Spider

Alexander Calder, 1939 · Gallery 522 · Floor 5

Ok so wait for somebody to walk past it. There. Did you catch that? One piece lifts, another drops, the whole thing wobbles and then finds itself again. Nobody touched it. And there's no motor in here. All black, top to bottom. Nearly seven feet tall, wider than it is tall, and standing on two bent rods. On the left, one big slab of aluminum hanging low. A rounded triangle. On the right, curved arms, each ending in a black teardrop. Legs, once you've seen it. So that's the trick. One heavy thing against a lot of light ones. Which Calder worked out standing in somebody else's studio. Alright, October 1930. Paris. He's at Mondrian's place. Windows on both sides, walls pinned all over with coloured cardboard rectangles. Calder looks around and thinks: all of this should move. Mondrian wanted nothing to do with that idea. So he goes home and does it anyway. Cranks. Little electric motors. Then Duchamp saw them and handed him a word. Mobile. In French that means motion and it means motive, both at once. February 1932. A show in Paris, the motorized ones, and the crowd loved them. One man didn’t. Mondrian told Calder they moved too slowly. So Calder sped them up. Still too slow. So Calder offered to build one especially fast. Mondrian said nope. What he really wanted was for the whole thing to just stay still. Calder eventually gets rid of the motors. But he doesn’t stop the motion. He lets the room run it.

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