Alexander Calder brought motion to sculpture. An incredibly playful spirit, Calder channeled his joy into a deeply informed and influential body of work that spans mediums from simple line drawings to massive steel sculptures. Calder's work reminds us of childhood fantasies...
[more]Alexander Calder brought motion to sculpture. An incredibly playful spirit, Calder channeled his joy into a deeply informed and influential body of work that spans mediums from simple line drawings to massive steel sculptures. Calder's work reminds us of childhood fantasies like infinite slides and zips between planets -- his work must have influenced the animator Chuck Jones, and "The Jetsons" world might as well have been designed by Calder. He was strongly connected to the Surrealists and his work is foundational to the critical discourse surrounding twentieth-century sculpture.
Calder's evolution began with his mind-blowingly inventive wire works -- because the wire acts like line, these pieces hover between sculpture and drawing; at the same time they are animated by Calder's ingenious mechanics. In a short French film, Calder acts as the ringmaster of a "Circus" of wire figurines, supervising performances that include a trapeze artist actually swinging between the arms of hanging partners, a tightrope walker, horses, lions, and acrobats. As technically masterful and fun-filled as the "Circus" is, however, it doesn't achieve the powerfully disorienting effect of his wire portraits, which, in a strange combination of one-, two-, and three-dimensional space, frustrate (and enchant) the eye, causing us to question the stability of our perceptual apparatuses.
Ultimately, Calder became dissatisfied with his wire work because, in order to achieve motion, he either had to manipulate a crank or install a motor. The movement that these methods produced was repetitive, rigid, and non-spontaneous. In his search for a new solution, he developed his hallmark form, the mobile. Suspending colorful abstract forms on carefully balanced systems of wire hangers, Calder achieved what no other sculptor had before: he introduced time into the rigid, stable space of sculptural art. And because the movement of the mobiles is flowing and random, and their colored forms echo the shapes of fish and leaves, these mid-air sculptures manage to create the impression of organic life rather than reference machine-driven motion. Time, like shape, for Calder is a natural element, not something measured and doled out by human contrivances, however delightful the latter may be.
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