Millican Dalton: A Sublime Midlife Crisis
The relevance of a 20th century cave-dweller to environmental aesthetics.
Wednesday, 23 December 2020
At the mouth of the cave at Borrowdale, May 2020. Photograph: Lewis Eaton.
On a swelteringly hot day in the North Western Fells of The Lake District, the gaping mouth of a cave offered itself as a refuge and swallowed us mercifully into its cool damp interior. Caves are otherworldly places. This particular cave, set into the hillside of Castle Crag, allows you to peer out at the gently swaying trees and glimmering daylight of the outside world from a viewing point void of light and sound. The daytrip itself had been to seek refuge in The Lakes; an attempt at replacing the stagnancy of a locked-down city summer with a more welcome, less claustrophobic, kind of tranquillity. We spent a few minutes scrambling around on the siltstone, marvelling at the height of the cave walls and exchanging the obligatory comments about feeling small in big spaces. On leaving, I noticed a large, flat stone covered in scrawlings. At the centre in neat, deeply-etched letters read ‘Don’t Waste Words, Jump to Conclusions’ with dozens of smaller sections of writing surrounding this. Each gave names and dates, with many faded with age and dissolving back into the stone’s surface. It was from a frantic Googling during the car ride home that I came to find out we had happened across a sort-of pilgrimage place for hikers: the cave in which a man had lived out his summers for over forty consecutive years.
In 1904, at the age of thirty-six, Millican Dalton gave up his life as an insurance clerk in London in order to dedicate himself to The Great Outdoors. Having spent part of his childhood in Nenthead, the North Pennines, he found life and work in the capital stifling in comparison. From then on Dalton split his year, spending the summer months in the cave under Castle Crag and winters in a canvas hut in Buckinghamshire. Far from your conventional hermit, Dalton was an active and sociable member of the community. He organised camping excursions for the outdoors novice which included teaching hiking, rock climbing, rafting and how to forage for food. What I found extraordinary for the time was that these excursions didn’t exclude women, with one of Dalton’s advertisements for a mountaineering course stating his views bluntly: “Ladies are welcome to the camp. There is nothing new in ladies camping, the custom being at least 10,000 years old.” This rare indiscriminate approach led to Dalton forging a long-lasting friendship with geologist Mabel Barker, who over the years consistently recommended Dalton’s courses to women students and friends.
Dalton and Barker atop a needle, 1913. The Mable Barker Collection.
exhibition review
Noguchi
by Caroline Benedict | 10 November 2021
Noguchi exhibition, Barbican Art Gallery.
Red Lunar Fist, 1944, Magnesite, plastic, resin, electric components.
Floor Frame, 1962 (cast 1987), Bronze, gold patina.
The Noguchi exhibition unfolding at the Barbican Art Gallery pays tribute to the Japanese American artist Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988), in a rather free and unconventional manner, where sculpture meets design, through a unique narrative. Spread across the two floors of the gallery, Noguchi’s stone and metal sculptures interact with his delicate, gleaming akari lamps (traditional Japanese lights made of bamboo frame and washi paper), in contrast with the dimly lit and sturdy brutalist environment of the Barbican. Noguchi’s art works are dispersed across the gallery space, employing the floors, walls and ceiling in a creative and playful manner. Upon entering the gallery, visitors are confronted with a large amount of free-standing pieces and akaris of various shapes arranged loosely across the room. As part of this less formal approach, the curator restrained from using any labels next to the art works, relying on the exhibition brochure to provide a cataloguing of all exhibited objects.
Noguchi’s oeuvre is marked not only by its interdisciplinary scope – including sculpture, performance and design – but also by the artist’s social and environmental consciousness. His humanistic vision materializes into his biomorphic sculptures, land art projects, anti-fascist murals, furniture pieces and diverse public projects. While some curators address artists’ entire careers by displaying their works in a strictly chronological manner, this retrospective organises Noguchi’s art works and design pieces around themes that reflect the artist’s various investigations and personal engagements. As a result, each of the rooms gathers works from different periods of the artist’s life in order to investigate the theme in question.
Room number 5, Lunar, reflects Noguchi’s experiments with the integration of electrical components into his biomorphic sculptures, inspired by the barren landscape of the Arizona desert. During World War Two, Japanese citizens living in the Western United States were imprisoned in camps. Although a New York resident and therefore exempt, Noguchi decided to enter one of these camps in Poston, Arizona to show his support to fellow Japanese American citizens, and to help create an arts and recreation centre aimed at improving prisoners’ lives.
Room number nine, Earth, gathers pieces and projects that address humanity’s relation to the earth. It showcases Noguchi’s ceramics of the 1950s inspired by traditional Japanese craft and stone sculptures that seem to emerge from the earth. His land art projects such as Sculpture to be Seen from Mars of 1947 reflect on the devastation of our post-atomic world.
When commenting on his film Frontier of 1935, Noguchi explained that he ‘[…] thought of space as a volume to be treated sculpturally’. [1] It seems that the Noguchi exhibition similarly creates sculptural spaces consistent with the artist’s vision, in a creative and unconventional manner. Room number six, Landscape of the Mind, only contains three objects. Two heavy and solid travertine and marble sculptures, Double Red Mountain (1969) and Time Lock (1944-1945), stand firmly on the floor, whilst a massive yet fragile spherical lamp, Akari 120A (c.1956 / c.1963), hangs from the ceiling. This set up creates a harmonious environment evocative of minimalist Japanese gardens.
The choice of display in Noguchi is striking to the visitor and it deliberately directs attention towards the play of space and light as much as to the exhibited art works themselves. The multiplicity of akari lamps and design pieces placed in the gallery create an immersive experience of space. Their inclusion hints at Noguchi’s desire to dissolve the barriers between fine art, traditional craft and technology, whilst the presence of quotes from the artist throughout the exhibition underscores the curator’s intention to immerge visitors further into the narrative. Light is used in a playful manner that balances the dim and austere environment of the Barbican Art Gallery. This is achieved by the akaris in the room which create their own, endearing narratives. Under the staircase of the lower gallery, a group of little Akari VB 13-T lamps seem to move forward as if taking part in a procession. The set up engages with Noguchi’s main artistic commitments, unveiling his attempt to ‘break out of the categories of sculpture’ and to make public art more accessible, through an empathic interpretation of nature. [2]
[1] Barbican Art Gallery, Noguchi, cur. Florence Ostende, exhibition brochure, Barbican (London, 2021), p.2.
[2] Barbican Art Gallery, Noguchi, p. 2.
Noguchi exhibition, Barbican Art Gallery, Lower Gallery.
My Arizona, 1943, Fibreglass, Plexiglass.
Sculpture to be Seen from Mars, 1947, Sand.
Double Red Mountain, 1969, Persian travertine / Akari 120A, c.1956 / c.1963, washi paper, bamboo, metal, electrics / Time Lock, 1944-45, languedoc marble.
Five Akari VB 13-T, 1986, washi paper, bamboo, metal, electrics.