The American Scene; Mobile Sculpture

Good morning. This is Howard Vincent, Billing the Arts for the American Scene for Illinois Institute of Technology. This fascinating object you saw to begin the show is a mobile. Many of you perhaps have indulged in the hobby of making mobiles. You're Sunday mobilists, perhaps, and you are aware that this has been quite a movement in the last 20 years, movement perhaps dying out now or fading off of a mobile. And one of the more distinguished mobilists in Chicago in the past, and still, although he has turned to other things right now, is Harold Hayden of the University of Chicago and well known as a leader in the art field as a practicing artist in Chicago. And we're going to have him discuss this with us as a problem with mobiles. I suppose Harold, the best way to start would be to the history of it. Where did it come from, mobiles? Good many people think that it's a rather recent invention, and Alexander Calder

gets the big play if you should arrive at an airport almost anywhere in the world. There's a bet anyway that you might find a Calder mobile somewhere. You could appreciate now. Well, and yet he has a monopoly on it. He's the only man who is collected widely by museums. A lot of people make mobiles and have made them. But you trace things back a little and you discover that the Chinese had dangling bits of glass, wind, what did you call them? Wind, windharps. Windharps of glass would move in the breeze and make different sounds. We still have the most of the lobbyists ever. I mean, it was a child fun. So that antecedents in the arts often turn out to be farther back than you think. There's always nothing new anyhow. But there has been a, when did Calder start working his, doing his mobiles? I can't, about seven. A date, I'd say early 30s or 30s. About 30s, yes. And of course, he wowed the whole world and it was extension probably of some wire drawing and work with metals that he was doing. And he stayed with it. He's done wonders with a constant invention. And consequently, it's hard for

anybody to do anything but imitate him, careful. He's put a stamp on it so decisively that anything one does, one says, all you're doing a Calder. Yes. I got into the act through his influence. There was a Calder for sale at a fairly extravagant price in one of the Chicago galleries, somewhere back in the late 40s. And the gallery people saw it on sale without any effect, turned to me and said, why don't you make a mobile? I've never made one before. Let's make a mobile Chicago style and price it reasonably and sell it. And that gave me the aesthetic problem of not being a Alexander Calder Jr. and yet producing something that would do the same thing in air. Also producing something whatever Chicago style may be. Yes. To create the style without intending to. The Calder Mobile, generally, is compared to the leaves of a tree, the branches, big arm moves out and the

smaller one below it moves a little and they all move to and fro quite often they're linked so that they can't make complete rotations. They go so far and they stop. This is extremely practical. You can do it with links of iron chain in the last four centuries, as long as nobody melts it up. But I turned to another principle, namely the central suspension. Calder has used this too, of course, but I went exclusively towards central suspension and then tried to develop what I could around it. Well, excuse me just a minute. I think that maybe we didn't define mobile. A mobile is what's up. I'll tell you what it is. In the early days, they walked into galleries and said to the people, I want one of those things that hangs up there. All right. Why do the seal? It hangs and it moves. And it moves. Of its own, of the breeze from the breezes and of its own bullies. Yes, and occasionally there are motors. The museum and science industry has one of Calder's with a motor built into it that keeps it going. And it's been done. Well, why not? Well, why not? It's a mobile. It moves. Well, you adopted a slightly different, somewhat different principle than the near

-mobiles from Calder. Well, I hope to be a little bit original and not entirely derivative. And so avoid it all those series of branches and never made one of those. It's a foliation. Yes. And the branching is characteristic of course. And then I used threads as little motors. They store energy. This mobile that started moving at the beginning of the program winds up its cord and stores energy and then unwind as it time passes until it gradually comes to rest. If there's a breeze, it'll keep going. But the thread, because it permits the free rotation, acts as a kind of built -in motor. And if we were paying attention to this one, you might see that I can give it a good twist and get it going, maybe set the ring going opposite. And that'll keep moving for quite a while. As long as I say, as long as anybody wants to look at it, it might be fifteen or twenty minutes. And then it may approach the perpetual motion there. That, incidentally, is a principle that I would like to develop

