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Chicago Daily News

Largest Evening Circulation in Chicago and Suburbs

Monday, Dec. 7, 1959 ** Tel. DEa

How Tollwa
Bite Colle

Winner of Art Prize Tries to Explain 'Self'

Iron Figure's Message Somehow Escapes Reporter

BY WILLIAM F. MOONEY

Remember that chunk of scrap iron that won a prize last week over at the Art Institute show? And the editorial we had asking the artist just what the heck it meant?

Don't laugh too much. The artist picked up a gold medal and two grand - that's dollar sign two comma oh-oh-oh - for it.

Well I finally got hold of Isamu Noguchi, the artist. He was down in Texas for a few days, but is now back in New York.

I ASK him about this pile of rusty iron. He calls it "The Self," but it looks like a big doughnut that got flattened, then came down with burps.

[[image]
WILLIAM MOONEY
[[image]]
ISAMU NOGUCHI

At first I think he's giving me the double talk.

"'The Self' is one's self," he says. "Everyone has a 'self.' You Have. I have. We may not be proud of it, but we have it.

"I tried to express how one protects one's 'self.' It's the basic primitive primordial self that we instinctively protect."


AS FAR as I can figure this out, you're not like me, and I'm not like you. You may not like it, but that's the way the martinis were mixed and you can't do much about it.

"From 'The Self' we get words such as 'selfishness' and 'self love,' for instance," he says.

"We instinctively protect and also have a kind of smug and complacent quality about the 'self,' too. The rings (he meant the burps) are like the arms with which one embraces one's 'self,'

"It's reasonable that we tend to protect our 'selfs.' We value our 'selfs.' We may not have much to value, but we value it."

THEN, in all seriousness, he tells me he "tried" to make that chunk of iron "slightly humorous, you might say."

That's so we won't take ourselves too seriously-Not "The Self," or our "selfs," if you are getting the message, but "ourselves."

I asked him if he ran out of iron and had to leave the middle empty.

"Not at all," he says. " The hollowness shows that for all of our protectiveness for 'the self,' it is a mockery."

THEN HE throws me the punch line.

[[image]]
THE SELF 
It depends on how the martinis were mixed. 

"It's hard for me to explain what I meant," he says. "Why don't you put my explanation in your own words to explain the message?"

Believe me, if there's a message in that three-foot refugee from the scrap pile, it wasn't delivered to me.

All I know is that Noguchi days it is not a self portrait, and it was not necessarily intended to be flattering.

That part I got.