Originally published at: A film about artist Alexander Calder's amazing miniature circus from 1931 | Boing Boing
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Whenever I see Calder’s work in museums, I always think it looks like its a bit sad. It’s usually set up in a way where it can’t move, and clearly it wants to move. My wife went to an exhibit that featured his mobiles, and they had the staff nearby telling people “don’t blow” lest the breeze make them move.
Certainly insurance reasons I guess.
Lovely whimsical art. The motion in those pieces is excellent.
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I saw this film at the Whitney (or maybe the Guggenheim - I can’t remember) back in the mid-eighties with a thorough display of Calder’s works - his performance piece of the circus was described (in a somewhat snarky manner) by Thomas Wolfe in his posthumous novel You Can’t Go Home Again.
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I saw this footage at a Calder exhibition in The Hague in 2012. I believe these very ingenious circus shows, usually performed during dinners and at other social occasions, were extremely popular with and admired by his artist friends. The many mobiles at the exhibit cheered me up no end.
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Thomas Wolfe saw Calder’s circus at one of the dinner parties in NYC where Calder performed it. He wrote about it in You Can’t Go Home Again. Evidently, Wolfe did not like the performance:
There’s a story that Calder was invited to Harvard by students to show his work soon after he returned from France. The students met him at the station and asked where all the pieces for the exhibition were. Calder reached into one pocket and pulled out a spool of wire, reached into another and pulled out a pair of pliers, “Right here,” he said.
Calder created over 100,000 works in his lifetime. He was always fiddling with something. I have at least one artist friend who has the same tendency. I call it Alexander Calder’s disease.
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