Engineer of Movement

"If one makes a moving thing," says Sculptor George Rickey, "one is always surprised, no matter how preconceived the design, at the movement itself. It seems to come from elsewhere. The pliers only made the arrival possible." In recent years, Rickey's pliers -- along with welding torch and sheet-metal cutters -- have produced whole families of curiously moving metal sculptures that gambol and gimbal in the wind, slicing segments of time like pendulums or spinning until the sunlight splinters into a spectral blur (see color).

Gun Turrets to Mobiles. It took Rickey a long time to realize that he could use movement itself, as another artist might use colors, to create art. As a boy, he was gifted with a strong mechanical bent, perhaps inherited from his grandfather, who was a clockmaker, and his father, a mechanical engineer who was sent to Scotland from South Bend, Ind., to manage the Singer sewing machine factory in Clydebank. Rickey also showed an early facility for drawing, and while at Balliol College, Oxford, he used to cross the street to sketch at the Ruskin School of Drawing.

Upon his return to the U.S., he continued painting while teaching history and art, including three years at the exclusive boys' school, Groton. In World War II, the Army Air Corps put Sergeant Rickey to teaching the use and maintenance of remote-controlled gun turrets in B-29 bombers. Surrounded by servos and selsyns, he made his first moving sculpture. Unlike Alexander Calder's mobiles, which evoke stems and leaves, Rickey's relate to wheels and other mechanical forms. The influence of the constructivists* on him has been strong.

Cogs to Cognition. In the 1950s, Rickey made a series of sculptures called Little Machines of Unconceived Use, whose metal surfaces traveled in interpenetrating orbits on pivots within pivots within pivots. They reminded him of the sidewheelers steaming down the Clyde in Scotland, with their rocking arms and connecting rods churning, barely missing each other in what he calls "dramatic crises." In Rickey's Lumina, the rapid flickering lends meaning to the watchmakers' term for controlled motion--escapement.

"Artists prosper," says Rickey, "but it becomes no clearer what art is. To present a Swedish roller bearing as art is at least as plausible as Warhol's presenting a commercial container." Rickey's difference, as the current exhibition of 75 of his works in Washington's Corcoran Gallery of Art demonstrates, lies in subordinating the precision bearing to the pure expression of what it is meant to supply--freedom of movement. He divorces the machine from function and allows it to do what is natural for it. Says he: "In a mechanized environment a machine that is carefully designed to be useless echoes the whimper or many a cog: 'What's the use?" Perhaps Rickey's nonfunctional machines show that out of tiny cogs a mighty concept of harmonious motion may grow, giving art another dimension at which it traditionally could only hint.

* George Braziller Inc. will publish Rickey's first book, Constructivism: Its Legacy and Its Heirs, in the spring.

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