Calder Gardens, which opens this Sunday on the Benjamin Franklin Parkway after a long and circuitous history, has already galvanized the Philadelphia cultural scene as well as the international community of architecture and design. The New York Times declared it “stirring,” Vogue went for “stunning,” and the Philadelphia Inquirer hailed “the Parkway’s magical, luminous spirit cave.”
As a prelude to Opening Day, there’ll be a jubilant party on Saturday afternoon — in the form of a parade, Chaos and Kisses, conceived by the experimental musician Arto Lindsay and featuring Philly organizations like the drumline Mad Beatz Philly, Brazilian percussion ensemble PHonk!, Almanac Dance Circus Theatre, and Pig Iron Theatre. The parade starts at noon in LOVE Park and makes its way down the Parkway to Maja Park near Calder Gardens, where the Sun Ra Arkestra will perform a free concert at 1 p.m.
The hoopla is fitting, for the world’s first arts institution dedicated to the works of Alexander Calder, who was born in the Philadelphia area just before the turn of the last century. He was part of a distinguished sculptural lineage that can now be visually traced along the Parkway: his father, Alexander Stirling Calder, created the monumental Swann Memorial Fountain in nearby Logan Circle, and his grandfather, Alexander Milne Calder, made the iconic statue of William Penn that stands atop City Hall.
There has always been an honored place for Calder’s work in his hometown — notably at The Philadelphia Museum of Art, where his giant mobile Ghost hangs above the Great Stair Hall — but Calder Gardens presents an invitation to engage more deeply and deliberately with his work. During a recent visit, I experienced it as a form of music.
This isn’t a literal interpretation, of course; I heard no musical sounds as I wandered through a warren of subterranean galleries thoughtfully designed, by acclaimed Swiss architect Jacques Herzog, to create a subtle and flexible framework for Calder’s work. But the pieces on display, in what will be an ever-changing exhibition, prompts a visitor to reflect on duration and dimension, as well as the interplay of planes and lines. Sitting in an alcove next to the 1940 mobile Eucalyptus, which suggests a Surrealist take on a dinosaur skeleton at a natural history museum, I observed how its parts moved in a glacial twirl, like the elements of a Morton Feldman composition. Other pieces stirred imperceptibly as I approached, responding to sonic vibrations or currents of air.
During a panel discussion after the press preview on Monday morning, this quietly dynamic aspect of Calder Gardens was emphasized by Sandy Rower, a grandson of Alexander Calder and president of the Calder Foundation. “He wants you to have an unmitigated experience,” Rower said. “Our experiment here is to present all of this work in a totally different way, where you’re allowed to have your own unfolding experience, where you’re allowed to really sit in a resonance with the sculpture in a really mysterious way — because you’re not being told what to think, what to feel, how old this piece is, what he was thinking, what his experience was, et cetera.”
The tagline that Calder Gardens is using for its grand debut is “Open to Interpretation” — and Rower’s note about the subjective experience rings true. There is, for instance, nothing in the literature to suggest that a 1953 piece titled Myxomatose, which has its own alcove, was intended to evoke the majestic concentration of a maestro on a podium. (As Rower implies, there isn’t wall text of any kind; I learned the title of the piece by consulting a tip sheet afterward.) But as I stood before it, all I could think of was the bearing of a master conductor, aligning impressive orchestral forces.
There’s ample precedent for a musical engagement with Calder’s work, in a more oblique fashion. During the artist’s time in Paris, he befriended not only fellow artists like Marcel Duchamp and Fernand Léger, but also composers such as Erik Satie and Edgard Varèse. Some of his innovations at the time involved three-dimensional “drawings” made of wire, including a portrait of Varèse, and several of Josephine Baker, who was all the rage in Paris at the time. Satie commissioned him to create the stage set for his piece Socrate, a setting of three texts from Plato’s Dialogues (in French translation). Calder created a set with three corresponding elements, including a red disk and various hoops and rectangular forms — all of which he moved and manipulated, as a spatial manifestation of Satie’s themes.
Movement and performance became a central facet of Calder’s artistic enterprise, most famously through his piece Circus, which he developed in Paris and staged for rapt audiences of his fellow artists. (It’s now in the permanent collection of The Whitney Museum of American Art, which is preparing to celebrate its centennial.)
Those dynamic ideas also inspired one of the more striking musical engagements with Calder’s work: Calder Piece, composed during the early-to-mid 1960s by Earle Browne, for four percussionists and a Calder mobile. Here is a 2021 performance of the piece featuring four members of the Berlin Philharmonic.
Musical and sonic programming will be an integral part of Calder Gardens, says Juana Berrío, its Senior Director of Programs. “Real-time experience is really important when you come to Calder Gardens,” she noted during the panel discussion. “The program is going to be a very diverse, dynamic combination of artists coming to present us with sonic experiences. Sometimes that’s going to take the shape of music, but sometimes it could be a sound bath that we’re going to experience under some sculptures.” There may also be an audio guide, but with commissioned or contemporaneous musical pieces in lieu of a curator’s historical explanations. A row of built-in auditorium seats overlooking one gallery will come in handy for musical performances.
Whatever lies ahead for Calder Gardens, it’s clear that the space and its magical contents — with their slanted equipoise, and the furtive way they decorate the air — will bring a welcome harbor for contemplation in the midst of the city. No two encounters with the work will be exactly alike. As music does, it will make its impression in the moment, before moving on.
Calder Gardens opens on Sept. 21; tickets and information.
