UPWARDLY MOBILE
The Whitney unveils a trove of sculptures that have been hidden for decades
AFTER years of staying still, Alexander Calder’s mobiles are fluttering back to life.
Nearly 30 of his dangling, delicate contraptions and another eight motorized sculptures are in motion once more at the Whitney Museum’s new show “Calder: Hypermobility.” Pole-wielding museum staffers called “activators” make the rounds of the eighth-floor gallery, gently prodding one mobile after another to move the way their maker intended.
Several times a day, they’ll even switch on the motorized sculptures, whose Colorformlike parts haven’t moved, let alone been displayed, since Calder made them over 80 years ago. But be warned: They move verrry slowwwly: It takes five minutes for one tiny rotation.
Listen closely, and you might even hear some works emit a faint ping. Better still, rent an acoustic guide ($6, free to visitors under 18 and museum members) and you’ll hear music specially commissioned for the tour by Jim O’Rourke. Performances by the JACK Quartet, Christian Marclay and others are also scheduled. “They’re not really sculptures, but systems of movement,” says curator Jay Sanders, who teamed up with the Calder Foundation to reanimate them. But the works are fragile, which is why they’ll be up and running for a limited time. Watching them the other day was the artist’s grandson, Alexander “Sandy” Rower, who pronounced the show “awesome.” As playful as the mobiles seem — many suggest fish and birds, or even, like the “Big Red” mobile dangling over the museum’s Studio Cafe, a stegosaurus — their maker was “a serious man,” Rower tells The Post. He says he saw a lot of his grandfather, who spent many of his 78 years before his death in 1976 in New York.
Calder’s opposition to the Vietnam War earned him a place on Nixon’s “Enemies List,” Rower says, but, however serious he may have been, he wasn’t above a good fart joke. Maybe that’s partly because he knew his audience: “My fan mail is enormous,” Calder quipped. “Everyone is under 6.”
The artwork here, Rower says, isn’t “about anything. The subject is you — and your experience.”
Happily, this summer, you’ll have more time to experience it: from July 4 through August 29, the Whitney, normally closed on Tuesdays, will be open seven days a week.