2005.03.27 13:38
moving along (down the Parkway)
There were claims that Duchamp suggested the mobile form to Calder. In the thirties, Calder was in Paris, making his wire portraits of Josephine Baker and others. Clay Spohn, a very curious artist from San Francisco who was a conceptual bricoleur and who did some of the first assemblage art in California, was also in Paris at that time, and he knew both Calder and Duchamp. Spohn told me that he had actually been the one to suggest the idea of the mobile to Calder. I had heard that it was Duchamp, and asked Marcel about that. He laughed and said, "Oh, people have always misunderstood. Spohn, this strange American whom I enjoyed very much, suggested to Calder that he take the little parts and balance them on wires to make these contraptions. What I did was to name it. What I invented was the word mobile."
Walter Hopps, "Gimme Strength: Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp Remembered" in Joseph Cornell/Marcel Duchamp ...In Resonance (Houston: Menil Foundation, Inc., 1998), p. 74
|