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EXHIBITION diar y

Motion carried travels with Arthur Melville plus Charlotte Edwards’s listings

Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture TATE MODERN Bankside London SE 1

The work of Alexander Calder ( 189 8- 1976 ) has rather disappeared

in plain view: we’re used to the fact that almost every major mus-

eum has one of his famous mobiles but find it easy to pass by with-

out feeling particularly challenged. Tate Modern’s new show seeks

to remind us of the radicalism behind making the sculpture move

for us instead of us moving around the sculpture. It excludes the

static monumental ‘Stabiles’ which feature in many public squares

and the vibrant gouaches. The focus is determinedly on work that

interacts with the viewer: a substantial selection of Calder’s 200 mo-

biles and the wire sculptures that led up to them.

Calder was born – in Pennsylvania – into a lineage of sculp-

tors but delayed following in his father’s and grandfather’s foot-

steps training as a mechanical engineer before having something

of an epiphany off Guatemala on a naval voyage in 19 22: the sight

of the sun rising and moon setting simultaneously on opposite

sides of the ship started him painting and he enrolled in art col-

lege in New York. That awakening stayed with him. The basis of

his work was ‘the system of the Universe’ he said: ‘the idea of de-

tached bodies floating in space... some at rest while others move

in peculiar manners seems to me the ideal source of form.’

Calder’s second source of fascination arising from a journalis-

tic sketching assignment in 19 25 was the spectacle and choreo-

graphy of the circus. He re-enacted its sequences through the 70

models of Cirque Calder ( 1926 -3 1 ) which he housed in a suitcase to

facilitate travelling performances. Calder had already begun as he

termed it ‘drawing in space’ making wire sculptures of animals:

Cirque Calder combines this technique with mixed media while

separate larger works employ just wire. The Brass Family ( 1929 ) is

typical of the latter both for wittily exploring the analogies be-

tween the balance of acrobats and the balance of sculptural weight

and for an erotic edge which led Calder to describe himself as

‘more “Sewer-realist” than Surrealist’.

Those two inspirations meshed with the influence of the artists

he met in 19 20s Paris – Miró and Arp played a part and Duchamp

proposed the term ‘mobile’ – but it was a visit to Mondrian’s studio

in 19 30 that induced Calder to turn towards abstraction. There is a

long tradition of sculpture in movement – in religious processions

for a start – but Calder was the first to make sculptures perform by

themselves. The restless mutability of his mobile works might stand

for the experimental approach driving his art as a whole which var-

ies immensely across an oeuvre of more than 16 000. The most cel-

ebrated mobiles are delicate metal structures suspended from the

ceiling painted in primary colours and designed to move gently

with the airflow like clouds drifting by (the curators have taken

pains to ensure that visitor movements will be sufficient to create

the right degree of draught). Others are fixed to the wall or mount-

ed on bases – such as Red and Yellow Vane ( 19 34). Tate’s show then

is a chance to assess afresh the variety of spatial and kinetic effects

Calder achieves through his universal circus of orchestrated move-

ment over and around us. ALEXANDER CALDER: PERFORMING SCULPTURE

runs 11 Nov-3 April Mon-Thurs Sun 1 0- 6  Fri Sat 1 0- 10 $ PAUL

CAREY-KENT is an art writer and curator based in Southampton r

Opposite: The Brass Family 1929 brass wire and painted wood. This page top left: Alexander Calder with his

sculpture 21 Feuilles Blanches in Paris in 1953. Top right: Red and Yellow Vane 1934 sheet metal rod wire lead and paint

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