sometime on a grand scale ten, fifteen feet high. It was heavy materials. But as you see, now it's come to rest. You might look at that. And what is the principle involved there? The parts are rotating. And in the center is a triple spiral. All one piece of wire, as one spiral goes down, the middle one goes up and the center one goes down. And it's possible, instead of having the random movement that's subject to constant change, to build in a rhythm. So that as one goes up, the other goes down. I'm afraid there's little hipensism involved here too, and you could possibly get accused. But those three spirals, and there could be more, there could be fewer, play against each other, and their relations are built in tightly, since it's all one piece of wire that does this up and down, twisting and turning. It's a principle that I haven't seen elsewhere, and it's one that intrigues me for developing on a grand scale. Yes. Also that heavy central piece acts as a motor, and once it's going, it'll go quite awhile as we said before. And now,

just to be thankful for a moment, but is this interesting mobile, this fascination of the spiral, which Frank Lloyd Wright showed, of course, in the Guggenheim building, is this an attempt to fight the rigid horizontals and verticals of machines society? I think it is, and although this is poetry, what you said earlier might apply. You'll notice that these are more or less continuous in motion and in form. The circles go around, they complete themselves, and the spirals do too, and they float. If your eye were to follow down one of those spirals, you would soon start up following the same wire, because that's exactly what happens. It goes down, and it goes up again, and it goes down. It's a long way from end to end. Yes. How new would you inflow, I think, is very much our century? Yes. Well, that's certainly, let's run with the Guggenheim Museum moment, when you stand inside that building and see if the thing is moving all the time. Of course, what gives it motion is not the literal motion, but you have the people

moving, and they, in a sense, are to stir the spiral of going somehow. Well, it does have an essential unity. Here is a building in which you elevate to the top and walk slowly down a ramp that is by no means just level. It changes height, and it's quite like walking gently down a hill in the country with different ground levels. But as you go, it changes, the view changes, and it is constantly reviving itself, and so it does seem that you and it are turning. Yes. I think you have there a static mobile, if you can use it to crazy. And many people visiting and have come into the fun, the things, the look of the people moving around. You're more aware. There's no museum where you can see everybody in it, virtually at a glance, and where you can get close to a picture and then get several rooms away and still see it. Well, you, in this one, we were just looking at the opposite opposing spirals. In that principle used in some staircases, very elaborate staircases in Europe, they have staircases. Have you seen that? Yes. There are one or two. And then when the people move, they pass. Yes, they pass. They pass,

but they pass, but never. No, they never somehow, I've never understood the engineering of it. Well, like some mountain roads that go jacknaping up, or hairpin curves, and you pass someone going the other way who is really following you or ahead of you. Yes. There's two roads, different levels pass. Yes. It makes for a very fluid world. Another thing that the mobile has as a problem is to get up and down motion, and there's none of it in this. Whereas in the mobile we have hanging above that upper one, if I should stand up and touch Yes, stand up and touch it. Yes. Get the loin on it. The little activity up there in that horizontal suspension makes it possible to get motion that is up and down. And when there's any kind of a general breeze blowing, you'll find that this thing keeps changing and sometimes looking red, sometimes looking black, since it's their party colored. And this is in the mobile, well,

is Nishandelier a mobile in the sand? Yes. And there have been people from time to time who said, why don't you make me an electric light? Probably they would like an 18th century electric light, as I heard a person furnished house. But a one that would be a mobile, this is entirely possible. And it could show lights on the walls, it could have prisms and transparencies of plastic or glass so that this movement would carry lights around. Now of course at this point you may get a little involved, you may wonder whether or not people will go crazy. Richard Bennett, the architect, was asking me once, very intrigued with the project of a kind of light mobile that was based on a prism, which a shaft of light would strike and then cast these many little prismatic color patterns on walls and ceilings. His notion was that it was the ideal mobile for an old people's home, because it moved so very slowly and was so cautious and quiet. As the light of the sun moved, all these little forms would move. And if you've ever seen shadows moving

into the corner of a room, it's quite fascinating because at the middle of the room it moves slowly. And then as it hits the corner, it zips right around. It goes fast around the corner, it slows down, fast around the corner and it's because of the relative distance. So there is a strange and wonderful acceleration. And when you have a prism that's throwing 100 or 150 spots of colored light, it has possibilities. Are you tempted to do a chandelier? I am. I'm just waiting for someone in the commission. No, I see. Well, what has happened to the mobile in recent years? It's dropped out of sight because it became entirely too popular and has not do it yourself. I've been told by people when they've looked at what seemed to be fairly simple mobiles, well, I can do that myself, you're charging too much. And I will say, well, now it takes so many minutes for each little knot and if you want to go to that trouble, I certainly encourage you to be your own artist. And in fact, when the simpler mobiles that I've made have been looked over by industry with the notion of producing them as premiums and the millions, the thing that

