(Another art exhibition reviewed just as it ends)
”He defined figures with delicate lines in space, not as a solid mass”
- From the gallery guide
”Drawing in space”
In 1923, Alexander Calder started
sculpting not by carving into stone or casting metal, but bending
wire. Modernism's most basic precept is clearly at work here. We
don't live in the Stone or the Bronze age any more, so why still make
sculpture like we do? But there's more, much more...
Calder hung around both New York and
Paris, the twin centres of Modernism in this period, and his wire
portraits reveal him as a figure on the scene. Many of Modernism's
totems adorn the walls, such as Miro or Leger. But his works were
famously dubbed 'mobiles' by no less than Duchamp, and he has
Duchamp's insistence on using not just non-art but transparent and
apparently transient materials. As the show says, “he felt that it
was a mark of modernity that his wire figures possessed a kind of
transparency”. (And as we've seen before, Duchamp himself had a predilection for
glass.)
His method was soon dubbed “drawing
in space” - an apt tag, for the images are by necessity 'doodly'.
Look at thumbnail images of them and they're almost like pen
sketches. (Even down to the variance in line thickness, see illo
below.) And in fact his preparatory sketches, where displayed, look
almost identical to the realised work. Which is again similar to
Duchamp, who considered the purpose of a work to put across the idea
behind it in the most economical, least distracting way. We could
call that 'proto-conceptual' if we were those sorts of people.
Which creates something of a puzzle. As
argued previously, the key to Duchamp is that he dealt in anti-art.
Attempts by artists to paper over that inconvenient fact usually
result in ruin, in short-term gimmickry which leads only to hopeless
dead ends. (Brit Art being only the most calamitous case of a sorry
trend.) It's like trying to build where someone had already staked
out quicksand. And yet Calder wasn't an anti-artist in the slightest,
as we'll come to see his works were celebratorily creative. As Adrian Searle wrote in the Guardian, his “mobiles are
made to give pleasure. They don't... baffle us in the way Duchamp
did”. But he still went on to have an inter-relationship not only
with Duchamp but his disciples. I am really not sure how he managed
that. It's like he took just enough Duchamp to catalyse his art
without destroying it, like a poison being used as a homeopathic
remedy.
But if these first room works are not
dismissable juvenilia, neither are they even embryonic – rather,
they're preparatory. Notably works of this period can have the
classical titles and subject matter of old-time sculpture, such as
'Medusa' (c. 1930) or 'Hercules and the
Lion' (1928, below). Calder might have meant this as
something of a taunt to the old school, but it rebounds –
suggesting he hasn't yet fully left it all behind. Wire was to prove
only one element of the mature Calder's DNA. We see the rest of him
assemble over the successive rooms.
The Circus Comes To
Town...
Animal and circus themes appeared in
his work around the same time, but showed more of a way forward.
Notably, with them creep in new materials. There's a great
playfulness at work, with for example 'Dog'
(1926/31, also below) using a clothes peg for a dog's head. Sometimes
he signs the works by writing his name in bent wire. And those themes
and this playfulness coincide, in a positive feedback loop. There's a
certain way we're conditioned to look at a sculpture titled
'Hercules'; no matter how its made. But now think
of a sculpture titled 'Circus Strongman' or
'Acrobat'. And with the new materials comes
colour, for example 'Red Horse and Green Sulky'
(1926, below), further adding to the sense of sculpture designed to
entice and enthrall rather than display gravitas.
The works have a poise, a
gravity-defying elegance and a suggestion of movement stone or wood
could never convey. See for example 'The Brass Family'
(1929, below). Sculpture had been about artists diligently carving
mighty subjects out of solid, timeless material. Now it's like all
that weight and solidity have been thrown off, as if someone had
walked over to art and asked it to dance.
The show tells us “embodying the
vitality of dancers or acrobats, Calder's sculptures were performers
in their own right”. And that's no metaphor. Calder would stage
performances of the self-styled Cirque Calder where he'd put those objects to
work. The show includes invites to these made from lino cuts, like
traditional circus posters, and a video of Calder performing it in
1927.
Thinking of their later use as baby
mobiles, some comment on the irony that Calder's art “became toys”.
As this video makes clear, they're entirely wrong – they were toys
from the start. As Craig Raine writes in the New Statesman, “his talent
isn’t injured by the snobbery of seriousness”. The video's like
the coolest children's show you ever saw, with attendees laughing out
loud while watching. (And make me reflect once more how the
hand-made, hands-on nature of the kids' shows I saw, such as 'Blue
Peter' or 'Vision On', has lamentably
succumbed to virtual reality. We've become like the child in
'Room' who imagines the TV is a whole other word,
unconnected to ours.)
