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Meredith Malone
Associate Curator, Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum

Standing ten feet six inches high, Alexander Calder’s Five Rudders is composed of a large tripod base painted bright red, which balances a sequence of black sheet-metal elements at its apex using a series of steel rods.¹ Incorporating both a stabile, an abstract construction that is completely stationary, and a mobile, a sculptural work in which motion is a defining property, Five Rudders is a hybrid form known as a standing mobile, or a stabile-mobile.² The bolted sheets of steel making up the base foreshadow the monumentality of some of the artist’s large-scale stabiles produced later in the decade, while the steel rods function as lever arms that support the kinetic element above. Both the name of the sculpture and the industrial materials employed in its fabrication suggest a direct link to the devices used to steer ships and aircrafts, yet the sculpture also evokes biomorphic imagery such as flower petals and butterfly wings, which belies the weighty character of its materials.³

Functioning like a weather vane, the vertically oriented black “rudders” can be placed in motion by a slight touch of the hand or by atmospheric forces such as wind. Because the kinetic sequences of the mobile depend on equilibrium and cannot be fixed or programmed, the movement of the rudders through space is intermittent and irregular rather than mechanically continuous or predictable. Jean-Paul Sartre’s eloquent description of the inherent tension between stasis and motion in Calder’s sculptures speaks to the effect of Five Rudders: “For each [mobile] Calder establishes a general fated course of movement, then abandons them to it: time, sun, heat and wind will determine each particular dance. Thus the object is always midway between the servility of the statue and the independence of natural events.”⁴ It is important to note that—in contrast to Calder’s lighter hanging mobiles, which exhibit a lively dynamism and often include an aural element—Five Rudders, given its scale and considerable weight, produces a more limited range of motion. It is only during periods of severe weather that the speed and velocity of the separate elements become highly erratic and the rudders freely collide.

Created in 1964,⁵ Five Rudders in many ways epitomizes Calder’s sculptural production at this late moment in his career. Since the 1950s the artist had devoted his greatest efforts to large-scale sculpture.⁶ In addition to making mobiles by hand, he dramatically increased the scale of his works, and as is the case with Five Rudders, he entered into collaborations with foundries in France and the United States to aid in the production of his sculptures, which were regularly commissioned as monumental public works.⁷ At the same time an international kinetic art revival was under way, and Calder was positioned—along with Marcel Duchamp, Naum Gabo, László Moholy-Nagy, and Vladimir Tatlin—as one of its major progenitors.

From the mid-1950s to roughly the end of the following decade, numerous artists sought a more experiential approach to sculpture and began exploring the subtleties in the phenomena of speed and time as an experience generated between work and spectator.⁸ Introducing actual motion into sculpture was one way to achieve an art reflective of the viewer’s shifting sensory and perceptual point of view. While Calder was frequently singled out in this period as one of the forefathers of the postwar craze for kinetic art, he was no longer considered an innovator in the field.⁹ The American kinetic artist and critic George Rickey put it bluntly in 1965: “[Calder] put the word ‘mobile’ into the language. Yet once he had hit on his image, thirty years ago, he developed it little. . . . Calder has not clarified the form of kinetic art. It has been left to others to survey the scope of Calder’s idiom and to establish his place as progenitor by their development from his postulates.”¹⁰ As artistic production changed dramatically in the postwar period—Pop art and Minimal art superseded Abstract Expressionism as the dominant artistic movements in the United States, and assemblage and kinetic art flourished internationally—Calder continued with his signature style.

It was in part because of his predictable production that Calder received numerous commissions for public works, both in the United States and abroad, throughout the last two decades of his life.¹¹ During the postwar building boom of the 1950s and 1960s, public art was in high demand, and Calder’s stabiles and stabile-mobiles evinced a certain universal appeal—abstract yet retaining a strong resonance with natural forms, resolutely modern yet lighthearted—that rarely generated any significant public dissent.¹² His works quickly became not only popular urban landmarks but also status symbols, as noted by the Calder scholar Joan Marter, indicating by their presence in cities, corporate headquarters, sculpture gardens, and college campuses the commitment of their patrons to the public arts.¹³ Calder’s own statements about his work in the postwar period compounded the notion that his sculptures were devoid of criticality or historical consciousness; according to him “the lugubrious aspect. . . is eliminated in my approach to sculpture. But the gay and the joyous, when I can hit it right, are there. . . . I want to make things that are fun to look at, that have no propaganda value whatsoever.”¹⁴

Miwon Kwon’s identification of three distinct paradigms within the postwar history of the public art movement in the United States—“art-in-public-places,” “art-as-public-spaces,” and “art-in-the-public-interest”—is particularly helpful in situating Calder’s work within the larger sociohistorical context of the 1960s. During the initial phase of the revival of public sculpture in the 1960s, public art was dominated by the “art-in-public-places” paradigm: modernist abstract sculptures by internationally established male artists—including Calder, Henry Moore, and Isamu Noguchi—that were basically enlarged replicas of works normally found in museums and galleries.¹⁵ What distinguished them as “public,” other than size and scale, was the fact that they were placed outdoors in parks, university campuses, civic centers, plazas, and airports, often removed from plinths and displayed directly on the ground, where access was unrestricted. In most cases Calder produced autonomous works of art whose relationship to a given site was largely incidental; the particular qualities of the site were taken into account only insofar as they affected the aesthetic quality of the artwork as installed.¹⁶

While the goals of the public art movement initially included the edification of the public and the beautification of the urban environment, by the mid-1970s many critics felt that neither goal was being met. Rather than making a genuine gesture toward public engagement, artworks sited in public places were understood as functioning more like advertisements for individual artists. Criteria for public art sponsorship and funding subsequently evolved to promote an integrationist approach in which the specificities of a given site were considered integral to the outcome of a work. Public art would no longer merely consist of an autonomous sculpture but would necessarily engage in a meaningful dialogue with the surrounding architecture or landscape.¹⁷

Calder’s large-scale works made an undeniable, if in hindsight conflicted, contribution to the resurgence of public art in both the United States and Europe during the postwar years. Larger than human scale but not monumental, Five Rudders has, since its original installation in 1964 outside Steinberg Hall, become a readily identifiable symbol of the Kemper Art Museum. In its present location on the Museum’s sculpture plaza, its biomorphic imagery and dynamic forms add life to the rational elegance of the surrounding architecture. Five Rudders stands as a prominent example of Calder’s late experiments with wind-driven mobiles and ambitious, large-scale constructions while also serving as an important indicator of the changing conceptualization of public art in the highly volatile decade of the 1960s.