SOW
ALEXANDER CALDER, 1928
Okay, so. Picture a little Parisian apartment, totally packed, everybody sitting on the floor. The lights go down. And this grown man gets on his knees and starts putting on a circus. A tiny one. Wire acrobats. A wire lion. A ringmaster. Trapezes, tightropes, the whole thing, all bent and rigged out of wire, cork, string, scraps of whatever he could find. And Calder is running everything by hand. Moving the performers. Making the noises. Doing the voices. Completely serious. And the people sitting on the floor watching? Half the Paris art world. Miró. Léger. People keep coming back. Because Calder is doing something strange. He's not carving sculpture. He's not casting it. He's drawing in the air. And pretty soon he starts pulling individual animals out of the circus and letting them stand on their own. Like this one. It's a pig. Technically, a sow. And it's basically nothing but steel wire, bent and looped around until your brain goes, yep. Pig. Snout. Little legs. Curly tail. Done. You can see straight through it. Half the sculpture is the empty air caught inside the wire. Even the shadow gets in on it. That's the trick he keeps chasing for the rest of his life. How little can you use and still make something feel alive? It starts here. On the floor of an apartment, with a homemade circus and this ridiculous little pig. Look how much pig he gets out of almost no wire.