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Alexander Calder
Eighteen Numbered Black, 1953

Artwork Info

Artwork title
Eighteen Numbered Black
Artist name
Alexander Calder
Date created
1953
Classification
sculpture
Medium
metal and paint
Dimensions
110 in. × 140 in. × 140 in. (279.4 cm × 355.6 cm × 355.6 cm)
Credit
The Doris and Donald Fisher Collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
Copyright
© Calder Foundation, New York / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Permanent URL
https://www.sfmoma.org/artwork/FC.624
Artwork status
On view on floor 3 as part of Alexander Calder: Dissonant Harmony

Audio Stories

How Calder invented mobiles

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transcripts

NARRATOR:

In 1932, Alexander Calder wrote, “Why must art be static? You look at an abstraction, sculptured or painted, an entirely exciting arrangement of planes, spheres, nuclei, entirely without meaning. It would be perfect but it is always still. The next step in sculpture is motion.

 

GARY GARRELS:

It is hard to imagine that the mobile actually was invented, the idea of the mobile is now so ubiquitous.

 

NARRATOR:

Curator Gary Garrels.

 

 

GARRELS:

We see mobiles in many forms everywhere, but this was actually invented by Alexander Calder in Paris in the thirties. He was influenced by the Surrealists and their interest in chance; that we do not have total rational control of our thinking or of our experience in life. Calder was interested in how sculpture might give a voice to that. And by making the mobile, there are a set vocabulary of forms and possibilities of certain combinations and shapes, the way the piece relates to space. But on the other hand, it’s indeterminate; that the elements can move freely from the influence of air currents.

 

NARRATOR:

There was no name for such a thing—a sculpture set loose in space—free to move with each passing breeze. So Calder asked his friend, artist Marcel Duchamp, what he should call them. Duchamp’s answer? “Mobile,” the French word for “movable” as well as “motive.” Duchamp and Calder loved puns and double-entendres. “Motive” suggested that a sculpture might have a mind of its own.

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Audio Stories

How Calder is like Beethoven

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transcripts

SFX: Music, spare, meditative

 

SANDY ROWER:

I actually grew up with a mobile above me all the time that was made by my grandfather.

 

NARRATOR:

Sandy Rower

 

ROWER:

I wish Eighteen Numbered Black was mine.

 

SFX: Piano opens up into a concerto reminiscent of Beethoven

 

ROWER:

If you think about a handwritten composition by Beethoven or something, if you think about the notes on the score, then the sculpture starts to have this kind of resonance to how music or sound has these waves, these frequencies. And the mobiles have that, too.

 

SFX: Music

 

NARRATOR:

Move around. Try looking at it from different angles.

 

ROWER:

It has so much going on that each time you see it, you can have a new experience. There’s a sensation that something might even be alive. Even though it’s just metal—you know, sheet metal, wire, paint, you do feel this quality of a presence in the room with you.

 

SFX: Music fades

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Other Works by Alexander Calder

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