Robert Breer’s art is moving in more ways than one, as DAVID WHETSTONE explains

LYING around on the floor of the huge Level 4 gallery at Baltic are assorted bits and bobs. Goodness, you’ll think, that’s a bit untidy.

But there will be a small part of you wondering if this might, indeed, be art.

We’ve all heard about the gallery cleaners (not at Baltic, I’m glad to say) who unwittingly disposed of an exhibit featuring plastic bin bags, or heard the jokes about mistaking the fire extinguisher for a modern art masterpiece.

Watch the assorted bits and bobs for longer than a minute or two and you will notice something. Hang on, you’ll think, I’m sure that bit that looks like polystyrene packing is edging closer to the blob that resembles a scrunched up piece of tin foil.

You will be intrigued and look a bit longer. Then you will realise that everything in the gallery – even the huge angled walls that look like a cupboard in the corner and the aluminium column resembling an escaped piece of bathroom furniture – is on the move.

These are Robert Breer’s Floats, sculptures in various shapes and sizes fixed on top of basic motors which carry them on meandering, and completely random, snail-like journeys around the gallery.

The American artist, who is now in his mid-80s, started making the Floats in the 1960s – a reaction, he says, to the rather uninteresting sculptures being displayed in some galleries at that time.

In the catalogue accompanying this major retrospective of Breer’s work – the first in the UK – the artist is quoted as saying: “I think of the entire armada as a single field – a composition that constantly rearranges itself.”

Baltic staff have helpfully produced a guide to the Level 4 Floats.

There’s Sponge, which is made of plastic foam; Porcupine, which is foam with matchsticks stuck in it; Rug, which is two motors beneath a plastic sheet, and a few dome-like structures that look like the progeny of a Dalek and a dishwasher.

Mostly rudimentary survivors of the 1960s, they made me smile.