&

Joy
&
Alexander Calder
Contemporary Art:
Form,
Balance,
Lynne Warren
17

Joy
With Essays By
George Baker
Brooke Kamin Rapaport
And
Bryan Granger
Dominic Molon
Diana Nawi
Julie Rodrigues Widholm
&
Alexander Calder
Contemporary Art:
Form,
Balance,
Lynne Warren
19

20
Contents
10
12
18
Lenders to the Exhibition
Director’s Foreword
Madeleine Grynsztejn
14 Acknowledgments
Lynne Warren
94
110
160
171
175
Alexander Calder and Contemporary Art
Lynne Warren
Calder’s Mobility
George Baker
Alexander Calder Plates
Why Calder is Back: A Modern Master’s Creative Reuse of Materials
Brooke Kamin Rapaport
Catalogue of the Exhibition
Reproduction Credits

28
38
48
56
66
74
84
Martin Boyce
Dominic Molon
Nathan Carter
Dominic Molon
Abraham Cruzvillegas
Julie Rodrigues Wildholm
Aaron Curry
Bryan Granger
Kristi Lippire
Lynne Warren
Jason Meadows
Diana Nawi
Jason Middlebrook
Diana Nawi
21

“How can art be
realized?
...It must not be just a
fleeting moment
bond
Lynne Warren
but a physical
between the varying events in life.”
Alexander Calder 1
19

20
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

2
Many of the bronzes were actually cast in 1944, during
World War II when sheet metal was in short supply.
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).
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 Martin Boyce, Untitled (2007)
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.
3
Except of course for the monumental works that were
constructed in foundries under his supervision.
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22
Aaron Curry, Danny Skullface Sky Boat (Reclining) (2009)
4
Captured famously in the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary
Art’s 1992 exhibition Helter Skelter: LA. Art in the
1990s (Los Angeles: Museum of Contemporary Art, 1992).
Lippire demonstrates deep resonance of method with Calder as well. The things of the
world that can be taken for granted and viewed as astonishing all at the same time, like
Calder’s snowflakes, birds, and other animals, also captivate this artist. A resident of Los
Angeles, Lippire additionally represents the importance of that city as an incubator for new
sculpture; Curry, Meadows, and Middlebrook also have significant connections to California
all received their advanced degrees in the state and Curry and Meadows also live in L.A.
The seven sculptors selected for this exhibition also eschew the dark, often scatological
tone of the works of the generation of sculptors exemplified by Los Angeles-based Mike
Kelley (b. 1954) and Charles Ray (b. 1953) their immediate predecessors and if not directly
their teachers-artists whose legacies looms large. 4
There are certainly other artists who could have been paired with Calder in this
exhibition. This essay is a way of broadening the scope.
Everyone knows Calder. He’s so recognizable. Even if you never enter a museum, you
walk by his works in plazas, in airports. People love him, but … Yes, but … The art world’s
view is captured well by painter Carroll Dunham in his review of the Whitney’s 2008
Alexander Calder: The Paris Years, 1926–1933. Not surprisingly, yet totally astonishingly,
the article starts with the sentence “It’s difficult to know what to make of Alexander
Calder.” He goes on to state, “He is arguably one of the most beloved and readily identifiable
artists of his time, but it can be tough to take him completely seriously.” 5 ;
Yes, indeed. Calder
faced this short-sightedness even during his lifetime, but never let it distract from his project
of making art with legendary vitality. Unlike the work of many of the artists who have been
“Fernand Leger once called Calder arealist;
Calder’s reply is: ‘If you can’t imagine things,
you can’t make them,
and anything you imagine is real. ’”
Bernice Rose
inspirational figures in contemporary art, Calder’s art is there for the
seeing and the experiencing. One needn’t study the Kabbalah, plumb
artist statements or manifestos, have read philosophy, delve into the psychosexual
depths of an artist’s autobiography, or be conversant with the socio-political
context of the artwork to appreciate a Calder. The fact that children historically have responded
so viscerally to Calder’s art, often taken as a detriment by sophisticates, seems a
particular strength in today’s highly intellectualized art world. As quoted by Marcel Bruzeau,
Calder said “... children adore mobile statues and understand their meaning immediately. I
have seen children ... run and shout with joy in my exhibitions. They like it instinctively.” 6
And the reason that contemporary art tilts so heavily toward the intellectual is no mystery
if one examines how artists are educated. It is the rare individual who emerges in today’s
art world without having attended art school, many of which feature highly theoretical
5
Carroll Dunham, “High Wire Act,” Artforum 47, no. 6
(February 2009): 165; the writer argues for discarding such
a limited viewpoint on Calder.
6
Marcel Bruzeau, “Alexander Calder, a Blacksmith in the Town.”
Revue Francaise des Télécommunications
(December 1973): 47–49.