...the Music Strikes Up...
But suggesting
movement, almost from the start, wasn't enough for Calder. He wanted
his mobiles to be... well, mobile. The very first
room contains 'Goldfish Bowl' (1929), where the
fish moved once you turned a handle. How to make them mobile became a
process of trial and error, as we'll see. But, and again almost from
the start, movement brought with it another element. Calder summed up
sculpture as “weight, form, size, colour, motion and then you have
noise”. If a sculpture can move, why not use that movement to make
sound? His work can even have an equivalence to musical notation, the
coloured shapes approximating notes while the wires make a warped
approximation of bars.
With 'Small Sphere and Heavy
Sphere' (1932/3, below), viewers could originally not only
set the spheres in motion, bashing irregularly against the objects,
but arrange the objects as suited them. Except, due to the disparity
of sizes between the spheres, the result could never be arranged. The
combinations were infinite and unforeseeable. Notably Calder
associated with Cage (of course himself a Duchamp disciple), and his
chance compositions.
Except 'Small Sphere and Heavy
Sphere' leads us to a... in fact the
drawback of this exhibition. And it's almost exactly the same one
that we had with the recent Jospeh Cornell show at the Academy. As this
description might suggest, the visual elements of this work aren't
all that important. It's like an instrument, the point is to pick up
and play it.
Except of course you're not allowed to. Instead a thick
white line and a sensor alarm keep you from getting near it. (As
artists, the two were quite different. Calder doesn't share Cornell's
interest in the allure of mystery, in fact he seems more disposed to
pare art back to its constituent elements. But in this way the shows
are similar.)
Yes, as with Cornell, there's a video
of it in motion. But videos aren't just passive, they attach a
significance to an event; inevitably, you end up watching like you
would a film. You may not expect a plot but you assume there'll be
developments. What they need to do is just move,
in the naturalised way the hands of a wall clock just turn or the
leaves of a tree flutter in the breeze.
And it's worse than the object not
being displayed as it's creator intended. We're in an art exhibition,
where we're keyed to see things symbolically. And so we're
effectively told that we've arrived after the event. It's like
Modernism once had a life, it was something which worked
for people. While all we can do is gawp at the detritus of that. It
leaves a “party's over” feeling hanging over the piece. Look back
at that illo of 'Small Sphere and Heavy Sphere' -
it's made up of bottles, balls and other easily obtainable objects.
It could have been recreated through a quick trip to the shop.
Making the Abstract Move
Calder's next component fell into place
with surprising neatness – he visited Mondrian's studio and was won
over to abstraction. (He called it “the shock that converted me”.)
He even managed to do it in an easy-to-remember year, 1930.
This story appeals to me, for I've long
thought that Mondrian's studio was the real work of art, his
paintings just constituent elements which people kept foolishly
removing from it. Mondrian himself thought differently, of course,
but I don't really see what that's got to do with it. (It was recreated by the Tate a few years ago, but at Tate Liverpool - too
far for a Brighton boy to visit.)
Mondrian's art by this point, with its
regulated blocks and lines, could hardly have become more static. And
when he disagreed with the suggestion of setting abstraction into
motion, Calder resolved to do the thing himself.
One of his original ideas to realise
this was to fit a motor, making his works into a set of turning
parts. And in his slow but steady development, these motorised works
are a rare (perhaps the only) mis-step. As with everything else, we
don't see them actually turn as intended. But the problem is deeper.
As they follow their prescribed paths then do it again they look too
ordered, too regular. And as the show tells us, this is something he
soon came to realise himself, as he turned more towards what he
called “free movement”.
And yet oddly, around this era other
works have the same clockwork spirit. After having said earlier there
isn't much comparison between Calder and Cornell, we may have
stumbled upon one. As with Cornell, he made numerous works in the
form of Orreries, defined (at least by me) as “clockwork models of
the solar system popular among the Victorians”. Check out, for
example, the mapped trajectories of 'Object With Red
Ball' (1931, below).Yet unlike Cornell there's none of the
sense of the ghost in the machine. They just look like diagrams of
mechanisms, motorised works without the motor. Cage's chance is
nowhere in sight.
Mapping the Constellations
Motion and sound were the final two
items in Calder's shopping list for sculpture. However, there's one
more element that needs to be introduced before his work's complete.
Though the show tells us he owes his abstraction all to Mondrian, I
have always fancied a connection between Calder and Miro. Though
another contemporary and compatriot, Miro gets little mention in this
show. (Even if he features in one of the wire portraits.) Compare
Calder to Micro's masterful 'Constellations' series of 1939/41; such as
'Constellation the Morning Star' (1939, below).
