Openness in Motion

A detail of the gigantic mobile sculpture hanging from the ceiling at the Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption in San Francisco. It is by Richard Lippold, whom I always think about in the context of his prominence in John Cage’s book Silence. Cage connects the act of listening to the “openness” of Leopold’s sculptures, much as he does to Mies van der Rohe’s glass houses. Cage wrote, “There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear. In fact, try as we may to make a silence, we cannot.” Even amid the stillness of that massive interior space atop Cathedral Hill, Lippold’s work is constantly in motion, just at a very subtle level, a vast number of tiny movements, a silent wind chime the patterns of which, from one moment to the next, are too complicated, too numerous, to ever be repeated.

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