Jason Meadows, Black Panther (2001)
7
Robert Storr indicted the tacit acceptance of the importance of
theory in contemporary art in a recent interview with Helen
Stoilas published in The Art Newspaper in which he states:
“I’m not sure that art and theory were ever that close to begin
with … what people now call theory is a vast field and a
relatively small amount of it bears directly on art, or at least
on art production. We’re in a very strange situation where some
artists have derived a lot from their theoretical reading but
never as systematically as people are inclined to think. … A lot
of artists don’t want to tip their hands and show how selective
curricula; an advanced degree is ever more common. Yet as demonstrated by this exhibition,
something is afoot that few who follow contemporary art foresaw, so enveloped are we by
the intellectualized process of artmaking that long has been contemporary art’s calling card.
As a long-time observer of the institution of the art school and the nature of how artists
are educated, I had settled into a jaundiced view about what some have called the contemporary
art academy. Traditional methods of teaching the visual arts that focused on passing
down and refining technical skills with which an artist could express his or her ideas had
long been supplanted by the art school’s version of “publish or perish:” come up with a body
of work and be prepared to talk about it. Since at least the late 1970s, artworks that could be
talked about, analyzed in systems other than aesthetics, and provide fodder for writings from
reviews to PhD dissertations have dominated, 7 and art school curricula quickly evolved into
methods to develop an artist’s intellectual or psychological faculties that he or she may have
something “to say” about the world. 8
“I feel an artist should go about his work simply with
great respect for his materials
... sculptors of all places and climate have used what came readily to hand.
... It was their
which gave value to the result of their labors.
... simplicity of equipment and an adventurous spirit
Alexander Calder
knowledge and invention
in attacking the unfamiliar or unknown
are more apt to result in a primitive, rather than decadent, art.”
and shallow their understanding is; a lot of people who do
theory full time don’t really want to acknowledge that the process
of making art is fundamentally different from the process
of writing theory. And, therefore, even though you may share
a vocabulary, you don’t share at all the same kind of generative
process or goals. See Helen Stoilas. “Robert Storr: Most
theory has little bearing on art.” The Art Newspaper/Frieze
Art Fair Daily. October 16, 2009.
8
This pedagogical philosophy was reiterated as recently as 2006
at the conference “A New Institutionalism: Where Artists &
Curators Meet” sponsored by the School of the Art Institute.
SAlC professor David Getsy summarized the presentations
by such figures as Eugenie Joo, Michael Brenson and Bruce
Jenkins by stating the art school had “shifted from a ‘haven’
to a ‘forum,’ and in that forum what was offered was “the
format of a multiple conversation” which “keeps all levels of
a conversation open” and allows “diversification of authority”
that “asserts importance of other arts institutions and
questions the meaning of art schools.”
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To put it simply, it is the difference between individuals who “go
around looking” and those who “go around seeing.” Going around
looking implies approaching the world with a set of conditions and
selecting out things that meet those conditions. Going around seeing
implies that the artist doesn’t have set criteria guiding his or her
observations. In this scenario one never knows what one will come
across, what one will “see,” because one isn’t looking for anything
in particular. And make no mistake, Calder was an artist who went
around seeing.
This is not a lament for the old ways or a claim that one approach
is better than the other. But perhaps in an age where what should be
obvious seems to take us catastrophically by surprise—the events
of 9/11 and the economic meltdown of late 2008 being two key
examples—it might be better to have artists seeing rather than
looking. It might be a good idea to encourage those who are open to
seeing what we haven’t already defined and classified, those who can
see around and beyond the conventions which so quickly seem to
coalesce—rather than merely looking for means by which to express
one’s preconceptions.
Yet of course as usually is the case, the artists are ahead of us,
as the artists selected for this exhibition seem to be doing just this.
The shift occurred in second half of the 1990s. Student artists were
no longer content to swallow the anti-retinal/theoretical agenda that
had so long predominated art school curricula. An interest in figures
like Buckminster Fuller 9 (1895–1983) and Charles (1907–1978) and
Ray Eames 10 (1912–1988) and subjects like modern architecture and
design took shape. Student artists, tiring of the social-political-sexual
identity nexus that had also long dominated so-called advanced
practice, started using their eyes again. Young artists began roaming
the modern galleries of art museums, making things with their
hands, even tinkering.
9
The exhibition Buckminster Fuller: Starting with the
Universe, organized by the Whitney Museum of American
Art, New York, in 2008 was the first major U.S. exhibition
of Fuller’s work in thirty-five years, in reaction to this
renewed interest.
Abraham Cruzvillegas, Autoconstrucción (2008)
10
An important book on the Eameses, The Work of Charles
and Ray Eames: A Legacy of Invention, was published
in 1997 on the occasion of a touring exhibition of the highly
influential designers.