stopped them always has been the labor of making those, I know some ingenuity is required, plus the fact that the general public still doesn't really know. They estimated 2 % of the US really knew what a mobile was. And that's despite paint companies that use cardboard mobiles and despite the mail order houses, which I think took the bottom out of the creative market by putting them out in plastic and cardboard at 298 and 398. I heard some of these how the dime stories ruined the mobile. That's certainly true. And furthermore, they ruined it aesthetically because it was the cow jumping over the moon. It was not an abstraction. It came representation. It was storytelling. It was for the nursery. Whereas we even ocean these things are for anybody. Did you do one which is slightly storytelling you did a fishball once? I did a flying fishball that had abstract fish. The one that has more storytelling and which was produced in great number in which I'm always out of, it's the one I still keep making is the Cheshire cat, which has the face of a cat, just the ears,

the eyes and the combination mouth in a couple of rings. And that mouth disappears and it comes back as a smile comes and goes. And that is literary. Yes indeed. But it was designed to try to overcome this disaster that happened. But it's about as abstract a literary thing you have, the disappearance. Yes. Disappearance made a thing. Yes. And then it comes back unexpectedly and keeps moving. But you continue still to make them on commissioners if they come on. Very exciting things. But what is the attraction of aesthetic, the attraction of a mobile? That I heard the best expressed by one of the students in our humanities general course at the university who after looking for a few minutes at one of college's mobiles in the art institute just turned and said why it's like watching the clouds. It constantly changes and there's no clear prediction of the new combinations. They're limited. The movement can be only of a certain sort. But that

novelty of the change, the new combination which comes. It has limitation and restriction but fluidity, it has a beauty of a game of tennis. I'm not a tennis player. Well, I am. So we saw you. But it has a discipline as well as well. Although I can tell you that it has some aspects of tennis, people like to bat these mobiles. And one of the most intriguing discoveries I had was to be asked to come down to make a copy for a friend who had a girl that purchased this table stand mobile, which had a kind of face suggested in it, the eyes of which were sheets of brass, little ovals of brass. And when I came down to look at it and saw that these brass eyes were all pockmarked, little nicks in and all over, I said to myself, what have I done? What kind of scrap material did I use for this mobile? And then it turned out that the young lady, when she came home from work, would sit in the opposite corner of the room

with her BB gun and shoot at these target practices. So the mobile probably has a secret history. Well, and you can say that these great big socks and an airplane draws behind it for gunnering practices, targets, is a mobile. They certainly are mobile. Yes. I had another question in here about the mobile, I'm sorry, it slipped my mind in there. But you are doing, you are a painter, really. And this is some of the convergence of the mobiles for the time being, but you like to experiment, don't you? Yes. You like to experiment a great thing. Oh, you experiment in your painting, don't you? Yes. Very calm. Well, let's go into that, not that that is mobile, but it is interesting. So, not I was going to use the word play. I think the one thing is interesting about a mobile is the element of play in it. I don't mean play in any cheap loose set. I feel that way about it, it's a light and playful thing, and that mobile that was designed for the children in the Bob's Roberts

Memorial Hospital, we have a picture of that. We have one picture of it, I'm afraid it is mixed up with shadows, but at the top of it, you can see the mobile parts. This is a room in which pipes go up the wall. It's a recreation and play room for the children in the hospital. I had a design a mobile, it would be close to the ceiling, so the teenage boys jumping up wouldn't knock it down too easily. And one that could be seen by children lying flat in the back, possibly, on a stretcher on a chair of some kind, and also to be seen in the normal positions. The one in which they wouldn't shoot that was BB gun. Well, the worst thing that ever happened to this one was that one of the small children reported, and I'm not sure how accurately, that her nurse threw a book at it to make it go. But she may have, for all I know, they've done marvelous things. Did one of Collar's and when it was being shown at the Art Institute one time, didn't somebody come and just knock it over and the thing just collapsed? I think so. That could have happened. That was that famous collector

