned six large, thick panels of
glass against the wall, perching them
on shelves. Deep troughs were sandblasted
into the panels, corresponding to the way the lines and fragments of lines are
arrayed in Mallarmé's
Un Coup de
dés. The opaque thoughts, from which Noble had
entirely etched away any trace of language, were reflected as shadows on the
wall. This almost metaphysical use of glass, with its vocabulary of transparency
and translucency and its contrast between deep green edges and clear central
area, manages to escape the decorativeness that dogs the medium." - Arthur C.
Danto
Arthur C. Danto, a contributing editor of Artforum, is Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University and art critic for The Nation.
Sculpture - October 2000
Alastair Noble - Robert Pardo Gallery, New York - "Trans the e-void"
"As an artist given to architectonic structures that seek the fusion of mind
and body, Alastair Noble explores the theme in a recent exhibition at the small
but fashionable Pardo Gallery in West Chelsea. By searching out different
facets of the work of French Symbolist poet Stéphane
Mallarmé, Noble attempts to set forth an
intellectual (an emotional) bridge between extant sensibilities in avant-garde
art at the end of the 19th century and those burgeoning at the beginning of the
21st. Noble calls his exhibition "Trans...the e-void." one can gather from this cryptic title an association with the hermetic (and
hermeneutic) approach to art articulated and made manifest by Mallarmé.
Focusing specifically on his well-known poem, Un Coup de des (A Throw of the Dice), Noble draws attention to Mallarmé's concept that life and art are bound together by chance. Chance is the deciding principle that makes art function as a self-encapsulating entity, an entity perhaps different from the predetermined aspect of a capitalist culture. Hence, the shows title refers to chance and its opposite, predetermination. "Trans" is the linguistic signifier of motion, of being in a state of passage, or between things, object, or events; it is forever in a state of in-betweenness, a motion from one place or definition toward another.
Mallarmé was clearly prophetic of being in-between, but not necessarily in a condition of stasis. Neither in a hiatus nor in a quandary of suspension, Mallarmé was interested in the imminent modernity that would emerge out of the 19th century, the period in which capital would gain access to all walks of life. He foresaw the predetermined aspect of capitalism and its relationship to the Church, the bedrock of Western civilization. For the poet, the only refuge was to move from this assumption of predetermination toward hazard or chance, to embrace chance as the purpose and intention of art, and through chance to understand absence as a linguistic ploy, the structural means whereby language is decoded and given the perpetuity of signification.
Noble is interested in this absence. He is interested in how Mallarmé's chance connects with what he calls the e-void; that is, the state in which the predetermined effects of information-exchange draw a blank; that is, when signs begin to cancel one another out through the conditions of excess and speed. This is the reality (not the theory) of the postmodern condition. The centerpiece of the exhibition is a large white, pneumatically carved piece of marble, representing an open book, a book representing the absence of language, bearing only the inscription of Mallarmé's name, further suggesting a tombstone. A light has been inserted within the hollowed-out book, thus giving the translucent marble a presence of equanimity, the presence of absence. Tangential to this exquisite book-object (in fact, a component within Noble's installation) is a series of six plate-glass inscriptions all tilted on steel brackets fastened in two groups of three against one wall. The inscriptions are, in fact, the cancellations of language. Noble has replaced the words of Mallarmé's poem with etched bars. Given the way the plates of glass are tilted, the absence of language is reified in the form of shadows playing off the wall. Another folded piece of galvanized steel sitting on a wooden pedestal in the middle of the room, also reveals die-cut bars in the place of Mallarmé's language. On the opposite and front walls of the gallery, Noble attached indeterminate sheets of galvanized steel that suggest a flotation of pages flying through space, as if the pages of the poem had been set adrift.
There is further meaning. Noble, is trying to signify the e-void, the collapse of language through the cancellation of signs, the space in-between things, the state of transition in which language attempts to signify on the ruins of this cyber-breakdown of conventional codes.
The leap that Noble has taken is profoundly conceptual, yet exquisitely visual. This is one of the most elegant shows I have seen this season on the west side of town, a show that functions diagonally between the past and the present, between mind and mind, between time and space. It is a revelatory exegesis on mental space and opens the threshold for how mental space can manifest itself as spatial presence through the cancellation of conventional signs, the prescribed meaning of artistic representation." - Robert C. Morgan
"A Century Later" by Jane Mayo Roos from A Painters Poet; Stéphane Mallarmé and His Impressionist Circle
THROUGHOUT the twentieth century, Mallarmé’s poetry has continued to engage the imagination of visual artists. By way of closing our exhibition we have chosen two works to stand as representatives of this enduring phenomenon: Kathy Bruce's Comocion, Contusion y Comp1esion Ce1eb1ales (Cerebral Commotion, Contusion, and Compression, fig. 48) and Alastair Noble's Le Tombeau de Stéphane Mallarmé (The Tomb of Stéphane Mallarmé, fig. 49 ). Among the preoccupations of our century's avant-garde artists have been the questioning of idées reçues and the deconstruction of the boundaries that traditionally separated various art forms and mediums. As artists have combined techniques of painting, sculpture, and print-making in their works-and have conflated image and text, visual and verbal components- new concepts of the "art object" have emerged, so that it is often impossible to categorize a work as being only a painting, only a sculpture, or only a print- or, even, only a verbal or only a visual constellation of signs. Also among the changes of the past century has been the significance of the U.S. as a site for the making of avant-garde works. Thus, it seemed fitting to us, the organizers of this exhibition, to include works that would recognize, in synecdochic fashion, both of these developments, which were inherent in the work of Mallarmé. Whereas Un Coup de dés gave essential significance to the visual position of words on a page, and thus presaged the blending of art forms and mediums, Mallarmé’s embracement of the works of Edgar Allan Poe anticipated the later importance of works created in the U.S. by artists working in the English language.
