Calder/Tuttle: Tentative

Alexander Calder, Richard Tuttle, Calder/Tuttle: Tentative at Pace Gallery, Los Angeles

By D.K. Sole

Richard Tuttle’s curation of Alexander Calder’s work at Pace was all hypersensitive brutality, a knifelike argument in favor of showing this well-exposed old faithful American artist yet again. “Explore” is an overused word in art blurbs (artists are always “exploring” or “investigating” something) but Tuttle, with his customary sincerity, took it to heart. He really did want you to explore your way into the show and discover Calder.

This curation showed off one of his strengths: being so nakedly obvious that it’s too weird to grasp. The first thing I came across when I walked into the first room was a medium sculpture on a surface that was set at about the level of my head, and it was as if Tuttle was there saying, “Calder’s great. We should look up to him.” And the strange pedestal – which was not a piece of ordinary gallery furniture but something the curator had devised himself – was white, with additional panels sticking up behind and around the object so that we would absolutely see it. In a different show this whiteness would go without saying because pedestals in galleries are normally white by default, but the curation was so clearly being treated like an artwork in itself that it came across as a meticulous choice.

The gesture was decisive, didactic, but the materiality of the presentation was, as the title advertises, “tentative.” The pedestals looked both hyperstable – chunked like multisided tanks – and not stable at all. One of them was composed of overlapping flaps held up with a pole. That combination of tempos was appropriate to Calder’s sculpture work, which likewise hovers between decisiveness and the possibility of unanticipated change. Skill serves uncertainty (when will the sculpture move next?), creating it, calibrating it out of nothing, engineered like a joke. (Calder as engineer-clown, engineer-juggler; the circus artist.)

It felt strange to be looking up at an object that was not made to be set so high. Not wrong, per se, but there was the sense that I was doing something unexpected. My way of viewing artworks had been altered just so that I could look at that piece. And this went on throughout the show. Some of the pedestals had walls around them with viewing windows cut into the sides so that walking around them felt like recreating the spinning action of a zoetrope. The air, a crucial participant in so many of Calder’s sculptures, was visibly blocked and released. One sculpture was concealed inside a tall box backed up against a wall with holes in it. The frontal hole was set higher than whatever was inside, so even as I was moving towards it all I saw in there was the white gallery wall on the far side, everything white on white, until the action of approaching the box made a curve of solid black rise up, gradually getting larger as I came closer. Finally I craned forward and looked down into the window, mimicking, with my body, the action of bending and bowing the head to the floor that I finally saw implied in the shape of the sculpture itself.

The exhibition was infused with the expectation that you’d already seen Calder as Calder wanted to be seen—with the hanging mobiles at the correct height and plenty of free air so the paddles can catch the breeze—and therefore it would be stimulating for you to notice that the mood has changed. I went to the Las Vegas Art and Culture Summit a few days before I saw Tentative, and as I stood in Pace I found myself thinking about the magnitude of the challenge the city had set itself when it decided that it wanted to encourage artists. Las Vegas has never, as far as I’m aware, done very much to build an infrastructure of assumed art knowledge. If you were planning a show like Tentative here, you would wonder how many of the people who were going to see it had ever come across a Calder outside a textbook or a digital image. Could you trust them to be excited by the fact that you had incarcerated the small standing pieces behind plexiglass, depriving them of the air currents that usually make them shiver? Not really. Why should they know that something had been taken away if they hadn’t been given the opportunity to realize that it was supposed to be there in the first place? (The quivering paddles had been transformed into plaintive hands reaching out to touch the prison glass.) You would have the choice of either ignoring that thought or trying to work around it. You would probably not employ Richard Tuttle as your curator.

Alexander Calder, Richard Tuttle
Calder/Tuttle: Tentative
Pace Gallery
1201 S La Brea Ave, Los Angeles, CA 90019
Jan 21 – Feb 25, 2023

Published by Wendy Kveck on March 14, 2023.

BlogDeanne SoleMarch 14, 2023Alexander Calder, Richard Tuttle, D.K. Sole, PACE Gallery