By JONATHAN VALLELY for Urbane Magazine
A few minutes from the house I grew up in, on a knoll between two lilac bushes a few miles south of Philadelphia, there is an oddity which has fascinated me since Ifirst spun its single limb in the wind to watch its white and red fingers dance like steel butterflies. In fifth grade, I spend hours with coat hangers and guitar picks making a hat for a presentation about the work. The piece is a mobile by the pioneer of the art form, Alexander Calder, whose early works came off display in the Art Gallery of Ontario last month.
Indeed, Calder’s art is born of the innate power of a piece to ‘create itself’ for the viewer (and participant). His slowly, smoothly swinging shapes and wires represent a transversal of the ephemeral, the unpredictable with the cold, hard materials of modernity. His medium of hanging, unstable forms, the mobile, gets closer to complete freedom from fixedness than even the new media and video creations which today hope to represent art in motion. The pieces seem infinitely non-narrative yet totally fluid in the moment of viewing– practices in the relativity of abstractions. Where recorded images are almost always serial, dependent on some permutation, mobile sculpture lives without a necessary beginning or an end to its personality. Yet many of the hanging wire faces and human forms AGO exhibition are highly expressive, like his full body portraits of dancer Josephine Baker or the simple curls of wire which evoke a figure heartily swigging some drink or other. His basic, unilinear wire and metal forms are astonishing as they move in the air and change expression, almost alive as the eye tries to figure out its dimensions, looking to the shadows on the wall for clues.
The defining work from his time in Paris, though, is his spectacular and magical miniature circus. Equally playful in terms of its content and its concepts of necessarily reduced form and color, the AGO showed the circus in one chaotic and fantastic tent, with projections of the individual toys and mechanisms actually in motion on the wall beside. Calder was just breaking into an unsuspecting art scene in Paris at the time of its creation. He had a vested interest in the effect of recapturing childhood marvel in his art which was almost directly against the sometimes high-seated conceptual work of his peers. As I looked at the six or seven large mobiles on display on the floor of the second room of the show, I certainly was brought back to the wonder I felt as I illegally climbed and swung on the structure, which would later be relocated and surrounded by sharp holly bushes to prevent just such activity.
Although the show at the AGO has now closed (alas, I only had the chance to visit days before it ended), his work is on indoor and outdoor display in dozens of cities across the world, though the few public pieces in Canada are in Montreal. His influence is deep. Although the medium of the mobile has fallen out of vogue, probably because nobody could do it the way he did, Calder’s insistence on the innocence and fluidity of the simple portrait, the playfully spectacular, and the abstract creature influenced not only his contemporaries like Miró and Mondrian, but future explorers of the changing abstraction like Lassaw and Laposky. Like most artists, Calder was also a philosopher, and his work speaks to important lessons about the instability of all relations regardless of their context.
A perfect example of this thought is an equally apt conclusion, and I leave you with a Calder quote about the creation of art from the “yearbook” of his scene in Paris, Abstraction-Création: “Nothing at all of this is fixed. Each element able to move, to stir, to oscillate, to come and go in its relationships with the other elements in its universe. It must not be just a fleeting moment but a physical bond between the varying events in life. Not extractions, But abstractions. Abstractions that are like nothing in life except in their manner of reacting.”
