Halfway to Heaven

There is the idea of an object floating—
not supported—the use of a very long thread,
or a long arm in cantilever as a means of support
seems to best approximate this freedom from
the earth. Thus what I produce is not precisely
what I have in mind—but a sort of sketch,
a man-made approximation.
–Alexander Calder[1]

The great poets don’t only represent an image through words, they use words to build an expressive resonance and awaken powerful sensations in their readers. A poet’s description of nature is not meant to provide a mental image of a tree, but the feeling of standing in solitude within the forest, in communion with the flux of natural energies. Calder is one of those poets—a poet who speaks in objects rather than words. To understand Calder’s art we must approach his mobiles, stabiles, and standing mobiles in a spirit of meditative introspection. There’s a subtle harmony in our experience of his work that has echoes and parallels—a gracious relationship—with centuries of Japanese expression. This relationship is grounded in a deep reverence for nature— not simply plants or creatures but all aspects of life, including flowing water, creeping moss, floating mist, and rocks and their sisters, the stones.

Marcel Duchamp wrote that Calder’s mobiles “design in mid-air their unpredictable arabesques and introduce an element of lasting surprise. The symphony is complete when color and sound join in and call on all our senses to follow the unwritten score. Pure joie de vivre. The art of Calder is the sublimation of a tree in the wind.”[2] Duchamp did not simply equate Calder’s magisterial work with the grandeur of nature—the tree is not the subject—but rather with the invisible forces of sublimation. Natural energies give life to your experience of a mobile. The mobile points toward a new reality.

An eternal dialogue unfolds as my grandfather’s sculptures move through a specific time and space. His mobiles suggest a dynamic process not unlike homeostasis, a state of oscillation. They are in constant impermanence, tuning and rebalancing in response to external events and forces; they remain in equilibrium regardless of these stimuli, revealing the serendipity of self-regulation. His universal language creates an intimate experience—occasions for contemplation. These moments can put you in touch with the indescribable uniqueness of your emotions. “To most people who look at a mobile,” Calder explained, “it’s no more than a series of flat objects that move. To a few, though, it may be poetry. I feel that there’s a greater scope for the imagination in work that can’t be pinpointed to any specific emotion.”[3] A viewer is liberated.

Calder followed a path of radical self-reliance, trusting his strengths and abilities. He practiced the art of being alone and never had a studio assistant. Following an intuitive channel, he allowed external forces to participate in acts of self-creation, true collaborations with nature. Calder also respected the vagaries and uncertainties of his work. He didn’t insist on perfecting whatever came out of this fluid process. He embraced disparity and approximation as central tenets of his compositions. “To me the most important thing in composition is disparity,” he wrote in 1943. “The admission of approximation is necessary, for one cannot hope to be absolute in his precision.”[4] To struggle for a pure or austere sensation necessitates finding beauty in things that are imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. Awareness of the transient nature of earthly things, and a corresponding pleasure in the objects that bear the mark of this impermanence, is always present in the dialogue that life has with death. Calder helps us grapple with feelings of incompleteness and longing. We move beyond melancholy. Humans, in our anticipatory way, try to predict events as they’re unfolding. Calder’s moving sculptures allow a deeper person-to-environment sense of unity.

Our mind builds a coherent model of the world. The way we experience life involves predictions we’re making based on sensory input. Calder’s work carries us farther, at times even conjuring feelings of bewilderment. For some, a Calder mobile can transform a dense fog into a hazy mist; for others, it offers a glimpse of the sublime—maybe even momentarily transporting us to a floating world, halfway to heaven.

1. [1] Calder, “What Abstract Art Means to Me,” The Museum of Modern Art Bulletin 18, no. 3 (Spring 1951), 8.
2. [2] Marcel Duchamp in Collection of the Société Anonyme (New Haven: Yale, 1950), 52.
3. [3] Calder in Selden Rodman, ed., “Alexander Calder,” Conversations with Artists (New York: Devin-Adair, 1957), 142.
4. [4] Calder, “À Propos of Measuring a Mobile,” manuscript, 1943, Agnes Rindge Claflin papers concerning Alexander Calder, 1936–c. 1970s, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.