Himmeli

The History of MobilesMobiles have existed in the form of wind chimes for thousands of years. People in Greece, Rome and Asia made them with bronze or glass, often with bells attached to them and hung outdoors for good luck or to ward off evil spirits. In Finland people made (and still make) traditional hanging sculptures out of straw called himmelis, “himmeli” is a Germanic word meaning “sky” or “heaven.” Usually pyramid shaped, they were traditionally placed above the dining table to ensure a good crop for the coming year.However, mobiles as an art form didn’t really start to exist until the early 20th century, when the Russian artists and early kinetic sculptors Aleksander Rodchenko, Naum Gabo and Vladimir Tatlin began to experiment with it. The first real breakthrough came in 1920, when the American artist Man Ray assembled 29 coat hangers based on the whippletree, a mechanism that has been used for centuries to distribute force evenly through linkages when horses or mules pull a plow or a wagon (if you’d like to see an example of a whippletree, look at your windshield wipers the next time you get into your car; they’re based on the same mechanism and contain the same structure as a basic mobile). He called his piece “Obstruction,” and it is to my knowledge the first of this type of hanging kinetic sculpture. Man Ray also experimented with hanging abstract pieces of sheet metal. In the late 1920s, Bruno Munari, an Italian artist, designer and inventor, started to make what he called “Useless Machines,” pieces of art that could interact with their environment. A number of them resemble what would become modern art mobiles.Shown: A traditional Finnish himmeliPhoto by Tomi Knuutila