Date: 24-03-1992
Owning Institution: Royal Academy
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999          
Subject:   20th Century        

A mobile, one might say, is a little private celebration, an object defined by its movement and having no other existence. It is a flower that fades when it ceases to move
Jean-Paul Sartre

THE AMERICAN artist Alexander Calder may not have conspicuously influenced British culture but he can be held partly responsible for the decoration of small children's bedrooms across the country. In the early Thirties, Calder devised a new kind of sculpture: a gracious, dangling wire and metal construction, designed to be gently stirred by draughts of wind or by the human touch. His friend Marcel Duchamp promptly thought up the term ''mobile'' to describe it.

Children's mobiles date back to long before the Thirties, but Calder did more than any other individual to extend and develop the form and his methods were rapidly imitated by mass manufacturers. So when young Eleanor or Florence or Arthur stare up at the bright cut-out shapes dancing on wires over their beds, they are all the involuntary inheritors of Calder's legacy.

The metamorphosis of Calder's invention, from modernist sculpture to modern toy, might not have en-tirely displeased him. His earliest works, engaging little figures fashioned from bits of carved cork and wire, were toys: tiny trapeze artists and sword-swallowers and lion-tamers whom Calder, in his adopted role as Monsieur Loyal the ringmaster, would animate for the amusement of his friends. Much later, when the Tate Gallery gave him a retrospective in 1964, Calder wrote to an acquaintance about the volume of fan mail he had received. ''Everybody,'' he noted, ''is under six.''

Calder's playfulness is much in evidence in the modest but gracious exhibition of his work currently oc-cupying the Sackler Galleries of the Royal Academy. Big Red is Calder at his most abstract, a constellation of thin red metal shapes strung out in space in an elaborate system of balance and counterbalance - al-though even here figurative reference is not too distant, Calder's sculpture being more than slightly reminis-cent, as it flutters in response to the faint urgings of the RA's air-conditioning, of foliage animated by a breeze. Calder's mobiles almost always have something of the organic about them. Hanging Spider is overtly creatural, its sprawling wires and blobs evoking both a spider's web and its leggy anatomy.

The exhibition also includes a 1961 film of the last ever performance of ''Calder's Circus''. This is a chance to see the 70-year-old Calder, putting his all-star troupe of Tom Thumb-sized figures through their paces. The RA show will have great appeal for the enduring Calder fan-club of under- sixes, but it is worth remembering that some of his greatest admirers were more than four feet tall. Albert Einstein is reported to have once spent three hours in front of a Calder, at the end of which time his only comment was ''I wish I had thought of that''. And the most eloquent appraisal of Calder's mobiles and their significance was written by Jean-Paul Sartre.

Sartre recognised that what Calder gave to sculpture in the form of the mobile was, precisely, mobility. This may seem fairly self-evident, but Sartre saw its importance with unusual clarity. Sculpture, for centuries the great art of stasis, of frozen mass, suddenly moved. It left its plinth and hung, quivering, in space. For Sartre, this made Calder's mobiles ''sensitive symbols of Nature'', things whose nervous energy, whose sub-tle, planned but unprogrammed responsiveness to their environment, gave them an existence of a kind quite alien to that of previous and more substantial sculptures.

Sartre also saw a link between Calder's art and his own philosophy, finding in the mobile a model of the existential attitude to the world. ''A mobile does not suggest anything,'' he wrote. ''It captures genuine living movements and shapes them. Mobiles have no meaning, make you think of nothing but themselves. They are, that is all; they are absolutes.'' He also found their unpredictability peculiarly significant: ''these hesitations, resumptions, gropings, clumsinesses, the sudden decisions and above all that swan-like grace make of mobiles very strange creatures indeed, something mid-way between matter and life.''

This is a fine description. Calder's mobiles are objects which mutely and stubbornly resist explanation; their susceptibility to the slightest breeze or draught (which is such that, even in the sealed chambers of a modern museum, they continue to move) is responsible for their most unusual characteristic as examples of the art of sculpture. They are never the same twice. Blink, and you miss something. To be surrounded by these trembling objects, rather like complex diviner's tools strung up in the air, is to be reminded that this is also true of the world. They are images of the rule of mutability.

It is not entirely true that Calder was the first artist to introduce movement into sculpture. Constructivists like Gabo or Tatlin had previously experimented with mechanised sculptures of different sorts. But the kind of movement that Calder devised for art, in the form of the mobile, was entirely new. Its special qualities are thrown into relief by the presence, at the RA, of a relatively rare example of his mechanised abstract sculpture, the Half Circle, Quarter Circle and Sphere. It seems a peculiarly lifeless piece; its sole movement, circumscribed by the mechanism that drives it, is a sort of metronomic tick. It is an automaton to the Aeolian harp of the Calder mobile. The artist recognised this distinction himself, saying of his motorised sculptures that ''even the best are apt to be mechanically repetitious''.

