Tending the Garden

I was initially skeptical of the press release I received for In Praise of Caves, the Noguchi Museum’s latest exhibition. “As the climate crisis accelerates, along with other terrifying signs that we have fundamentally and perhaps irreparably broken our relationship with nature,” it read, “these artists’ visions have never been more relevant.” Grandiose claims are typical of press releases, but this one hit a nerve. As the climate crisis accelerates, it has seemed to me that art exhibitions are losing, rather than gaining, relevance; that meditating on beauty and abstractions in the midst of disaster is as absurd as tending to your garden while your house is on fire.

I’ve been in this state of mind for a long time, leaden with premature grief for everything that has ever excited me about being alive. Though it’s possible that this is a personal problem of mine, related to my history of serotonin deficiency, increasingly it appears that existential dread has come to define this century—in op-ed after op-ed, nihilism is either embraced or succumbed to. “It’s so soothing to conclude that nothing matters,” Emma Beddington declared recently in the Guardian. Back in 2019, Jonathan Franzen posed a provocative question in a piece for The New Yorker, titled “What if We Stopped Pretending?” “I am talking, of course, about climate change,” he wrote, and went on to dismiss the naïveté of those who foster any hope that our world is still salvageable.

Hailing from Mexico, the artists making a case for optimism at the Noguchi Museum are Mathias Goeritz, Juan O’Gorman, Carlos Lazo, and Javier Senosiain. Through figurative and literal approaches to the ennobling possibilities of cave dwelling, they ask: What if we rekindled our connection to the earth by inhabiting it? In conversation with the museum’s permanent collection, sculptures, paintings, models, and architectural plans turn the space into “a subterranean environment as a metaphor for contemplating and reassessing our place in the world.”

I made my way there in low spirits on a particularly cold November morning. When I arrived, I was fittingly met with a fullscale exhibition copy of Mathias Goeritz’s sculpture El Eco Serpent, described by the artist as “a fever chart” meant to “express the anguish of man in the universe.” Originally presented in Mexico City in 1953, here the enormous black zigzag rips its way through Noguchi’s rock garden, overpowering the normally serene atmosphere. But rather than acting as a portent, this snake, as Dakin Hart, the museum’s senior curator, explained to me, represents a guide and surrogate to the cavernous realms exalted throughout the exhibit, which hinges on the utopian premise that there are not so many humans in the world now as to make a return to caves infeasible.

Quixotic thinking is purposely at the center of In Praise of Caves. Goeritz himself insisted that “all this architecture is an experiment” at the opening of the El Eco museum, where the Serpent was first unveiled. “It doesn’t want to be more than this,” he said. “An experiment with the aim of creating again, within modern architecture, psychic emotions for man.[…]” Perhaps as an affront to the sterile functionalism coming out of Europe, this predilection for an emotional architecture that veered toward mysticality was particularly strong in twentieth-century Mexico. Absent from this show but inherently implicit in any review of Mexican modernism is Luis Barragán, who once declared shadows to be “a basic human need.”

The work of Juan O’Gorman, a contemporary of Barragán who began his career as an architect of functionalist homes and ended as a painter of surreal landscapes, is also on display here. Surrounded by his intricate drawings, at the center of a small room, sits a strikingly realistic model of Casa O’Gorman, the house he began building in 1948 and inhabited for two decades. (It was sold in 1969 and later destroyed by its second owner.) A half bubble, formed by lava after the eruption of the Xitle volcano in southern Mexico City, became the cave in which most of the house sat, a gesture of, in O’Gorman’s words, “protest against the prevailing architectural fashion in Mexico today that manifests itself in the box-shaped buildings and glass crates of the so-called International Style.”

In Issue 44 of n+1, the literary magazine’s editors ask, “Why Is Everything So Ugly?” “We live in undeniably ugly times,” they argue, amid “an ocean of stuff so homogenous and underthought that the world it has inundated can feel like a digital rendering—of a slightly duller, worse world.” This isn’t a novel sentiment. Already in the mid-twentieth century that we now look back on with nostalgia, O’Gorman perceived a homogenized ugliness in the built environment and blamed it on humanity’s hostility toward nature. Within the hall of the museum that harbors his visions, it was impossible for me to ignore that his lurid illustrations as well as his cave house were battle cries in a war that he waged until his death by suicide, in 1982.

Outside of O’Gorman’s hall is the work of Javier Senosiain, displaying the levity that has cast him as nonserious among many of his contemporaries. At seventy-four years old, he is the leading proponent of organic architecture in Mexico. The second enormous snake in the show, this one Senosiain’s, is wholly unlike Goeritz’s jagged beast. It is glossy and sinuous; it is enchanting, not menacing. Wrapped in a colorful mosaic, the serpent is representative of Senosiain’s playful aesthetic and repudiation of ninety-degree angles, which don’t exist in the womb and therefore should not exist, he reasons, in architecture. Models of his projects, some realized and some not, are shown next to the sculpture, solid declarations that organic architecture can transcend experimentation to become concrete, functional, and perhaps even permanent.

Speaking to Senosiain over Zoom after my visit to the museum, I wasn’t convinced that buildings should always mimic the curves of nature, or that inhabiting caves is the ultimate panacea for humanity’s modern troubles. I wondered, though, what the world would look like if more of us refused to be paralyzed by dread, or even just what my own life would be like if I met small exhibitions that court utopia with hope instead of skepticism. Later that week I attended an event where Rebecca Solnit spoke of her book Orwell’s Roses. Orwell was a staunch antifascist and, it turns out, also dedicated much of his life to planting and caring for rosebushes, which served no practical purpose. Using that as a metaphor for the climate crisis, Solnit reminded the audience that no form of activism can be sustained without the constant cultivation of a love for beauty and humanity. If art makes life endurable, it can’t be frivolous, so tending to a garden is never absurd.