who, Aaron Burk, the Aaron Burk collection, the Collar was in the Aaron Burk collection. It was knocked over by somebody. Well, of course, one of those of Collar's was called Street Car and had a gong set in the middle of it, which was struck by chance every now and then. And I think they set a fan to make sure it happens. There were occasions during that exhibit when it did sound like a car barn. It was being going clon, clon, periodically. Well, that was a magic pipe coming up from other pipes, spraying out into the room, and then on the... It's pretty colored. It's many colored. Right colored, yeah. And the little parts represented fish. Because of your problem with getting it high, you made that more... More in the Collar pattern, didn't you, Lee? Yes. Yes, they go out and they hang down, and they stay as flat as they can to the ceiling. Very attractive. Well, now, when I said play, you see what I meant by, willing to move around the experiment, not rigidify things, and you've done that and you're painting to have to use the experiment. Let's have some of that now. Well, the thing that I have done, having had the usual conventional experience, is develop

over quite a few years, virtually a quarter century, the painting that I discovered while I was still in college, namely painting based upon what you see with two eyes. This at first I thought was a real revelation, and I wondered why everybody wasn't rushing in to do it, and I ran across comments and books that the artist in the Western world really needed only one eye, and here was I, seeing with two eyes, and noticing that the world was not the way you see it with one, in fact, all the images are doubled except in the plane of focus. Dariusco. Sort of, and you can study stereoscopic pictures to find out the displacement, although I'm more involved with the suggestions of space and the complexity of form that comes by doubling the image. So that it turned out there are good many games that are played. This principal one is this business of looking past your two fingers, which don't quite touch. In between you'll see a little sausage floating, about six inches ahead of your eyes. Well, if the fingers don't quite touch, and if you look

at the far wall in your room, you see a little sausage, the overlapping images of the two finger ends, floating there in mid space, and that's an old children's game that most people have played, but it is the basic principle of binocular or two -eyed vision. I've taught people, including artists, to see what is double, what the sea with both eyes. If they look at the wall and hold the finger up six or eight inches ahead, they should see two fingers, and if they have trouble one eye and then the other, they'll see those images jump back and forth. It's harder when they look at the finger to realize that everything beyond is double, but it is. And when you learn to see this way, the whole world is a much more exciting visual experience. It has depth and movement, and you are seeing through the full depth of your field vision, instead of seeing just what you focus on. We all learn to focus on one thing. Yes, that's true. It's a very charming intelligence, and I remember as a child, that business of closing one eye and seeing things move. Yes, you could make a cellophane. And so I set out to paint it, with all kinds of discoveries, things that I hadn't thought were there. And even in this

painting here, it's in a chapel, it's in this couple of years, and it's a fairly confusing example. But the plan of focus is on variety. The idea in the word variety, on a kind of theater marquee. It's something like a theater or entertainment zone in a big, complex city. It's a painting that was in a series that I called Talking Buildings, because it occurred to me suddenly one summer that buildings throughout our great cities shout messages at people, tell them to buy this, and eat that, and do come be entertained. I didn't look for romantic and literal names. I found romantic and imaginative names, and things that are quite literally sound, such as the lower part of this is the legend, Ladies Served, which I've seen again and again. And reflecting on that, you get some very interesting conclusions. Bandbox, dancing, then variety and diner, and fortune, and frolic, and the romance of these names, a

plaza, and a figureo, and an opera, and usually there's a palace somewhere in one of these pictures, because almost every American city has a palace, and what it is, maybe a theater, it might even be a filling station, or a eating parlor, or a hotel, of course. But in this picture, I was able to vary the lettering, which would be rather monotonous, if it were all just in focus, by doubling the image forward and back. It gives it a nervous vitality, doesn't it? It's disturbing to people. It is. I remember one curator of an art museum turning eyes away, and saying, that's too much, I can't stand that, which I took as a great compliment, because stimulation of the optical nerve is hard to achieve. Well, it is extremely complex, and the idea is a simple idea, and it's very clear idea, as you stated it, but the whole thing has a very complex dance to it. About one

