"Therefore, why not plastic forms in motion? Not a simple translatory or rotary motion but several motions of different types, speeds and amplitudes composing to make a resultant whole. Just as one can compose colors, or forms, so one can compose motions."
- Alexander Calder
"How can art be realized? Out of volumes, motion, spaces bounded by the great space, the universe."
- Alexander Calder
If we are asked to name an artist in the history of contemporary sculpture who adopted “motion” as a sculptural element and the form of their sculptural work, Alexander Calder (1898-1976) and his moving sculptures dubbed “mobiles” will probably come to mind. Calder’s two statement-like quotes cited at the beginning of this essay demonstrate that his sculptures are no different from new challenges and experiments, and they cut through the wide range of his artistic practice, including painting, jewelry, and ornaments. Among them, “Calder Jewelry,” which is just as widely known as his mobiles, is especially meaningful, as it gives form to the aesthetic desire and potential of experimental contemporary sculpture that seeks to abandon the immobility of static sculptures, a limitation that has been in place for almost 2,000 years.
1969, Lamiera, bulloni e pittura, 259.1x342.9x236.2cm, Calder Foundation, New York Ⓒ 2009 Calder Foundation, New York
Then, we can argue that through the “motion“ of Calder‘s mobiles, the once immobile classical sculptures gained mass as nature or life that they long yearned, thereby becoming metaphors for “bodies“ that (occasionally) move in their given space or nature. Come to think of it, Calder‘s mobiles are notable because they represent early stages of the tradition of “moving sculptures,“ from geometric abstraction of Naum Gabo (1890-1977) to personification demonstrated through occasional movement of the sculptural body that replaced mechanical continuity. The birth of Calder‘s mobiles traces back to small wire toys the artist made for Cirque Calder, directly after moving to Paris in 1927. A group of artists and musicians visited Calder’s studio in Montparnasse to see this circus performance. Calder’s desires as a sculptor translated into mobiles that portrayed physical characteristics and intermittent motions created by those bodies. In the meantime, other works by Calder categorized as jewelry are fascinating in that they expand and transform a visitor’s body to take on a new role as a performing sculptor who follows the actions and motions of the body generated by wearing Calder jewelry.
- 1 Rosalind E. Krauss, Passages in Modern Sculpture, trans. Nanji Yun (Seoul: Yekyong Publishing Co., 2009), 237-260
- 2 Ibid, 256.
Calder’s Aspiration: Humanity
Calder’s moving sculptures exhibited in the white cube and his jewelry worn and cherished outside the gallery setting share aesthetic characteristics implied in his art in terms of their form and content. Motions of the body represented by vitality and the artist’s passion as a sculptor to materialize it aesthetically were reflected in jewelry, which could give form to theatrical elements. An object that once only existed in the gallery was separated from it and infiltrated into the visitor’s space, instantly transforming a beholder into a performer the moment it was worn. This marvelous phenomenon is rooted in “motion” that Calder could only rely on and “the sense of volume” created by motion.
Calder’s jewelry became sensational when progressive members of the art circle including American female painter Georgia O’Keeffe (1887-1986) and legendary art collector Marguerite “Peggy” Guggenehim (1898-1979), as well as celebrities of the time like Brooke Shields (1965-) and Anjelica Huston (1951) wore them. His mobile-inspired accessories and the OK brooch made for O’Keeffe confirm the artistic element of his jewelry. Calder began making jewelry for his sister’s doll during childhood, and all the jewelry he made throughout his life convey nature’s vitality through natural and soft curves and spirals that generate a sense of tension.
Calder later recalled that the term “mobile” referring to his sculptures was coined as follows: “I asked [Duchamp] what sort of name I could give these things and he at once produce ”mobile.“ In addition to something that moves, in French it also means motive.”
