Motion Man

In Manhattan's Pierre Matisse Gallery, critics and gallery-goers gravely inspected a number of gangling contraptions. Made up of string, wire, metal rods, colored wooden balls, sheet metal, the objects delicately bobbled, jiggled, woggled, teetered and tottered on their moorings. Some were powered by tiny electric motors, others needed a gentle push to set them going. These were "Mobiles." There were also "Stabiles"--a fantastic, animal-like limb from a tree; and the William Paley Radio Trophy of stainless steel cones surmounted by wires. These stayed perfectly still. Motionless or jiggly, they were all creations of Alexander ("Sandy") Calder, a hulking, greying, boyish onetime mechanical engineer, onetime painter. Though his Mobiles and Stabiles did not pretend to mean anything--except possibly No. 8, which resembled a pair of deliberate ballet dancers--they are oddly pleasing, oddly arresting.

Sandy Calder, son of Sculptor A. Stirling Calder, gave up painting when he found that "wire, or something to twist, or tear, or bend, is an easier medium for me to think in." He has made a circus of bent-wire figures, a mobile setting for a musical work (Erik Satie's Socrate), in which steel hoops, colored discs and rectangles, "very gentle," move during the performance. At the Paris Exposition he constructed a fountain of mercury flowing through tubes; for the Consolidated Edison Building at the New York World's Fair he designed a "Water Ballet" of fountains from 14 nozzles, which are controlled by cams, squirt in choreographic rhythms in a five-minute cycle.

Designer Calder sells his Mobiles and Stabiles, makes them all in his workshops in Manhattan or in Roxbury, Conn. Costume Designer Millia Davenport has an outdoor Mobile--a mushroom-shaped hunk of hard Lignum vitae, balanced upon another--which ordinarily is as still as a Stabile. But during the Eastern hurricane last autumn, with trees crashing all around it, the Mobile revolved ceaselessly on its axis, all through the storm.

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