There's a new sculpture tucked away in a corner of the Front Green, fairly close to Hope College. It's big, black and wavy. It looks angry. And it's by Alexander Calder.
Calder is famous for his mobiles - giant, colorful, hanging forms - often present at major museums. They're graceful and elegant, slowly turning in the wind. They've also been extraordinarily popular, perhaps because they're so easy to "get" - they're usually simple, pretty forms.
The Calder piece on the Front Green is not one of his mobiles. The piece, entitled "Tripes," is a 12-foot steel structure bolted firmly to the ground. Calder completed "Tripes" - literally, "intestines" - in 1974, two years before his death.
The sculpture looks like an alien, albeit a playful one. And as with all encounters with aliens, one must ask where it came from and what it means.
"Tripes" was brought to Brown by the Public Art Committee, composed largely of arts faculty and administrators. Since its founding in 2002, the committee has ushered other memorable pieces to campus such as "Untitled (Donkey)," Isamu Noguchi's elegant, if somewhat phallic, "To Tallness," and Roy Lichtenstein's mammoth "Brushstrokes."
Like the others, "Tripes" is on loan to the University, in this case for two years. Such loans of artwork are significantly more feasible financially and allow the continued rotation of new pieces to campus. That the donkey only clung to the Sciences Library for a period of months, for example, contributed greatly to its allure, much like a summer-camp romance.
Calder lived from 1898 until 1976. Born to artist parents, he attended engineering school, but soon drifted into artistic jobs and moved to New York. At this point he became quite interesting, working as an artist for the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus. This experience influenced Calder greatly - he soon began constructing wire sculptures of circus animals and performers. This circusy aesthetic came to frame his work. Bold primary colors and playful movement pervaded his sculptures and paintings.
What's confusing, then, is "Tripes." The work is massive. The heavy steel looms above you. The bolts holding it together give it a kind of industrial, "just out of the factory" look. The work is bottom-heavy, wide, dark and bolted to the ground, giving it a kind of imposing solidity. And most importantly, it's a deep, dark black.
At the same time, the forms themselves are playful - the multiple folds of the work wiggle and bend. One looks like a monkey, one looks like a bunny and one looks like two dinosaurs poking their heads around a corner.
Seeing "Tripes" is like attending a circus funeral with pallbearer clowns and a eulogist on stilts. The viewer simply doesn't know how to react: should one laugh and play, dance around the sculpture, or put on a "serious art" face and solemnly discuss the work's compositional merits?
But the discord of "Tripes" fits well in its new home. The sculpture's own identity crisis is at home among the clashes of the Front Green's architecture, where colonial brickwork sits next to a Greek chapel, and perhaps even Brown's iconoclastic-Ivy identity.
