The universe is real but you can’t see it.
You have to imagine it.
Once you imagine it,
you can be realistic about reproducing it.
Alexander Calder
Look at this thing. Sitting there outside the law school like some kind of predatory bird that decided mid-flight to just fucking freeze, arrested in steel, suspended in its own impossible geometry. You want to talk about truth? Here it is: twenty tons of it, painted that arterial red-orange that Calder loved because it didn’t apologize for being seen.
The Falcon. Le Faucon. And it’s not some delicate mobile twitching in the breeze like the precious little darlings everyone associates with Calder’s name. No. This is the other side of the man—the side that understood weight, permanence, the brutal honesty of iron forged in a French foundry where guys with actual dirt under their fingernails bent metal to his will.
You walk past this beast every day on your way to tort law or constitutional theory or whatever the hell they teach in there, and maybe, maybe, you glance at it. Maybe you don’t. Because that’s what happens when you institutionalize art, when you plant it on a manicured lawn and pretend it’s decoration. It becomes wallpaper. Background noise. The sculptural equivalent of Muzak.
But Calder didn’t make wallpaper.
He made this thing that sat outside his studio in Saché for fifteen years. Fifteen years. It watched him work. It watched him die. And then someone had the good sense to bring it here, to California, to this place where future lawyers would theoretically learn to parse truth from bullshit, which seems fitting, because that’s exactly what this sculpture does. It strips away all the academic horseshit, all the interpretive frameworks and post-modern whatever, and just exists in space with the kind of confidence that comes from knowing exactly what it is.
Calder said you have to imagine the universe before you can reproduce it. And what he imagined wasn’t pretty. It wasn’t comfortable. It was angular, aggressive, alive in the way that predators are alive, efficient, purposeful, absolutely itself.
That’s the falcon. That’s the art.
And most people will walk right past it checking their phones.
Alexander Calder Le Faucon (The Falcon)
Stanford Law School, part of the Cantor Arts Center collection