Telegram from Buckminster Fuller to Isamu Noguchi Explaining Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, 2009
Carpet
500 x 618 cm
Project for Art Unlimited, Basel 2009
A carpet reproduces the telegram that Fuller sent to Isamu Noguchi in 1936 to explain Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.
A telegram is normally something short, fast, urgent; this, on the other hand, is two hundred and fifty words long, gets there seventy three years later, and has nothing urgent to say; if anything, it sums up a world-old law, continuing, however, to question us, as it did back then, on time and space, and on our place in the world. Richard Buckminster Fuller wrote it to his sculptor friend Isamu Noguchi back in 1936. In this year Noguchi was in Mexico City, where he was completing History as seen form Mexico, a big mural in bas-relief in Mercado Abelardo L. Rodriguez, in which he narrated the struggle for freedom from fascist oppression and exploitation. In the relief, twenty two meters long, political symbols are featured (swastikas, the hammer and sickle) and Einstein’s famous equation E=mc².
As Noguchi writes: “in answer to my request, Bucky Fuller had sent me a fifty-word telegram explaining the equation. However I could also appreciate the sardonic humor of the man who used to come by to watch me work, saying that E=mc2 really meant Estados=Muchos Cabrones2 (‘the States equals many SOB2’). In any case I was able to shout and do what I pleased, and I was happy.” Today that telegram becomes a large carpet, an object of daily life and a reminder, a sign transmitted from the modern utopias of the 1900s to our current age, a bridge which stretches from the Earth to the universe”.
Courtesy the artist and Magazzino, Rome
