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Alexander Calder and Contemporary Art
Jason Middlebrook, How Much thought and Consideration Goes into our Decisions (2008)
1 Alexander Calder. “Comment realizer l’art?” in Abstraction Creation, Art Non Figuratif, no. 1 (1932): 6, as cited in Calder, Sculptor of Air, Alexander S. C. Rower, ed., (Milan: Motta Cultura srl, 2009). Translation from the French by the Calder Foundation; Pedro E. Guerrero, Calder at Home: The Joyous Environment of Alexander Calder (New York: Stewart, Tabori, and Chang, 1998), 63; Bernice Rose, A Salute to Alexander Calder (New York: Museum of Modem Art, 1969), 24; Alexander Calder, 1943 manuscript, Calder Foundation, New York.
If there is anything a study of contemporary art should tell us it is that its unfolding is unpredictable. Yet at any point those of us who follow art all seem to know what is going on and we mostly agree on what past artists and events are important to what is going on now. The consensus—they sometimes say about silence—can sometimes be deafening. And for the longest time, the consensus has been that there are artists of the early twentieth century, that is of the modern era, who are seminal to the initial and continuing development of contemporary art. Marcel Duchamp looms over all others, but the canon includes certain of the constructivists and various Dada artists. There are also those who, while perhaps not central to the tenets that define contemporary art—experimentation, self-reflexiveness, visual explication of nonvisual ideas and the reverse, nonvisual explication of visual ideas— are admired for their contributions; in short, those upon whom art historical developments hinged, such as Picasso. One need not be in the inner circles of the contemporary art world to be aware there are artists like the one at hand, Alexander Calder, who are given their due while at the same time they are given short shrift, as if their fame and popularity degrade their worth as innovative artists. It has been decades that the assumptions that feed the consensus have guided us. How is it, then, that a new generation of contemporary artists is re-viewing (seeing again or anew) the work of Alexander Calder? Martin Boyce, Nathan Carter, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Aaron Curry, Kristi Lippire, Jason Meadows, and Jason Middlebrook represent this new generation. Each artist selected for this exhibition fits two very important criteria: that his or her work be full in itself (no need for long-winded extra-object explanations) and that it acknowledges or shows influence from Alexander Calder. Some of the artists, like Boyce and Carter, reveal obvious influence by Calder. Boyce’s Fear Meets the Soul (2008), especially when seen in reproduction, closely mimics such early Calder mobiles as Untitled (1933). Carter’s whimsical wire constructions have a direct pedigree; such works as Traveling Language Machine with #3 Frequency Disruptor and Disinformation Numbers Station (2007) have more than a passing resemblance to Calder’s Tightrope of 1936, which features simple wire shapes perched atop or hanging from a wire suspended between wooden forms. Others, like Cruzvillegas or Curry, are more subtly influenced, learning lessons of form, balance, movement, implied movement, or the activation of space by an object from the modern master. Abraham Cruzvillegas, who was a recipient of an Atelier Calder residency in
Sache, France, created the work Bougie du Isthmus (2005) during his time there; subsequently, his work has increasingly dealt with balance and actual or implied movement. Most recently, his stacks of cast-off wooden objects and other found items show a deep resonance with Calder’s Small Sphere and Heavy Sphere of 1932–33. This astonishingly contemporary piece places bottles, a can, and a wooden crate on the floor. A simple stand of bent wire carries a flat metal disc in a gonglike arrangement; a suspended rod with wires carries the “small sphere” and “heavy sphere” of the title. It would be right at home in many contemporary sculpture exhibitions or sharing a gallery with art by Jason Middlebrook, who also rescues bottles and places them in arrangements with other objects, as in How Much Thought and Consideration Goes Into Our Decisions (2008). Martin Boyce, Untitled (2007) The abiding notion that Calder hadn’t much to offer to the contemporary art discourse shows particular cracks when one realizes Middlebrook, an artist of wide-ranging media and methods, made a close study of Calder to create a particular work in the form of a mobile. In doing so, his eyes were opened to an artist who long ago had had the book closed on him, so to speak, and the lessons learned have shaped his subsequent production. For other of the artists, it is a new view on modernism in general that underlies the re-seeing of Calder, both for his particular innovations and wideranging creativity. Aaron Curry’s modernist influences are clear, especially those of Jean Arp (1886–1966) or Jean Dubuffet (1901–1985). Yet the human and animal forms that Calder explored in 1930 in a lesser-known body of bronzes are especially apropos to Curry’s strategy of biomorphic, balanced forms.2 Meadows and Lippire reflect Calder’s concerns in that their engagement in the nature of materials, innovation of form, issues of design and balance, and use of color substantially ally them with the older artist. Calder worked intuitively, drew extensively from nature, relied on his own hands to create the work, and expected viewers to activate it, whether by stirring up the currents that caused the mobiles to swirl about, or by using their imagination to make the implied volumes fully three-dimensional.3 Meadows’s disdain of the postmodern tendency to spend more time in the context around a piece than with direct viewing of an object imbues his work with a particular Calderesque vigor.
2 Many of the bronzes were actually cast in 1944, during World War II when sheet metal was in short supply.
3 Except of course for the monumental works that were constructed in foundries under his supervision.
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