Nicholas Mayes

From the Tate to Palmyra: to preserve great art, let it decay and regenerate

Strolling around Tate Modern’s recent Alexander Calder exhibition, something bothered me. Calder is best known for creating mobile, rather than static, sculptures; most of his pieces were intended to move, but some were now sitting lifelessly by the gallery’s white walls.

It’s hard to appreciate how radical Calder’s kinetic art was in its time. Hergé, who owned one of Calder’s sculptures, put it best: ‘I don’t know if you are familiar with his “mobiles”. They consist of elements of light metal, assembled by thin wires. When hung from the ceiling, the slightest draught will make them move. They are graceful, light and extraordinarily poetic.’

They sure are, or were. But here at the Tate, a sign explained that some of the moving parts inside several of Calder’s motorised sculptures – inside, note, and not visible to the gallery-goer – had become too fragile to allow the things to be switched on. The playful planets in his pretendy solar system had stopped orbiting. One jobsworth security guard told me off as I was trying to take a photo of the pieces in question, which is why I can’t remember which ones they were.

Anyway, this seemed to miss the point of Calder’s philosophy. Which would have been more important to him – that his sculptures should be seen in motion as he intended, or that a few screws and bolts should be preserved? Wouldn’t it be better to replace those and let the work live again – or are each of the parts somehow greater than the whole?

'Small Sphere and Heavy Sphere' (1932-33) by Alexander Calder

‘Small Sphere and Heavy Sphere’ (1932-33) by Alexander Calder

In another room in the exhibition – housing ‘Small Sphere and Heavy Sphere’ (1932-33), which I managed to photograph while jobsworth had his back turned – we learned: ‘The red sphere is pushed so that the white sphere arbitrarily knocks against an arrangement of bottles, a box, a can, and a gong on the floor.

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