Alexander Calder paraphrased

By Rhonda Dredge

If you want to capture the essence of Alexander Calder you need to begin in one place then move forward without lifting your pen off the page, unless you’re at the NGV when you must use a pencil.

If you are three-quarters of the way through the exhibition you will not want to retrace your steps to get one.

Continuous line drawing is at the heart of student sketching and Calder was a master.

The line work of this American artist from Connecticut is superb, full of swirls and wild dashes but also complex crossings, repetitions and knots.

In a sculptural piece in which he claimed to have invented a new art form, he cut up his aluminium boat, sculpted the pieces into pleasing shapes than joined them with rigid pieces of wire.

The work, called Constellation with Red Knife, also includes carved hardwood in abstract forms and the wires not only serve to keep the pieces in place but also create a solid empty space which is quite relaxing.

How can a thin piece of wire allow enough separation between forms to serve as a protective device?

Calder’s work is moving, pre-dating as it does, the advent of social mechanisms to break down the barriers between galleries and the public.

He was encouraged by his artist mother to be clever and even at the age of 11 was working out how to turn a piece of tin into an animal with minimal cuts.

A craven attempt at impressing his mum is still impressing viewers today, judging by the rapt attention of an art student from RMIT who had been to the lecture the night before and was on the steps of the gallery the moment it opened this morning.

Relevance is an important criteria for selecting artists to show at the NGV with many students getting their inspiration from what is imported from overseas where more radical and, often more modest, movements have prospered, or at least been able to grow without too much condemnation.

According to the student, Calder sold just 300 of the 23,000 pieces he made during his lifetime, which included mobiles, illustrations, paintings, jewellery and sculpture.

The impression the exhibition gives of his character is one of radical innovation but really, from the distance of 80 years, his work seems quite constrained and that is its beauty.

You won’t see Alexander Calder self-promoting. In fact he was far too shy to share any of his jewellery with the public or manufacturers, instead giving it away to friends and family for special occasions.

Even at his largest in scale, Calder was almost heart-rendingly true to his original sheet metal cutting days. He managed to making a rocking duck with just four bends and eight cuts out of a sheet and it’s this parsimony that is so clever and was at the heart of the Modernist revolution.

The RMIT student said it was almost impossible to be an artist now because art was so much part of society rather than a small gesture with a pair of metal-cutters.

Calder is credited with the invention of the mobile or perhaps it was Duchamp who gave him this label in a gentle swipe at the artist who is featured in a black and white film bending wire while wearing a suit.

The curators have used a quote by Calder as an endnote to the exhibition in which he suggests that it would be silly to look for meaning in his work.

That is a paraphrase so if you want the original you’ll have to see it for yourself.

Alexander Calder: Radical Inventor, NGV International, until August 4.