Another Look at La Grande Vitesse

Abstract

Since 1969, forty-two tons of arching steel painted bright red has anchored the center of a modern gridded concrete plaza in Michigan. The sculpture is remarkable for its enormous size, vibrant color, sweeping curves, and tapering lines. La Grande Vitesse by Alexander Calder maintains a persistent cardinal status in the field of public art as the first outdoor sculpture commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts. It is emblematic of the field's early embrace of monumental scale, abstraction, and civic siting as strategies for making contemporary art public. More than forty years later, these strategies no longer prevail and public art's paradigms are increasingly various. However, because of the extensive longitudinal documentation of this sculpture's “social life,” La Grande Vitesse remains a critical resource for the field's practice and theory today.