“Time past and time future / what might have been and what has been / point to one end, which is always present.” – “Burnt Norton,” T.S. Eliot
A major flaw of mine, I’ve long thought, is my natural bent toward sentimentality — a brash force, obscuring objective thought and analysis. Any objectivity in my analysis of art is sort of lost in that, which is probably worth acknowledging at the outset of this, another past and future perfect.
But, that is neither here nor there.
Alexander “Sandy” Calder was born in Lawnton in 1898, now part of Philadelphia. His father was a sculptor named Alexander Stirling Calder, whose own father was a sculptor named Alexander Milne Calder. In his own words: “I spent my childhood as a boy in the midst of my family, always enthusiastic about toys and string, and always a junkman of bits of wire and all the prettiest stuff in the garbage can.” He studied mechanical engineering before turning to art, and painting before turning to metal, making elaborate sculptures that Marcel Duchamp described as “mobiles.” Between these descriptions of trash and “mobiles,” I struggle to see my interpretation of Calder’s work represented by popular descriptions.
At the end of the day, Calder’s wire circus miniature, “Cirque Calder,” either deeply moves you or it does not. I have found that the scene, housed in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, elicits very few indifferent reactions. Some flit in and out, unaffected by what they see, but some sit. Though I can make no generalizations about the type of person who leaves versus the type who stays, I know I fall firmly into the latter camp. I believe I’ve experienced Cirque Calder more than any other piece of artwork; over the course of my life, I have sought it out more than any other piece of art.
I remember, or have been taught to remember, a few visits: as an infant with my father in the lobby of the Whitney’s location on the Upper East Side; in middle school with my mom, all masked up in its new (to us!) location; walking from my high school; and going two summers in a row to the tiny corner of the permanent collection, where little wire statues are encased in panoramic glass. The third summer I visited, it was gone. It was replaced, a few months later, by the exhibit “High Wire: Calder’s Circus at 100.”
Yes: a rather beautiful (though small) retrospective on Calder’s Circus. The room, decked out in pinks and purples instead of the black drapery in which the figures were long concealed, had a short video that played on a loop. On display also were his wire sculptures: a key instrument in his creation of “quite an elaborate circus of which animation is one of the chief characteristics,” as he called it.
When I was there in December, I attempted to inhabit the minds of those flitting in and out, landing on a few ideas I assumed crossed their mind upon viewing the exhibit. I thought of kitsch, I thought of the sweetness of the small wire statues cloaked in scraps of cloth (or in the case of my favorite, “The Man With a Thousand Vests,” sometimes shedding those clothes en masse under the watchful eye of what looks like a kangaroo), I thought of Sandy Calder in a red sweater, watching the looped video of his ’60s performance of the Circus in his home in France. (The New Yorker once described his appearance as “that of a gentle Stalin at a fancy-dress ball.” Sure!)
I thought of sentimentality is really what I mean to say.
As I thought, I realized I could inhabit this “flitting” mind so poorly that any attempt at writing on the “Calder Circus” (or « Cirque Calder ») would be contaminated by emotion, by sentimentality, and by my experiences watching it stacked on top of each other. No, all writing about art turns out like this for me: an embrace of the emotional while attempting to levy the intellectual, the former forever triumphant over the latter. Yes: I was desperately happy at the “High Wire” exhibit. A sentimentalism, sure, but perhaps a needed one. The layout was slightly different: the figures still in glass, but in four prisms instead of wrapped along the wall. Under a spotlight, instead of tucked away in the corner.
I’ve been reading a lot of T.S. Eliot lately, and I’ve been thinking a lot about him — I received a copy of his “Four Quartets” for Christmas and consumed all four one sleepy Wednesday. I’ve been thinking more and more about “Burnt Norton.” A poem about time, really: time and change. Original sin, too. But more literally, a manor in the Cotswolds, redemption, and religion. It’s an unclassifiable abstraction that can really only be understood with the other three quartets. But for my purposes, let’s suppose time and change are the most important takeaways from the poem.
This slightly contrived inclusion points me to one end: how odd — how remarkable — it is that the ephemeral moments we get to live existed at all.
“If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable. / What might have been is an abstraction / Remaining a perpetual possibility.”
Only in a world of speculation.
“I like broken wine glasses on stems, old carpets, old spring beds, smashed tin cans, bits of brass imbedded [sic] in asphalt, and I love pieces of red glass that come out of taillights.” — Alexander Calder I have yet to visit Calder Gardens. I intended to, before publishing this piece. I didn’t. Like most Swarthmore students (I think), I have the stifling tendency towards monasticism, towards isolation. I’m finishing this piece from a venture off campus, staring at the red glass of taillights and fiddling with the tiny pieces of aluminum foil in my pocket. Yes, I, too, like “all the prettiest stuff in the garbage can.”