Calder's mobiles are, perhaps more perfectly than any other form of sculpture, capable of lifelikeness. This might seem an odd claim to make for an art whose forms rarely seem intended to suggest anything like a precise resemblance between themselves and the forms of things in the world. But what is lifelike, in the Calder mobile, is not so much the form itself as its behaviour.

This may be what Calder meant when he said that his mobiles were ''abstractions which resemble nothing in life except their manner of reacting''. Calder also wrote a brief textbook on how to draw animals, in which some of the descriptions seem thoroughly appropriate to his own creations: ''Animals' lives are of necessity active and their activities are reflected in an alert grace of line even when they are in repose or asleep. Indeed, because of their markings many animals seem to be awake when sleeping, and many mammals sleep so lightly that even when apparently asleep they will move their ears in the direction of a sound that is inaudible to us. So there is always a feeling of perpetual motion about animals''. Calder's mo-biles are, as Sartre said, suspended between matter and life: constructed creatures leading endlessly com-plicated lives.

Their character as perpetual motion machines may explain Einstein's admiration for Calder, whose sculpture can also be interpreted as a model of the post-Newtonian sense of reality. Even the most substan-tial objects are microscopically and sub-microscopically mobile: matter itself is volatile. The mobile is a sculptural form that seems peculiarly true to such ideas, in the light of which the old, dauntingly substantial forms of sculpture come to seem something of a lie. Calder encourages such interpretation of his work by making many of his mobiles look vaguely like models of molecular structures or planetary constellations.

The benign character of Calder's art can obscure its critical nature, the reproof of previous sculpture that it implies. For this, it may be helpful to consult some other works by Alexander Calder conspicuously displayed in London: a dozen or so of the figures on the Albert Memorial. These are by Alexander Milne Calder (1846- 1923), father of the similarly academic sculptor Alexander Stirling Calder (1870-1945) and grandfather of the Calder whose works are now at the Royal Academy. Calder's mobiles were dismissed by his father, who saw them as timewasting eccentricities but may have failed to notice their patricidal intent - their rebuke to the tired tradition of monumental public sculpture which he and his father had come to represent.

Calder's mobiles are almost perfectly anti- monumental. They are frail objects whose aim is not so much to command the space they occupy as to be commanded by it. Unlike the stilled monuments of civic statuary, they do not counsel any specific form of behaviour, do not commemorate any specific act of heroism, do not reprove the living with memories of the illustrious dead. Instead - and this is where they seem most genuinely subversive - they propose a kind of poetry of the erratic. Their beauty is the beauty of purposelessness, their energy a blind vitalism. This is why Calder's later art, in which his preoccupation with the ''stabile'', a form of static sculpture of a vaguely architectural and more than slightly monumental appearance, has always seemed somewhat disappointing. Perhaps he did not entirely understand the nature of his own genius.

CORNELIA PARKER
Known for her mobiles, like Thirty Pieces of Silver, which consists of old pieces of cutlery suspended on fine wires just above the gallery floor and which was included in ''The British Art Show'' of 1990. Interested in other possibilities of mobile sculpture. Spent last weekend throwing works off the cliffs of Dover and photographing the results.

My philosophy is essentially anti-mass. I like Calder's work because no matter how much metal is hanging in the air it still seems light. I am also interested in Anish Kapoor's work, the way he cuts into stone, hollows it out, dematerialises it from within. All I have ever wanted to do, as a student and an artist, is to disintegrate things, to make them porous or to float, or to make them virtually invisible. So when I started to suspend things I realised that it was a way of making almost anything seem somehow vaporous. I also like mobiles because they defy gravity; there is this sense of tension that you get from their hovering movement above their earth. I try to exploit that by suspending things only just above the ground. I also very much like the way that mobiles move - there is this sense that sculpture is not a fixed mass, that it is something a pas-serby could change the arrangement of, and that it will always be different in each new environment. A monolithic stone sculpture is very little changed by where you put it, whereas a mobile is more like a human being, it changes its character in different places. I am interested in heightening the sense that sculpture, like everything, is moving, that it is molecularly unstable. Also, when things move that encourages people to want to touch the work, to interact with it. Maybe because it is more like you.

GEREON LEPPER
German artist. Works with machinery, making constructions that frequently have an element of implied risk or violence. Making an outdoor sculpture to be seen at Canary Wharf later this year.

