AUDIO GUIDE TRANSCRIPT

NARRATOR:

Bougainvillier is one of the works in the Shirley Collection most frequently requested for exhibitions.

It dates from 1947, a period when Calder was focusing on standing mobiles. Calder Foundation President Alexander S.C. Rower.

ALEXANDER S.C. ROWER:

The frilly lines, these wires that come out in space – even when they're not active, you feel a tremendous sense of movement through space – are why he called it Bougainvillier.

His process of titling, of course: it wasn't that he saw a Bougainvillea vine with the beautiful purple leaves and blossoms. He made a sculpture and then, looking back in retrospect, said it's kind of the tendrils of a line, I'll call it Bougainvillier.

And the use of the title is not any kind of access into understanding or meaning of a work. You should really consider that the work has no meaning. But then you have to bring yourself forward and contribute and participate with the work in a way that the meaning is created. Calder always anticipated that the viewer was going to have an active role in not just experiencing his work, but in the viewer's own interpretation.

NARRATOR:

The year before Bougainvillier was made, the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre explored these ideas in a seminal essay on Calder. Sartre captures the sense of what it’s like to experience a Calder sculpture. As he put it,

ALEXANDER S.C. ROWER:

“Each of its twists and turns is an inspiration of the moment. In it you can discern the theme composed by its maker, but the mobile weaves a thousand variations on it. It is a little hot jazz tune, unique and ephemeral, like the sky, like the morning. If you missed it, it's lost forever.”