How Alexander Calder Became America’s Most Beloved Sculptor | Hacker News Reader

How Alexander Calder Became America’s Most Beloved Sculptor

smithsonianmag.com

23 pointsneonate9 comments

I far prefer his early mobiles and even simple but recognisable abstract wire work to the later work described. He seemed to go from small carefree and fluid to large heavy and crude/austere. I'm sure the latter made him more money.

Is there some well-trod path to being able to appreciate this sort of work? I'm looking at the pictures in the article and wow do I ever not "get" this, to the point that I can't understand how one might "get" it. That camel...

[EDIT] if it helps, the only one I kind of appreciate is Croisière, but even that one seems like it'd be better if it were less shoddy and cheap looking. It looks like a quickly-made scale mockup or model for some other, fully finished work, and I don't follow how that (lack of?) quality contributes to its value, in any sense, as sometimes such things can.

Make a point of frequently going to art museums and sculpture gardens. Read the placards and learn to recognize certain artists, spend time looking at the pieces that grab your attention and think about them. Don't feel like you have to enjoy every piece. This will build your appreciation/understanding for two reasons:

1) Like all things, art depends on context. A piece is often in conversation with other works by the same artist, contemporaries, predecessors, or historical events.

2) Sculpture in particular depends on scale, perspective, and physical detail. You'll never get to appreciate these qualities through a photograph - you have to be there in person and walk around the sculpture. Look at it from different distances, different angles.

Yeah, maybe I just need to look at more of it, though the required travel to do so makes that much more difficult than with most other art forms aside from architecture. Maybe that's part of the appeal of state- and country-spanning "conversations" of this sort? Most people are simply priced out of traveling enough to appreciate it? Meanwhile traditional sculpture relies on more general aesthetic principals and references other more-accessible media sufficiently that you don't need to see tons of it to get at least some of the point or intended sense of a given piece.

This kinda junk-drawer-looking abstract sculpture stuff hits me the same way the heavier, growlier kinds of heavy metal do, in that I can never tell whether I'm supposed to be laughing with it, laughing at it, laughing with it at some target of ridicule of which I am unaware, or not laughing at all, but they don't seem like they could be anything other than some form of comedy, even though their fans rarely act like it's the sort of low-brow fart-joke-adjacent thing it appears to be/sounds like to me, and which I don't mind in moderation but wears thin with me pretty quickly. Probably I just haven't been exposed to enough of it.

Calder's work has to be seen in person to appreciate it. Photographs definitely don't give you much of an impression. I'd compare it to the experience of standing beneath a skyscraper and looking up. There's no photograph that can convey the actual experience. The best they can do is reference it and remind us.

I'd been aware of Calder's mobiles for over 20 years, but only this summer did I see one in person. The one I saw was much larger in person that I'd expected. But the main impression I had was how balanced all of the pieces were (they had to be to make the sculpture work as a mobile) and how light and airy it was (there's a lot of empty space surrounding the pieces). What makes the mobiles interesting as sculptures is that your standard sculptural work just sits there, the forces which act on the sculpture are static, whereas the mobile is constantly in motion, it's a very dynamic arrangement. If a person had a poetic way of speaking, they'd say the mobiles were a little bit alive. But if not, they are captivating to watch, their behavior is both predicable and not (chaos rather than disorder).

That was my impression from the article too. The works they talk about there don't really wow me or justify the title. From Wikipedia, I learned:

1. He was one of the first sculptors to incorporate motors and movement into what had up until that point been an entirely static artform.

2. Related, he invented the hanging mobile as a sculptural style. The fact that it changes its shape and orientation at the whim of the winds was an innovation.

3. He invented wire sculpture.

Given all those, I can see how he gets acclaim.

Ah, his fame, at least, makes sense then. I've definitely seen other mobiles and wire sculpture that I like.

The title doesn't have much to do with the article. Calder's popularity is, in my opinion, largely due to the non-political, inoffensive nature. It is in a conversation with other artists, but doesn't say anything about war, death, love, governance; it does not stimulate strong emotion, but an abstracted air of interesting-ness.

I'll give as a direct counterpoint Jo Davidson. I'd not heard of him, but friends mentioned encountering him (or someone who'd had a bust made by him) in Big Sur.

I started reading the commissions list, and the just burst out laughing. Davidson simply did an increadible number of works on some of the most notable names of the 20th century.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jo_Davidson#Commissions

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