Between engineering and art

SANTA FE — If you’re looking for art to see in Santa Fe this week, Will Clift’s “Still Points, Turning World” at Gerald Peters Contemporary is worth checking out. Feats of precarious balance, Clift’s interlocking assemblages of hand-carved wooden slats are elegantly designed and delightful. If there’s a scientist or engineer in your life who doesn’t normally go to art shows, this might be one to take them to. It’s great for children, as well, provided they understand not to touch. Clift’s pieces are mostly freestanding with no nails, screws or permanent adhesive holding them together. Bump into one, and it might collapse like a $25,000 Jenga puzzle.

By and large, Clift uses the same materials — wood and string — that our Paleolithic ancestors used for their boomerangs, bows and arrows and animal traps. He sometimes incorporates other materials, such as carbon-fiber plastic and steel wire, and there are several large outdoor pieces that are part of the show, too. But seeing Clift’s hand-carved, aerodynamic shapes jutting from the walls and hanging from the ceiling inside the gallery, I was aware that most of these pieces technically could have been made tens of thousands of years ago. There’s something amazing about that. Who knows if any prehistoric humans stacked their curved throwing sticks into teetering, cantilevered towers just for fun, but they may have.

As a kid, I used to do that sort of thing with silverware, making elaborate towers of forks and spoons, which would invariably topple, embarrassing my parents at restaurants.

Clift’s sculptures are all about the physics of weight and counterbalance. His constructions seem to defy gravity, but in fact use gravity to their advantage. The way the interconnected slats support each other’s weight recalls the choreographer Trisha Brown’s 1970 piece, “Leaning Duets,” in which pairs of performers hold hands while leaning away from one another, as well as more recent pieces of contact improvisation by the choreographer Wu Tsang.

Speaking of dance, Clift’s “Centripetal, Centrifugal” instantly reminded me of Henri Matisse’s “Dance.” I don’t know if he is deliberately referencing that painting, but there are five figures in “Dance” and five points of contact with the pedestal in “Centripetal, Centrifugal,” and Clift’s wooden slats arc upward just like the interlocked arms of Matisse’s figures. While Clift’s works are not explicitly figural, they resemble gesture drawings of human bodies in motion. It’s hard for me not to see a ring of free-spirited dancers holding hands and leaping in a circle when I look at “Centripetal, Centrifugal,” just as I can’t help but see Michelangelo's “Creation of Adam” fresco from the Sistine Chapel when I look at Clift’s “Convergence.” In “Convergence,” an element suspended from the ceiling curves downward toward a freestanding floor piece, like the finger of God reaching down to touch the first man.

Kinetic sculptors from Alexander Calder to George Rickey to Jesús Rafael Soto have made art that plays with weight, balance and motion. Clift’s artworks are static, not kinetic — they don’t twirl in the wind like Calder’s mobiles — but they do suggest motion through form. The title of the show, “Still Points, Turning World,” paraphrases a line from T.S. Eliot’s poem “Burnt Norton”: “At the still point of the turning world … there the dance is.” To express dance through static forms is more of an accomplishment than to do it with sculptures that move, or with actual dancers’ bodies. Clift shows us the dance within the stillness.

As much as I admire and enjoy Clift’s work, though, I can’t call it great art.

As an art critic writing weekly reviews for a newspaper, I have multiple responsibilities. My first is to you, my readers, to inform you of shows I consider worth seeing. To that end, I say, yes, please see this show. If you think Calder’s mobiles are cool, which most people do, I bet you’ll like these, too. But I also have a responsibility to the artist to provide honest feedback. And as someone whose reviews will become part of the historical record for as long as archives of newspapers are kept — digitally or otherwise — I have a responsibility to my hypothetical readers of the future to interpret the art from within my own historical context.

To the artist, I say, keep challenging yourself. As much as I like the new pieces, they’re indistinguishable from what you have been making for the past two decades. The 2025 piece, “Three Pieces Reaching / The Tensions Within,” is a thing of wonder. Standing with only a tiny point of contact with the pedestal, it cantilevers far into space like a wildly asymmetrical Japanese floral arrangement. Unfortunately, it has essentially the same form as “Three Pieces Reaching” from 2006. That piece was the lead image for a nice feature Dottie Indyke wrote in the Albuquerque Journal at that time. Indyke praised the ingenious engineering and calligraphic gracefulness of Clift’s work, and she wasn’t wrong. The problem is, we could have reprinted the same review this week, changing only the exhibition title and dates. To be fair, the new “Three Pieces Reaching” demonstrates a slight technical improvement: it leans one or two inches closer to the pedestal. The artist has also applied a layer of clay slip to the surface to make a crackling texture, which emphasizes the physical tension in the bent wood. But that’s like republishing the same novel 20 years later, changing only one or two paragraphs, and calling it a sequel. I’m not against artists making multiples or doing variations on a theme, but when artists stop challenging themselves, they stagnate.