of my other experiences, and this connection was being told by a New York dealer, that this was kind of thing was what he had bought glasses to avoid seeing. And yet, I just attest that this is normal vision. Oh, DeGas, one time, he had bad vision towards the latter part of his life, and one day they gave him a pair of spectacles to correct it. And he said, God, now I see the world like Bougareau, though he didn't want to go back to our vision, he wanted to keep his own, which was after all, rather than more important. But the most important vision for the painter is imaginative, and so instead of just being literal or photographic, I would naturally use this for expressive purposes, for getting that thing, you were talking about excitement, and the Brazilians, and depth, too, by simulating the conditions of normal vision, depth. Now, this painting is a kind of bridge between abstractionism and the... Well, they all are, you know. All paintings are an abstraction that you take three dimensional things and flatten them to a flat plane. It's the greatest abstraction possible,

after that anything else is a degree of suggestion, simplification, one kind or another. But if words weren't apparent at first, you would say that's an abstract painting. You might, just because of the display of colors, and yet it's of the city, it's rectilinear, flat planes facing you one after another, the old city, that is, the modern new city, the brazilia of the future, may have curbing forms and novel shapes, or the cargo, certainly. It is, although it's the kind of Chicago city planners don't like. All right, but nevertheless it's Chicago, it's honest. There's a picture like that that a city planner wanted to borrow for a convention in order to show other city planners what they should not do. Well, I felt I'd made some right -wing of existence. I think so. Well, didn't I see your name in the paper recently up to some monkey shines here? I mean, some real achievement, and let's hear about that. Well, I've had a very happy experience in the last several years working in cooperation with the New York architect, Percival Goodman, on two of his temples, one in Chicago and one in Gary.

And one of these is represented here by the arc cover at the front of the sanctuary. This, I designed to suit the architect's arc shape. It is executed in hooked wool, brilliant colors, and was done by the women of the congregation. Some 40 or 50 of them, including a few men who joined in just for the honor of doing it, who may have spent about $1 ,200 working on it. What a pity we don't have this in color, because this color program here, because that painting showed up so well. Yes, this would too. And you have loses a lot of not having the color. It's key to the stained glass windows. And where is this located? This is located in Chicago. It is Temple Beth Am at 71st and Coles Avenue. 71st and Coles Avenue. South West. Southeast, South East, South Shore Drive. I like to see this sometimes. And then most recently I've been working in still another medium, namely Mosaic.

Oh yeah. Also for one of Percival Goodman's buildings, the Temple Beth El in Gary Indiana. This was a new story with the new story. Yes, the new story picked this up. This is the original old mosaic of the classic days you've seen in Europe so much. The Byzantine glass, treated with some depth, a very strong depth to the impressionist painters, because I have learned much from their use of color. Yes. A blue area, for example, is blue of several shades, maybe as many as half a dozen, plus some greens and yellows and violets, and live in the blue. And there is no simple color in it. But I've done all I could to make it exciting. And this stands for the law, the robes of the high priest. This too is a very vivid color. Yes, very vivid. Oh, this would be stunning to see. And this is painting for eternity to quote one of the Italian artists. It's glass and will not change. It's color. All paint has a limited life, but the glass is permanent. Eternity is a very long word. And that allows me to take a longer

time in doing these. Yes, it might be expected. But when I see buildings which were built for eternity, and even 50 years ago, and look at them now. Well, I hope this does last to eternity. Well, works of these order, of this order, that is in the hands of a congregation and in an institution. I think this may be one reason why. And many of the public and a religious public building, it does stand preservation. Many of our great moderns have sought a chapel. Yes, as well. Matisse and Vaughnson and Cacto. Cacto, strange to have Cacto doing one. But I think you'd like some time to do it. Do you ever do anything in architecture? No, and I think I'll leave that to architect. I already have a lot of respect for them. But you work along with them, of course. Yes, and what are you doing now? I'm continuing with the Mosaic. You're doing the Mosaic? Second Mosaic. A large one? Yes, it's eight feet high and five and a half feet wide. Must be in tremendous amount of work. You're not a lazy man. It's a long, tedious,

but I'm doing it directly. Nobody else does it for me. But you have a very strong tactile sense. And the visual sense of color? Yes, totally. Well, we've had a discussion, and I'm glad to say it was more than a discussion of mobile. We had this interesting discussion of mobile, but also some of the other work that Harold Hayden of the University of Chicago is doing. Thank you very much, Hal, for coming to be with us. It's been a pleasure, Howard.