There's the same 'lines-and-nodes' almost diagrammatic approach to
composition, with shapes of pure colour connected by sharp black
lines. (Though I have no notion of who influenced who, or even if
anyone did. The fancy might simply come from my being such a fan of
Miro while caring less for Mondrian.)
Even Miro's habit of placing his forms
before a flat background can find an echo in Calder. Though in his
case he'd place coloured shapes in relief before a painted panel, in
essence placing a sculpture before a painted backdrop. This can give
the sculptural elements a 'push', as though the panel is their
spring-board into the room. 'Form Against Yellow'
(1936, below) even has the suggestion of a figure dynamically diving
towards you, arm upraised like a swimmer. But abstract forms are more
common, in works such as 'White Panel' (1936, also
below) even if the effect is the same.
But perhaps what Calder most has in
common with Miro is his rejection of Mondrian's perfect geometry.
While he always hung onto circles, the final element of his make-up
is the evolution of the misshapen leaf form. And the whole shape of
his mobiles shifts with it. His compositional genius was to make
imbalance appealing and inviting, giving it an irresolvable dynamism.
Look again at 'White Panel' with that long streak
of black bent along one side of it. Look at the bends and turns in
'Morning Star' (1943, below), like an antenna
tuned into Radio Askew.
Notably, like Miro, Calder often gave
his mature work cosmic titles such as this. They even included Miro's
chosen term, such as 'Constellation' (1943, below)
and 'Black Constellation' in the same year.
(Though the show tells us the term was something else which came from
Duchamp.) Calder said himself, in 1951:
“The underlying sense of
form in my work has been the system of the Universe. The idea of
detached bodies floating in space, of different sizes and
densities... some at rest while others move in peculiar manners,
seems to me the ideal source of form.”
While, writing in the Standard, Matthew Collings spies “a hint of the Atomic Age, of molecular
structures and orbiting planets at a time when science didn’t yet
cause anyone to be fearful or cynical”. (While the earlier
motorised works would seem more in spirit with the old, ordered
Newtonian physics.)
Back to Nature
The cosmic of course exists at such a
scale and remove from us it might as well be abstract. Yet like many
of its great practitioners, Calder's abstraction is not pure. It
keeps open a relationship to its environment, just a suggestive
rather than a slavishly imitative one. Laura Cumming writes in the Guardian of “the enchanted forest
at the heart of this show where mobiles shiver like silver honesty
leaves, and black forms dangle like the last petals on wintry
bushes.” And the waxing lyrical is warranted.
Again this is frequently reflected in
the names. 'Vertical Foliage' (1941, below)
suggests the twisted branch of nature, leaf forms emerging in a
manner somehow systematic and unpredictable. While in 'Snow
Flurry' (1948)... well, the dominant colour is white. The
show speculates that this revisiting of nature might have been
precipitated by his shifting his studio to an old Connecticut farm in
1933.
And it seems in parallel with this
revisiting that Calder finally solves the problem of motion - in the
simplest and most elegant way, the way nature does it. The delicate
mobiles are able to catch the breeze even from the ambient draughts
drifting across the room. Exhilaratingly, you can watch them spin
slowly, seemingly of their own accord.
And Calder's love of Cagean chance
processes and indeterminate composition finds it's
expression.Calder's work is sometimes dismissed as simple variations
on a theme. But the connection between his work and Cage really
answers that. There's a richness in those perpetual variations. They
achieve for the eye what Cage does for the ear, they look completely
simple and straightforward while soon becoming compelling.
Like any great sculpture show, only
possibly even more so, you can't just work the room systematically
taking in each piece. You keep looking behind and around you,
re-seeing what you only just saw, only from some new angle or set
alongside something else. The pieces really are
pieces, part of something bigger. (Something similar was to be found in the recent Barbara Hepworth sculpture show.)
In the show's second-biggest weakness,
we don't see his larger-scale works or monumental outdoor stabiles.
Though there's one big exception to this rule - the 'Black
Widow' (1948), normally hung in the lobby of the Sao Paolo
Institute of Architects and out on loan for the first time. Notably,
and again like Hepworth, its flexible enough that it works as well
against the white wall of the gallery or when placed in situ (see
photo below). We do see photos of Thirties Worlds Fairs he
participated in (including exhibiting alongside Picasso's
'Guernica' in the Republican Spanish pavilion in
'37), but the show really needed some large-scale photos of his
stabiles.
Its true we may only see the mature,
realised Calder for the final third of the show. But there's an
appeal in seeing that maturation happen, in Calder bending open a
wire frame and then assembling himself around it. Calder is one of
those artists who looks like anyone should be able to copy him, yet
no-one really can. He's another reason, as if we needed one, to
reject the notion that abstract art has to be something austere and
remote. His work virtually radiates childlike joy!
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