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Musée d’Art Mobile
- Red Hen Press
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38 Musée d’Art Mobile Today I visited Calder’s exhibit mobiles all frozen voluble birds of iron slats arrested, silenced under white floodlights of a dead aviary. Motion makes forms sway of foliage branches amplify variegated faces in ruffles of green. Like other visitors, I want to animate those thousands of equilibrium out of the force of my lungs. Balancing Demoiselle I blow over her swift skirt of tin giving dance to her spiky feet closing a grand ecart in slow gyration of her finale. How the black tinsels of Flocons de suie I overheard someone translate “Flakes of being” beg for a wind twirl to animate them tilt their invisible fulcrum, celestial, eternally ascending in reverse of the snow. 39 Each visitor fended by Ne pas toucher wants the mobiles to move vibrate in clinks and clanks against silence— all mobiles here stilled like past autumn’s life. On tiptoe, lips fluted, we whistle birds to rotate in invisible touches of breathing fluttering toward light leaving us panting, exhaling an afternoon trapped in pristine museum rooms— art becoming pneuma from our lungs life praised to its aspiration. ...