11
Martin Herbert “Sifting Defunct Modernity in Search of
Something Useful.” TATE ETC, no. 15 (Spring 2009)
Perhaps it is as simple as the exhaustion of tropes. Duchamp’s influence has, after all,
dominated for over half a century. Perhaps it is another vagary of human nature, the attraction
to the unfamiliar. Perhaps modernism as represented by Alexander Calder is being seen
across the crowded years and the creature spied there is downright exotic. As Martin Herbert
puts it, albeit much more cynically, “This refreshed attention to modernism’s potential might
be considered a classic generational response to a bequest of obsolete tools.” 11 Anthony
Huberman, in the catalogue to the SculptureCenter’s pioneering 2005 exhibition on the subject
of the new sculptural generation, Make It Now, suggests that an antidote to the current
culture’s distort toward short-term memory is that artists “mine the long-term memory of
art history, find its enduring forms and images, and make them in new ways that resonate
with the contemporary moment.” 12 Martin Herbert agrees “New Modernism is rampant,” in
his article “Sifting Defunct Modernity in Search of Something Useful.” He also notes various
names (besides his own “New Modernism”) to categorize the tendency, including Nicolas
Bourriaud’s “altermodernism.” 13 Whatever the reason, the floodgates are open and “re-modernism”
(my neologism) is everywhere.
This is not to say artists haven’t been sidling up to modernist tenets and in particular
Calder’s innovations for a while. Artists from a slightly older generation and who thus are
better known than the cohort represented in the present exhibition include Sarah Sze (b.
1969), who balances forms in space in dazzling feats of micro-architecture; Ernesto Neto
(b. 1964), who besides activating the eye engages the nose with fragrant materials in many
of his biomorphic hanging installations; and Tony Feher (b. 1956), whose use of discarded
everyday objects such as plastic bottles and straws balanced into rudimentary mobiles puts
him in a direct lineage to Calder. Likewise, New York artist B. Wurtz (b. 1948), although
not as well known as many of his peers, has since the early 1990s explored the aesthetics
of detritus such as produce nets, plastic bags and lids, shoe laces, and buttons in delicate
balancing sculptures.
Others employ modernist forms or quote from the legacy. British conceptualist Simon
Starling (b. 1967) has explored modernist themes for at least a decade, and recently showed
reproductions of Henry Moore sculptures balanced on a Calder-like mobile. The Brazilian-
born, London-based sculptor Alexandre da Cunha (b. 1969) acknowledges Mondrian
as an influence in a 2006 body of work and in 2008 created a Calderesque mobile titled
12
Anthony Huberman, “Things Don’t Fall Apart,” Make It Now:
New Sculpture in New York (Long Island City, New York:
SculptureCenter, 2005), 10.
13
Herbert, “Sifting Defunct Modernity in Search of
Something Useful.”
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26
Nathan Carter,
Radar Reflector Origin
Petit Calvigny Grenada (2009)
14
Pablo Leon de la Barra “Alexandre da Cunha ‘Club Sandwich’
in Berlin.” Centre for the Aesthetic Revolution,
November 10, 2008.
childlike
“Calder’s art, although
in its exuberance,
was a
not to be dismissed by writing it off as that.”
Pedro E. Guerrero
serious endeavor,
Club Sandwich using pipes and baking sheets. A
contributor to the website centrefortheaesthetic-
revolution writes that da Cunha “uses ordinary
domestic materials and puts them into a new context.
… However, the objects … do not function as
readymades in a Duchampian sense, as they have
been worked on and changed by the artist and thus
enter into a contemporary dialogue with the vocabulary
and aesthetics of classical modemism.” 14
Rachel Harrison (b. 1966), especially in works such as
Huffy Howler (2004), which features a bicycle as a fulcrum for
various dangling found objects, features some of the same materials
and formal concerns that Jason Meadows, Aaron Curry, and other of her
peers use. But her method is conglomerative and installational, as opposed to
the constructed and object-focused works of the sculptors featured in the current exhibition.
Emerging artist Agathe Snow’s (b. 1976) ambitious Master Bait Me commission for
the New Museum in 2008 consisted of magnetized rubber balls and popular cultural imagery
in and around a cagelike metal column of rebar. A Calderesque avatar toiling in a Blade
Runner version of America’s future might come up with such a work.
The suspending of objects inevitably calls up the mobile form. New York-based Christian
Holstad’s (b. 1972) wide-ranging practice includes sculptures made of fabrics, yarns, vinyl,
and other soft materials that hang from the ceiling in the form of chandeliers, or cascade
and drape provocatively from a central axis. The Brazilian artist Beatriz Milhazes (b. 1960)
has also recently made works in the form of chandeliers, such as the spectacular Gamboa of
2008 of brightly colored, spinning discs and balls created for Prospect 1, the New Orleans
Biennial of 2009. Jamaican-born, New York-based Nari Ward’s (b. 1963) Bottle Messenger,
created for the Yokohama Triennale of Contemporary Art, Japan, in 2005 also suspends
objects, in this case, recycled bottles, from a form suggesting a chandelier. And standing
somewhat alone in that he explores a darker side of human life in his Calder-inspired constructions,
Los Angeles-based Evan Holloway (b. 1967) has created a major series of works
that balance tiny mask-heads on armatures of numbers.