One thing I very much like to use is balanced movement, so that for example two very strong motors might be placed in opposition to each other - each might exert a great force, but the result is a charged iner-tia. This creates a very aggressive and strong sense of force, but in the service of an aesthetic of stillness. If one of the motors were to break down the whole thing would explode and destroy itself. These works are exhibited in cages, because they are extremely dangerous. But still they are always frightening because they look so bloody strong that they might break out . . . I am interested in making works that are the product of my own subjective will, but which are also powerfully subject to natural laws, like gravity or inertia. The work I am planning to show in London later this year, for a site on Canary Wharf, will be placed in water, but it will be controlled by gravity, which for me is natural energy, and by electricity: it will be a kind of fight between these two different forms of energy. . . . The piece I am making for the Chisenhale Gallery in London, again to be shown later this year, hardly moves at all. It will move maybe half a metre in the course of one month. What is true of all my work is not movement itself, but the way in which it can change the audience's percep-tions of time. So because this work moves incredibly slowly, as soon as you enter its space everything you do comes to seem incredibly fast. You feel speeded up.

DARRELL VINER
A sculptor who has worked extensively with movement, making computer-programmed constructions. A couple of years ago as part of a public arts project he turned a disused laundry in Plymouth into a curious modern grotto, priming a large number of water jets housed in the ceiling to be triggered off by the audi-ence's movements.

The laundry piece in Plymouth was designed to be completed by the audience: its unpredictable nature mirrored the unpredictable behaviour of the people visiting it. The best responses were from children, who twigged how to make it work pretty fast. Over the years I have noticed that adults tend to be more apprehensive of what they are walking into. I use different kind of movements. Semaphore, which was a piece at the Chisenhale Gallery, consisted of these large, propellor-like forms. The messages sent by these forms were random. Any one rotor, or two or three, or all five, could come on at any one time. Conversation Piece was another piece that used movement but was about communication, or its opposite - I made these machines that were like three characters trying to communicate with each other. They moved around in some fairly unpredictable ways, and the Whitechapel guards were terrific: they had to keep putting them back on their original marks. I like the audience not to be quite sure of whether something is in control or not. I made a piece called The Wheel that rolled in an irregular way from the wall of the gallery towards its middle - al-though it couldn't go beyond a certain point, you couldn't be sure just looking at it. A lot of the movements I use are based on natural movements even if they are mechanised: people think of natural movement as lap-ping waves or beautiful sunsets, but there is also this chaotic side to nature, this explosive, dangerous side. Calders register this, although only his bigger, outdoor mobiles tend to be subjected to the sorts of extreme weather that make this clear. What I am trying to get in my audience is a certain feeling. I don't want to be seen to be demonstrating something, to be displaying a gimmick. I hate the term Kinetic Art because it tends to imply those things, it implies an art of gimmickry.

RICHARD WILSON
Has worked in a wide variety of media. His most conspicuous use of movement in sculpture was One Piece at a Time of 1987, which consisted of 600 used car pieces suspended from the roof of one of the towers of the Tyne Bridge. A blade attached to a rotary motor severed the strings one at a time so that over the course of five weeks each car part crashed to the bottom of the space. At the same time, the noise of each crash was recorded on tape and played back the following day. As the space emptied itself of objects, it filled with sound, so that by the end of its run, the spectacle of 600 prone objects was accompanied by the roaring cacophony of their cumulative falls. It was viewed from within a cage.

I do not think of myself as a kinetic artist or anything like that. I had the opportunity to make a piece lasting five weeks, and I thought of that time as a clock and decided to create something that would evolve over a period of time. I was very nervous about working with machines, and about whether I would get the timing right. In the end, the last piece was cut an hour within the schedule . . . Movement simply enables you to make art about certain things that you might not otherwise be able to approach: the sense of events being driven by machines, or changing senses of time. I like the fact that Calder once painted an aeroplane; that really was a mobile. I don't think of my art as being about movement. I think of movement, maybe, as more like a colour in an artist's palette. You might only use that colour once, and to do something quite specific. I enjoy the fact that people do make motorised art, but I find it too fraught with problems to do it an awful lot myself. Also I always find the evidence of the electric lead rather irritating - that taped lead that runs across the floor to the work, that pretends to be hidden but isn't. I remember going to a kinetic art show at the Hayward, and half the pieces had signs up saying ''Temporarily Out of Order''. Is that an art corpse, or is it part of the being of the work, its tendency to break down? This makes me think of Tinguely, whose sculptures are slaves of their own motion and are eventually, I'm sure, meant by the artist to be killed by it.