If you go onto Clift’s website, you’ll see that he’s made many versions of the same sculptures, including larger versions in steel for public commissions. If he called himself a designer, perhaps it wouldn’t matter. After all, good design is always good design. Who cares how many copies of Marcel Breuer’s Wassily chair get mass-produced if even the cheap knockoffs are just as beautiful as the first one Breuer made a century ago and they still look great in interior design magazines? Alvar Aalto’s bentwood furniture from the 1930s, which Clift’s work somewhat resembles, remain iconic and well-loved, too. But for those of us who think art should be more than elegant home décor — that it should actively reflect the consciousness of the artist — we expect the art to change and evolve as the artist’s own thoughts and feelings change over the course of their lifetime. If it doesn’t, there’s something wrong.

My other problem — and this one’s more subjective — is that Clift’s work is too elegant. His curves are just a little too graceful for my taste, too pleasing to look at. This may seem like a strange criticism if you’re one of the many people who think beauty is the be-all and end-all of art. But if the real world is not beautiful and harmonious all the time, why should art be?

Marcel Duchamp visited an aircraft exposition in 1912 with his good friend and fellow artist Constantin Brancusi. Gazing at a propeller, Duchamp said, “Painting is over. Who could do better than this propeller? Could you do that?” Well, it took him 11 years, but Brancusi finally managed to carve his famous marble sculpture, “Bird in Space,” which does resemble a propeller blade, only slightly more beautiful.

For Brancusi, beauty was the goal of art, whereas for Duchamp, art was about ideas. “Aesthetic delectation is the danger to be avoided,” Duchamp said. So, who won the propeller challenge — Brancusi or Duchamp? It depends on how you look at it. Brancusi succeeded in making something similar to, but more beautiful than, an airplane propeller. Great. But Duchamp’s larger point still stands. By recognizing that commercial products can be just as beautiful as works of art, he challenged himself and his fellow artists to move beyond beauty as their end goal. If they didn’t, what was to distinguish their work from everyday commercial engineering or product design?

In practice, Brancusi operated as much more of a commercial designer than Duchamp ever did. After making “Bird in Space,” he reproduced it many times in both marble and bronze.

Calder, for his part, was trained as a mechanical engineer and worked as a toy maker before becoming an artist. During his lifetime, there were always critics who thought of him more as a very talented engineer or toy designer than an artist with a capital A. It was a fair criticism, I think, and the same could be leveled against Clift. Does it matter? Well, it matters only to the extent that maintaining separate categories for art and design matters. That may not matter to you, but it matters to me. At a time when governments and corporations around the world pump billions of dollars into technology and invest very little into art, I think it is important to stand up for art as an autonomous enterprise and not conflate the two.

Having said that, my grandpa was an engineer, and whenever Grandpa Beitmen visited me in Florida when I was growing up, we would make paper airplanes together. Once, he and my dad’s friend — also an engineer — designed a tubular airplane that looked like a pope’s hat. It glided slowly but traveled farther than anything else we designed. Not understanding the science, I found it absolutely magical — and I felt the same way seeing one of Calder’s mobiles for the first time at the local art museum.

Are paper airplanes, propellers, mobiles and elegantly balanced slats of wood great art? No. But if they can inspire wonder, there’s certainly value in that. Clift’s work is objectively impressive and requires no explanatory text to understand or enjoy, so it’s a great starting point for anyone, young or old, who’s just getting into art. Moreover, the things that interest Clift — gravity, balance and so on — are so fundamental to most sculptors and installation artists that spending time with his work and thinking about what’s keeping it from falling over is a great way to train yourself for looking at three-dimensional art in general. Accessible art like Clift’s, or Calder’s, is necessary and good, just as long as it doesn’t take the place, culturally, of more challenging work. It’s the doorway to art, not the room, but definitely worth a visit.