This method of working is quite distinct from the group that refers to Calder or other
modem masters in the archetypal postmodern way, such as Mario Garcia Torres (b. 1975) with
his The Kabul Golf Club (2006). who uses Calder “as a symbol of progress and Western
thought” 15 or Alessandro Balteo Yazbeck (b. 1972) with the work UNstabile Mobile (2007),
which used a Calderesque object to cast a shadow that replicated a map of an Iraqi oil field. 16
As well, there are numerous other contemporary artists who hang their works in space,
from the magnificent creations of Lee Bontecou (b. 1931) from the 1990s and early 2000s,
or Magdelena Abakanowicz (b. 1930) and her abakans to those of their lesser-known peer
Ruth Asawa (b. 1926), whose wire-vessel hanging sculptures arise directly out of modernism.
These figures, along with artists such as Bruce Nauman (b. 1941), with his Hanging
Carousel (George Skins a Fox) (1988), or Felix Gonzalez-Torres (1957–1996) and Jorge
Pardo (b. 1963), who suspend string of lights or lighting fixtures in the gallery space, clearly
fall into very different aesthetic territory.
It also leaves aside such figures as Judy Pfaff (b. 1946), whose influential body of work,
which she now acknowledges as having been influenced by Calder, nevertheless seems to
embrace an entirely different aesthetic, that of assemblage. 17 Another artist of the 1970s, Ree
Morton (1936–1977), often hailed as an important feminist, can also be seen as a fascinating
figure in the lineage from Calder to the current generation. There is much research to
be done tracing this lineage, which the present project can only hint about. Works such as
Morton’s See-Saw (1974) or Untitled (1971–73) were influenced by her study of British psy-
chologist Richard L. Gregory’s writings that explicated the nature of visual perception, which
could also fruitfully be applied to Calder’s innovations: how form and scale of objects is determined
by our perception of its distance and position is but one area Gregory explored. 18
Alexander Calder’s unique artistic temperament—straightforward but highly sophisticated,
expert but down-to-earth, utterly serious but displaying singular wit and playful
humor—is unmistakable in his equally unique artistic innovations, of which the mobile is
but the best known.
15
Julie Rodrigues Widholm, Escultura Social: A New Generation
of Art from Mexico City (Chicago: Museum of
Contemporary Art, 2007), 132.
16
A reviewer noted that “kineticism, a genre iconically connected
to Calder, embodies the political reality wrought by the Iraqi
war—the heightened instability that now characterizes the
region.” The writer perhaps had never had the opportunity
to observe that Calder’s mobiles, which while undoubtedly
kinetic, are hardly unstable, almost magically finding their
fulcrums and quickly reestablishing their balance if disturbed.
Kristi Lippire, Fumigated Sculpture (2006)
This was noted by none less than Jean-Paul Sartre in his
foreword for a 1947 exhibition at Buchholz Gallery, New York:
“The ‘mobiles’ … always return to their original form …” See
Lisa Ann Favero, Sculpture 26 no. 8 (October 2007): 75.
17
While especially the “Paris Years” of Calder, dominated
by wire sculpture and the Circus works, include assemblages,
his mobiles and stabiles cannot be said to be works of assemblage,
which currently is defined as a practice which amasses
thoughtfully selected found objects and everyday materials.
18
For valuable analysis of Ree Morton, see Diana Baldon,
“Toward the Temple of Artifice and Naturalism.”
Ree Morton: Works 1971–1977 (New York: Distributed
Art Publishers, 2009).
We must thank the current generation of artists for
refocusing our eyes on such treasure as Calder’s
body of work. At the same time we must be entirely
grateful to Alexander Calder for his fierce devotion
to seeing and experiencing the world that makes his
art so vital and alive and able to resonate so abundantly
into the twenty-first century.
27