Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
Alexander Calder
American; 20th-century
Chicago, IL: Federal Plaza
67%
Flamingo. 1973. Painted steel
I've been told, by a couple of the rare Chicagoans who both care and remember, that the imposition of Flamingo onto Federal Plaza ruined the site, which was designed in all its right-angled rectitude by Mies. Likely true, but that's no reason (I don't think) to fault the sculpture on its own terms as a sculpture. (And I'd say it's much more of a sculpture proper — an enclosing play of shapes within a virtual space those shapes created — than it is a site-specific thing, except insofar as it sort of tantrums against the stiffness of its surroundings.) In some ways Flamingo is decadent Calder, all juts and colliding surface tiptoed in glaring red: it's like it's an image of the movements of one of the artist's mobiles. In this there's an element of having taken modernist sculpture's incorporation of the base a bit too far. But then again it's arresting how those limbs are all both arcs and planes at once, and there's a complexness to the balance its five legs strike. The subtlety of most of its taperings, too, comes close to justifying how brash its focal quadrilateral is. The monument refuses to ever lock into symmetry. (2025)