IB GEERTSEN'S mobile sculptures

This artikel was brought in the catalog Skitser til mobiler,
Statens Museum for Kunst, 1992
 

lb Geertsen is widely known as one of the leading exponents of concrete art in post‑war Denmark. His well‑deserved reputation in this connection is due to his pioneering work both as painter and sculptor.
Geertsen has especially demonstrated his strength in the sculptural field, which is where he has experimented most vigorously and produced his most remarkable works.

Geertsen made his first sculptures during the war; the earliest documented figure is a small, spontaneously 'curly' wire sculpture from 1943. Even in his earliest sculptures Geertsen displayed a preference for unusual forms of expression. For example, four'fabulous animals' from 1946 have been preserved, built up of metal springs and steel wire in various thicknesses and with objects mounted on them such as a tin‑lid, a tap and the like.
His approach to concrete art in 1948 was via sculptural experiments. In that year he exhibited his first constructivist sculpture, executed in plaster. Denise Rene, owner of the renowned gallery for concrete art in Paris, found it interest­ing and wished to see more of the artist's work. Together with the painter Serge Poliakoff she visited Geertsen's studio in Birkerød. But the visit was rather a disappointment, for ‑ as Geertsen himself has related ‑ "I only had spontaneous pictures andjust a few sculptures that I was begin­ning to develop along constructivist lines." So at this turning‑point ‑ from the spontaneous to the constructivist ‑ it was his work on sculptures that pointed the way ahead.

In the course of 1949 Geertsen started to give his attention to the series of sculptural problems that has absorbed him ever since. He wanted to liberate sculptural experience from dependence upon static angles of vision. "Above all, sculpture had to be liberated from its base. I saw a sculpture not as a statue but as a living creature."
A sculpture was not to have any specific front and back. There wasto be no question of its being 'more correct' if seen from one side than from another. On the contrary, a sculpture should ideally form a transitionsless series of equally justified angles of vision, and the beholdershould feel encouraged to move the whole way round it. In other words, the aim was to add a perpetual element of movement to the experience of seeing the work. Geertsen produced the effect he wanted in the form of a folded sculpture constructed on the Möbius strip principle. It was the very same principle which the Swiss Bauhaus pupil and concrete artist Max Bill used so effectively in his famous ribbon sculptures.

In technical terms, Geertsen's folded sculptures were made by cutting out the form in a two­dimensional medium, usually a sheet of metal, and then bending it into a series of variegated spatial shapes. During the years around 1950 he also tried out systematically the possibilities of establishing a dialogue between the two­dimensional pictorial geometry of concrete paint­ing and the spatial freedom of his sculptures. An example is the paintings on which he mounted folded sculptures with the aim of establishing a subtle 'stereometric' interplay with the painted shapes on the surface of the pictures. From these first folded sculptures the transition to kinetic art was not really such a big step. The new mobility Geertsen wanted to introduce into the way we look at sculpture did not necessarily require the beholder to move ‑ the sculpture itself could be made movable instead. Geertsen recognized this possibility when his attention was drawn that same year to the kinetic works of the American sculptor Alexander Calder.

The encounter with Calder's mobiles then encouraged Geertsen to work with free‑hanging, movable sculptural elements. That same year, 1950, he had already created his first suspended ‑and thereforemobile‑foldedsculpture,'Rhyth­mic Plan III'.
The following year he concentrated his sculp­tural production on airy, constructivist sculptures in wire, and the year after he returned to folded sculptures. Usually he reverted to his preferred material: thin sheets of brass and aluminium. An innovation he introduced at this time was to paint a number of his sculptures in clear signal colours, as a rule blue to start with but in due course in a more varied chromatic register.
Geertsen's experiments with free‑hanging movable sculptures continued in the form of hanging sculptures in wire with balancing counterweights. In 1953 he had a particularly vigorous burst of productivity in the sculptural area and in several important respects made decisive progress in terms of sculptural mobility.

He found he could develop new possibilities of creating relationships by means of voluminous sculptures resting on the ground which could then be placed ad libitum in four different positions, resulting in four very different spatial appearances. Intense, continually changing preoccupation with more massive sculptural forms of this nature, spatially folded sheet‑metal sculpture and airy, three‑dimensional 'drawings' in wire led at this time to a number of pioneering confrontations with thedogmasand prejudices then prevailing in the area of plastic expression. Geertsen's most remarkable innovation in 1953 was the development of a revolving sculpture consisting of a fixed base (a folded sculpture) upon which was placed a simple, carefully balanced and freely movable form made of metal wire. With this new type of sculpture Geertsen created no less than the fundamental point of departure for all his subsequent mobiles.

His concentrated work on creating free‑hanging mobiles gained impetus during the following years and has taken up a great deal of his creative energy ever since.
In connection with Geertsen's mobile sculptures Richard Mortensen has said that 'Geertsen took over where Calder stopped'. J ust how this is to be understood is best clarified by a statement made by Geertsen himself: Actually Calder is related to Mirö. He belongs to the surrealists ‑ he's spontaneous. They belong together. But I make the mobile concrete and work with contrasts: the round and the straight. I make balanced units that are sculptures in themselves. I then link these unitstogether into mobile sculptures forming one long line.

Even though Geertsen here refers to his free­hanging movable sculptures as mobiles, he dislikes having his works described in this way. The term represents too close an association with Calder's specific contribution and at the same time isolates a group of works in Geertsen's oeuvre whose effects and basic aims are insepar­ably linked to other parts of his sculptural produc­tion, such as his folded sculptures, revolving sculptures, etc. It would therefore be more reasonable to avoid calling Geertsen's mobiles by any special name and merely see them as an aspect of the overall concept of movable sculp­tures. With kinetic art the mobile concept has become a generally recognized art‑historical term that is here to stay. Geertsen's mobiles consist of several ‑ up to six ‑ movable segments. While each consists of a sculptural fragment of a line, together they form an unbroken line. The individual parts rest on one another like mutually counteracting levers balanced against one another with infinite precision. By means of this delicate state of equilibrium the mobile appears to overcome the powers of gravity and at the same time becomes an easily movable object when exposed to even quite insignificant influences of another kind such as a breath of wind, a gentle push, etc. Such influences set the individual parts of the sculpture moving and permit them to oscillate in countless mutually related constellations. As a result the mobile takes on an almost infinite number of different appearances.

The creation of kinetic art is basically an aesthetically self‑sufficient game with an element of movement in the sculpture. Observing the changing interplay of forms in the movements the mobile is first and foremost an aesthetic pleasure ‑ and virtually not so very much beyond this, certainly not in the case of lb Geertsen's works. The concrete form he gives his mobiles quite deliberately cuts off any kind of association beyond appreciation of the sculpture itself. Geertsen's mobiles thus constitute total compliance with the modernistic demand for autonomy in a work of art. They always directly express the pure, fundamental idea of the mobile sculpture without superfluous effects. Geertsen's uncompromising consistency in this matter entitles him to an internationally prominent place among the masters of the mobile.

lb Geertsen's principal contribution as a sculptor lies in his mobile sculptures. At the same time, however, he has also created other remarkable forms of concrete sculptural art. Among his most striking merits, mention need only be made here of the fantastic sculptures he made during the 50s that were meant to be crawled over or sat on. With these works ‑ in contrast to the mobiles ‑ he went beyond the traditional, highbrow purposes of the visual arts by using social, everyday functions to bring his sculptures into the highest possible degree of harmony with their surroundings.

Finn Terman Frederiksen