Eyes on the Metal
A Flying Squirrel? A Bat?
Welcome to the crisp and cooler days of Fall after a long and hot Summer in my current city of Philadelphia! Fall is the traditional season when we’re back to schools, colleges, and workplaces pushing the proverbial pedal to the metal in terms of our brain power. Even Amtrak, our nation’s passenger train service, is celebrating its ‘pedal to the metal’ movement with its introduction of new and faster Acela rolling stock. The days of heat-induced lethargy wrought by hot summer days are, indeed, over.
You may have noticed an addition of a new portfolio of photos that I took during my recent visit to the recently-opened Calder Gardens in Philadelphia. Alexander Calder was born in Pennsylvania and would go on to be one of our nation’s most iconic ‘metal’ sculptors. His works have inspired generations of metal sculptors, including a schoolmate of mine from my high school. Calder spent much of his life in France during an era of new arts and literature in that nation. During my college years, I read several novels by Alain Robbe-Grillet, the author of the concept of the ‘new novel’. Reading a Robbe-Grillet novel demanded much brain power; it was up to the reader to interpret the novel’s plot. Take, for example, the title of one of his novels, ‘La Jalousie’. Already, that title is a loaded word; it means both ‘jealousy’ or the movable slats of a shutter or jalousie window.
Not unlike Robbe-Grillet and his new novel, Calder’s works, which he did label just as Robbe-Grillet titled his new novels, are abstract works; they are not like the great works in bronze of, say, August Rodin. Rodin’s famous ‘Thinker’ depicts an actual seated human nude male in a thinking mode. Ditto for his other big work, ‘Gates of Hell’, which depict the damned figures. A passerby unfamiliar with Rodin’s work can easily identify Rodin’s ‘Thinker’ and ‘Gates of Hell’ as he or she spots those two works along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway in Philadelphia. But what of the black metal sculpture created by Calder, which stands at the entrance plaza to the new Calder Gardens exhibition house? What does it represent. A flying squirrel? A bat? Some other creature or character? I may not know the official titles of Calder’s artistic works. But the real beauty of his magnificent works is that they demand our brain power to delve into the various meanings and intents of their creator. What is the meaning of works that rely on mathematical shapes such as parabolas and circles? How about Calder’s use of colors, blacks, and whites in his works?
In a number of ways, Calder could be known as as ‘nouveau sculpteur’ of abstract works composed of metal. At a restless time when eyes are too frequently glued to screens to gather canned information, it’s time to visit a museum devoted to Calder’s works, most notably the wonderful collection now available for interpretation at the Calder Gardens in Philadelphia. Calder’s works, as was the case of Robbe-Grillet’s novels, were never intended to be canned goods. Calder is demanding us to peel our eyes away from screens and to actually think through what his works could mean.
One important note for future visitors to the Calder Gardens in Philadelphia; The collection is subject to rotation and as new works by Calder may be introduced there, other works may be rotated out. Hence the dates on my portfolio of the current collection.