Byoungho KIM’s Sculptures and Jewelry, “Repetitions” and Units
Byoungho KIM (1974-) has repeatedly shared that it is “the programmed and artificial environment of contemporary industrial civilization” that fuels him with endless questions and inspiration. Kim studied printmaking and art engineering as an undergraduate and graduate student, and he has been making art based on meticulous design, detailed blueprint, and a production system that animates his designs and drawings.3) In other words, he makes detailed drawings first, consigns a workshop to produce standardized modules based on them, and then assembles the modules to make his sculptures. Instead of taking a traditional approach to sculpture, where meaning is imparted to object through the work of a sculptor who creates metaphorical figures, Kim opts for the mechanism that operates contemporary machine civilization as his sculptural language. His approach can be summarized by “repetition” and relational order of modules found in most of his sculptures. In that sense, Kim’s work is, in part, similar to that of the Minimalists, who directed attention to the simple order of “one thing after another” composition in terms of form. However, his work is distinct from their art in that while repetitions in their works demonstrated the logical method of investigating the question “what the world’s like,” Kim focuses on the mechanism behind contemporary civilization and intervenes in the very process of constructing units by combining individual modules. Take for example, the Garden series, which he first presented in 2013. Identical shapes that resemble mass-produced products are arranged as a repetitive pattern. The mass-production process of the mechanized contemporary industrial society’s calculated and programmed pattern has been translated into his contemporary Garden.
- “My work involves the assembly of objects produced through specialized processes so they become a single product. I thought this approach is a way of representing the environment I live in or a way of expressing how things are mass-produced.” - Byoungho KIM
Kim’s such approach to sculpture is interesting in that it is also adopted or integrated in his recent jewelry project titled, Daily Celebrating. The artist made jewelry—rings, necklaces, and earrings—inspired by his massive steel sculptures of the Garden series (2017-2023), which are vertical or horizontal assemblies of teardrop or water drop-shaped (elongated elliptical spheres) modules the artist calls the fruits of material civilization. Kim’s jewelry looks as though they are a few miniature modules taken from his artificial Garden representing today’s material civilization, and with hopes that each piece and the every day of our lives will shine, be celebrated, and be remembered. He emphasizes that though they may be small pieces of jewelry, they can transform into monuments greater than the original monumental sculptures when they are remembered and celebrated.
Two Hundred Ninety One
Drops of Tear
2013, aluminum, 100x40x230cm
Teardrop R/E18
2022, 925 silver ring
- 3 “Kim Byoungho x Soyoung Moon” in Kim Byoungho: The Manual
- (Seoul: Site & Page, 2023).
He made them
All along, we never questioned the conventional linear hierarchy of fine art, crafts, art objects, and ornaments that has been in place since the Renaissance.
The early to mid 20th century, when Calder was active in the art scene, was an era when functional anti-ornamentalism advocated by architects of the time such as Adolf Loos (1870-1933), Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886-1969), and Louis Sullivan (1856-1924) was a leading trend. Architectural style called international style and characterized by functionalism was dominant around the world, and jewelry or ornaments used for decoration were viewed as negatively as women’s social status at the time, as what must be strictly excluded. Even “time,” which was equivalent to “contemporaneity” was a concept reserved only for men then, so women had to wear “secret watches” in disguise as jewelry even just to check the time. It is evident here, then, that jewelry and ornaments were placed at bottom of the hierarchy with women. Meanwhile, Calder introduced new approaches of transforming solid and fixed objects into moving art objects and transforming those very objects in motion into jewelry to be worn, all to break away from conventional customs that were expected to be followed. On the other hand, we have Kim who disassembles parts and units of monumental structures composed of mass-produced modules, and then creates jewelry with those fragmented modules, thereby visualizing and materializing the grid-like structure of the contemporary society’s two-dimensional surface.
There is a great deal of time between Calder and Kim, and their works are markedly different in their characteristics; yet the two sculptors’ decorative jewelry “transform long-standing aesthetic questions concerning technology, media, and taste (is it a good painting or a bad painting?) into existential (what is art?), epistemological (how do we perceive art?), and institutional (who decides what art is?) questions,“ as Duchamp once said.
He made them, and now he asks us:
Is jewelry art? How do we perceive sculpture? What do we make of jewelry? Who decides what is art?
- 4 In the early 19th century, Austrian architect Adolf Loos harshly criticized ornaments in his essay, Ornament and Crime (in German, Ornament und Verbrechen). He wrote, “The evolution of culture is synonymous with the removal of ornament from utilitarian,” and “We have conquered ornament, we have won through to lack of ornamentation.” German-born architect Mies van der Rohe made a similar argument that “less is more,” and American architect Louis Sullivan stated, “form follows function,” all regarding ornament as unnecessary, extra element. As a matter of fact, “ornament” and “jewelry” need to be discussed separately, yet the two are not distinguished in this essay, for the purpose of gaining an understanding of historical background.
- 5 Hal Foster, Rosalind Krauss, Yve-Alain Bois, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Art Since 1900, trans. Suhee Bae and Junghun Shin (Seoul: Semicolon, 2016), 128.