Wife and husband, Bruce and Noble created these objects in 1998, to commemorate the centennial of Mallarmé’s death. The central element in Bruce's work consists of a nineteenth-century Spanish book, a found and random volume, into the center of which a rectangle has been cut, the book's pages being replaced with an inset wooden box. Within the box she has set a nineteenth-century engraving of sailing ships and a pair of old wooden dice, evoking themes that recur in Mallarmé’s poetry and directly referencing Un Coup de dés; and scraps of random Phrases cut from the book's original text and suggesting "the Chance" that "A throw of the dice will never abolish." The book is bound with threads, in the manner of a ship's rigging; and its spine bears the title Un Coup de dés, pieced and collaged together and pasted over the book's original title. The volume rests on white velvet, as if riding the waves of the sea, in a further evocation of Mallarmé’s poetry, in this case a line from Un Coup de dés: "au velours chiffonne par un esclaffement sombre/ cette blancheur rigide/ dérisoire" ("in the velvet crumpled by a burst of dark laughter/ this rigid whiteness/ mocking".
Thematically, Bruce's work and Noble's fit together with
remarkable complementarity. Both objects traverse and collapse the boundaries
between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, embedding the ideas and
materials of the one into the forms and frameworks of the other, although in
doing so the artists have utilized wholly different mediums and different
techniques. In Noble's work, a section of white marble, reminiscent of the
funerary monuments of the past, has been
carved
into the shape of a book and placed upon a wooden base. The marble has been
hollowed from the inside, its interior illuminated by fluorescent tubes. The
words Le Tombeau de Stéphane Mallarmé have been carved (sandblasted) onto
the open pages of the book, and the theme of the work commemorates and
perpetuates the "tomb" poems that Mallarmé wrote- "Le Tombeau d'Edgar Poe," "Le
Tombeau de Charles Baudelaire," and “Tombeau d’Anatole.” Dispersed across the
surface in the typographical manner of Un Coup de dés, these words seem
to float on a swelling sea, the object's wavelike forms suggesting both the
pages of a book and the undulating movement of currents and tides. While the
striations carved at the edges of the work enrich the idea of the object as
text, the marble's swirling dark patterns simultaneously invoke the medium's
materiality and assume the appearance of amorphous aqueous forms.
Sculpture
"Alastair Noble's Observatory Tower turned the room in which it was
placed into a sanctuary for 10th-century technology. The piece resembles
an ancient temple injected with the power of today-light and movement."
FlashArt
"Alastair Noble's transmutation of TV snow into waves of brain spirituality continues on a somewhat more eccentric and occult direction in his latest show. Noble's Observatory Tower No. 2 was shown in truncated form in a sculpture group show at White Columns last year. There, the roughness of the pace shot a bolt of extraterrestrial meaning through the standing reflection, giving them an alien edge. At that show, I saw a couple playfully lower their two-year old's head first into the TV embedded inside the hexagon: forever marking it as a font of electronic baptism. The reflectors set high and low about the central font create an aura in which the dangers of positive beauty are blurred and reduced to wobbly nebula in negative space. The rough floor and frontier spirit of White (Insert Photo) Columns accented the negative. Nerlino's floorboards were perhaps too cozy for that energy to be felt, but, come to think of it, Nerlino's polished space announced Noble's rebuff of futuristic readings: he now works the static through the intimate, appliance channels of life. Here the negativity and mystery of Observatory Tower infiltrated the inquisitive exchanges of strangers, and acquaintances. The uncertainties of status, of motive, fear, desire, and the questionings of human contact, all were preternaturally sensed within the range of its detectors.
Noble is also finding horizontal correlations to TV snow. In Homage to Nico a rather humanoid ceramic pipe translates TV static kinetically into a whirring air-duct helmet. In Aludel three ceramic pipes drip form away into gilded cooling woks set below. One wok is held up like a chalice on a piping that exposes TV static inside, a shape which suggests every sort of natural process, from sex to food, with a subtext of insomniac impotency tossing ambiguous curve balls. The TV static bleeds with the gilded receptor of such fears, a surrogate womb for a passion that never learned to talk, or walk, or love - just glow. This piece especially puts Noble's TV critics on notice: the static, having established its meaning in one area, aspires to world consciousness and will begin to invade all other outlets of civilization. A strange recontextualized replay of popular culture image echoed in my mind, seeing the invasive humor of Aludel. I peeked into the static TV set under gilt and wok, and though, "They're ba-ack." In this show, Noble breaks down the old hieratic housings, and brings his invasive powers - much slower to home." - Robert Mahoney
