The Brooklyn Rail

I’m writing this review in Spoleto, Italy. On arrival here, I saw Alexander Calder’s public sculpture, Teodelapio, a monumental black stabile, directly outside the train station. It was made and given to the city for the 1962 Festival dei Due Mondi as part of the open-air exhibition Sculture nella cittàorganized by Giovanni Carandente. I mention this because the centerpiece of the current Gray Gallery exhibition is the large-scale standing mobile, Clouds over Mountains, also from 1962. A monumental version, nine stories high, is now installed in the atrium of the Hart Senate Office Building in Washington, DC. Both sculptures use flat planes of cut sheet steel painted black. In Clouds Over Mountains however the “clouds” are a white mobile element suspended above the stabile of black “mountains.” The maquette for this work is also exhibited here. Calder eschewed mimesis in many of his sculptures; his works do not rely on obvious likeness to a source to succeed. Abstractly, they are thoroughly inventive and engaging with or without figurative allusions. More importantly, what we experience with much of Calder’s work is something like a projected visual and physical proprioception. Though obviously not himself unthoughtful and unaware of his evolving methodology, Calder remained opaque about his work, against offering explanations of his thought and process.

To be able to make connections others had never conceived marks him as an original artist, especially when involving the crucial aspect of movement—both ours, and the sculpture’s—in the participatory dance of time, folded into sculpture as Calder’s key innovation, both playful and profound. The visual shape and physical position of a sculpture’s elements interchange, like watching film or animation, except that we too can move and orient ourselves simultaneously. Take two sculptures here: The Two Yellows (1962) and Contrepoids jaune (ca. 1953), the former, larger work suspended from the gallery ceiling, the latter raised up on a cylindrical base. Only the two yellow shapes in The Two Yellows are on a horizontal plane, balanced at the end of articulated metal rods, whereas the others—red, blue, and black—are oriented vertically. Coming to mind are forms reminiscent of Brancusi, Giacometti, Arp, and Miró, but here set in motion and space. Calder didn’t avoid influence any more than Picasso did with Cézanne or later, Gorky with, again, Miró but he always found something new and not just novel. Calder’s works are in our space, contained neither to the pedestal nor the wall.

Not surprisingly, as they activate social space, the monumental outdoor works relate to dance and theater. Calder was in Paris in the 1920s where Diaghilev and the Ballet Russe were very influential, and he would later design works for Martha Graham and Virgil Thomson. The three dimensionality of Calder’s sculpture, however frontal, invites the viewer’s movement, which is in turn converted into the object’s momentum. Any fixed perspective or ideal viewpoint is denied when a work is spurred into motion by a draft, breeze, or gentle prod. Times various speeds, in the relativity of changing orbit and distance, is relayed to us in real time as the mobile moves toward and away from the viewer, circulating at varying rates.

Calder could focus his work at such an enormous range of scales without problem. With some standing directly on the gallery floor like we do, while others command an outside plaza, one wonders what kind of effect these variously sized stabiles had on artists such as David Smith and Mark di Suvero? Standing Mobile (1953) like Contrepoids jaune is freestanding and small in size, in counterpoint to Clouds Over Mountains. Presented here in a vitrine are also four pendants intended to be worn as jewelry. Calder did not conflate his jewelry with his sculptural works, but rather took discoveries made in the one mode that could easily transfer in another direction later. This is a fundamental quality to Calder’s works: of impulse, and a pre-linguistic auditing of the world of shape, color, movement and scale, retaining the play, enchantment and humor of childhood into adult experience that is not to be underestimated and which is sophisticated beyond understanding unless we give ourselves up to its joyous insurrections. As Baudelaire said, “The child sees everything in a state of newness; he is always drunk.” Nothing more resembles inspiration than the delight with which small children absorb forms and color.