Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture, Tate Modern (until 13 April 2016)
Even before he made his trademark suspended mobile sculptures, this glorious exhibition of one of the twentieth century’s most recognisable—but also under-regarded—artists reveals that Alexander Calder was already king of the kinetic. The first two rooms of his bent, looping—and sometimes lewd—wire portraits and figures bristle with energy and cast shadows that stand in as vivacious alter egos, whether in the tipping movement of tennis player Helen Wills reaching for a shot, the puckish features of his friend Joan Miró, or a naked Circus strongman supporting six precariously balanced figures.
Piet Mondrian had little truck with Calder’s suggestion that the austere Dutchman apply some motion to his shapes, but then Calder also gave short shrift to rectangles, declaring they tended to “constipate movement”. In another revelatory room of rarely shown works from the 1930s, we therefore see square and rectangular panels relegated to the role of vividly coloured backdrops—all the better to offset a procession of dangling curvaceous shapes. But soon these organic discs, petals and leaf forms break free to soar, oscillate and quiver aloft, as well as rise up from the floor as evidence of Calder’s experimentation with fluidity, movement and space.
Standing in one of the large, grand final rooms is like being simultaneously airborne and underwater with shoals or flocks or delicate vegetation drifting all around: Snow Flurry is an accurate title for one mobile with sprays of floating white discs, each quivering at the end of a multitude of taut wire prongs. It’s a show to lift the spirits and confirms the radical experimentation of Calder’s hedonistic play.
Ben Rivers: Earth Needs More Magicians / Edgelands, Camden Arts Centre (until 29 November)
Shot using vintage equipment on 16mm stock, these four atmospheric films of Ben Rivers take you out of the mainstream and off into the margins, where anything can happen—and it often does. Shortly after filming the beautiful sub-tropical landscape and sunken World War Two debris on the remote South Pacific island of Vanuatu, the entire region was devastated by Hurricane Pam. Footage of livid sunsets and boiling lava in its active volcano feels like a premonition of impending disaster.
A new two-screen film of idiosyncratic octogenarian painter Rose Wylie at work in her bespattered Kent studio and in the bucolic tangle of her garden may be nearer home but still feels otherworldly, with Wylie an impossibly youthful sprite, as well as a dedicated practitioner, whose explosive, immediate works belie their seemingly childlike spontaneity by being meticulously produced.
The earliest work in the show is shot in black and white, in a far-flung and unspecified rural wilderness, where feral children play among flaming piles of junk and abandoned machinery, while dogs and horses roam and mountains and fir trees loom in the distance.
To accompany these liminal zones, Rivers has also curated Edgelands, a mixed exhibition of works and publications—from Max Ernst to JG Ballard and Robert Smithson—all of which celebrate these places that defy easy categorisation.
Enrico David, The Hepworth Wakefield (until 24 January 2016)
Strange bodies abound and drawings evolve into enigmatic, psychologically charged sculptures in this hugely inventive exhibition in which nothing is fixed, finite or exactly as it seems. A luminous Beuysian watercolour becomes a knobbly stacked arrangement of horizontal hovering figures and spare limbs, fashioned from verdigris pigment-steeped jesmonite and suspended by wires, while a small spindly study in wash and pencil of a weirdly compressed figure, face down, cheek pressing into the floor and backside aloft as it hugs an extra limb, becomes immeasurably more bizarre when assuming three dimensions and growing to near life size. Is s/he crumpled in despair or offering a sexual service? There are no clues from the faint grimace on its face.
It’s as if the framed drawings and small plinth-bound sculptures in the modest first gallery have been permitted to get down and dirty and disport themselves in the lofty two-storey space next door, where many seem as if they are still trying to figure out who or what they are. One spindly insect-like creature sporting a Mary Quant bob is reading an Enrico David catalogue essay. Androgynous and ambiguous, David’s personages prop against walls, hug the floor, or hang from the ceiling, populating an environment that seems as much like a piazza or a landscape as a gallery. It is also often not clear what they are made from: bronze is patinated to resemble rusty cast iron, and at times his sculpture seems poised to revert back into drawing as brown paper masquerades as sheet metal, with trompe l’oeil volume and detail drawn in graphite onto its surface, or a procession of lofty figures that reach up to the height of the gallery use paper-thin, silkscreen aluminium to maximum effect.
Cristina Iglesias: Phreatic Zones; Jeff Wall, Marian Goodman Gallery (until 19 December)
The dark slate paving slabs lining the ground floor of Marian Goodman Gallery have been removed to expose a mysterious trio of pools lined with tangled roots and branches through which water ebbs, gushes and drains. A soothing gurgling and babbling drowns out the usual Soho street sounds, as the gallery becomes a kind of inside-out plaza devoted to a more wholesome type of outdoors.
Of course, we know that Cristina Iglesias: Phreatic Zone—the term means the saturated area below the water table—is a laborious construct: the floor has been raised, it isn’t covered in slabs, the water is circuit-pumped and the organic matter lining of the pools is cast aluminium. However, this doesn't detract from its magical, transformative power and ability to remind us that in London the Thames and the city’s many ancient covered streams and rivers mean that water is always—often perilously—close to the surface.
Upstairs six new photographs by Jeff Wall play with, and off, readings of space and blur truth and fiction. There’s a multitude of possible back-stories to the two occupants of the cell-like rooms of a seedy flophouse, or to the woman approaching a coffin-like cardboard shelter, whose occupant can only be discerned by a glimpse of a foot. Struggling to pull on two dresses simultaneously in a department store cubicle, a possible shoplifter becomes a headless creature. And as to the fate of the pale-skin man who kneels, stripped to the waist, on dusty ground while five men loom over him? Well, it doesn't look good.