CONSTELLATION WITH RED OBJECT
ALEXANDER CALDER, 1943
Calder spent most of his life trying to build the universe. Seriously. Look at the mobiles. Little shapes floating around, turning, drifting, somehow held apart by forces you can't see. Tiny solar systems. And that's not being dramatic. Einstein himself once came to MoMA and stopped in front of one of Calder's motorized sculptures. It's called A Universe, because of course it is. The story goes he stood there watching it turn for forty minutes. Albert Einstein. Fully hypnotized by a Calder. Now jump ahead to 1943. There's a war on. Metal is hard to get, which is a problem if metal is basically your whole life. So Calder does what Calder does. He looks around the studio, finds some scrap wood, carves these odd little shapes, paints a few of them, and hooks them together with stiff wire. And look at what he gets. A red one. A black one. A couple brown shapes. That little yellow knob. All hanging apart like planets, or molecules, or whatever else is floating around out there. Except nothing moves. That's the funny part. The guy who got famous making sculpture move builds this little universe and makes the whole thing sit still. Years later, he explained what he'd been after. Bodies floating in space. Different sizes. Different weights. Different colors and temperatures. Some moving, some not. Which is pretty much this. Then James Johnson Sweeney and Marcel Duchamp see the new pieces and come up with a name. Constellations. Perfect. Because this isn't just Calder making do because he can't get metal. He takes a few scraps of wood and some wire and builds himself a piece of sky. They could ration his metal. They couldn't ration the stars.