The Movement Movement

In the century of cinema, television, and indeed Rube Goldberg, it was inevitable that art would start moving too. Now, hard on the heels of op artists, who address their work to the retina, has come a widespread number of "kinetic" artists, who try to combine mechanics and art. They are exploiting the human eye's capacity to perceive motion, and their work is the newest watchword on the fast-moving international gallery scene. Manhattan's avant-garde Jewish Museum is currently showing 102 works by kineticism's established practitioners, Jean Tinguely and Nicolas Schoeffer. In Boston's Institute of Contemporary Arts, Matisse's grandson Paul is showing his Kalliroscope, an oozing suspension of metals in volatile liquids. An exhibition by kinetic experimenters will open in the University of California's art museum in Berkeley this March.

Manifesto Destiny. Although it seems to have blossomed suddenly, the kinetic kraze has been a long time germinating. As early as 1910, the Italian futurists wanted to "renew art by seeking the style of movement" and proclaimed a racing automobile more beautiful than the Winged Victory. Dadaist Marcel Du-champ set a bicycle wheel atop a stool in 1913 and called it Mobile. The Russian constructivists Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner issued a manifesto in 1920 proclaiming their freedom "from the 1,000-year-old error of art, originating in Egypt, that only static rhythms can be its elements. For present-day perception, the most important elements of art are the kinetic rhythms." Only a year earlier, a fellow constructivist, Vladimir Tallin, had designed a Monument to the Third International, a glass and iron tower 900 ft. tall with three geometric tiers rotating according to the day, the month and the year. This technological salute to the Soviet Revolution never got off the drawing board.

"It was Alexander Calder who really put movement into art," says W.J.H.G. Sandberg, former director of Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum. The affable American's Circus of 1926 was an adult toy, perhaps, but his wind-and motor-driven mobiles that followed in the '30s became the first recognized aerial expressions of art in motion. Giacometti's Suspended Ball of 1931, Brancusi's Fish on a rotating pedestal of 1926, Thomas Wilfred's lumias of the 1930s with swimming projections of colored light--all these were what Watt's apocryphal teakettle was to the steam turbine.

Speed of Light. Today kinetic artists see their art as expressing not only the machine but also nature itself. Says Critic-Sculptor George Rickey: "Nature is rarely still. She follows natural laws: gravity, Newton's laws of motion, the traffic laws of topology." Gabo proclaimed: "Look at a ray of sun--the quietest of the silent strengths--it runs 300,000 kilometers in a second. Our starry sky --does anyone hear it?" But whether attuned to the music of the spheres or the metallic clanking of makeshift machines, artists by the score are now trying to make poetry out of motion. Among the leaders (all shown in following color pages):

sbJEAN TINGUELY, 40, a Swiss living in Paris, owes more to Dada than to the logic of the dynamo. His jittery, rattly, eccentric pseudo mechanisms spring from a view of man as the prisoner of cogs and cam wheels rather than their master. As the enfant terrible of kinetics, he exhibited his Homage to New York (once) in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art in 1960. Despite the efforts of the fire department, his machine destroyed itself. Since then, his bolt-and-nutty contraptions have been more durable. His Dissecting Machine (opposite page) is a gleeful guillotine a gogo, a Grand Guignol comment on man as the victim of his own existence. Says Tinguely: "Life is play, movement, perpetual change. From the moment life is fixed, it is no longer true."

sbNICOLAS SCHOeFFER, 53, a Hungarian-born Parisian, builds Erector set-like perforated grids, convex mirrors and metal latticework. He views these not as art works but rather as the medium to express his vision of "spatiodynamics." His largest work to date is his 170-ft.-tall computerized Cybernetic Tower in Belgium, which emits sounds of street noises mixed with electronic music. Other works blink, twinkle, and swathe the space around them with elusive illuminations, sometimes changing 300 times a second like whirling dervishes of light.

sbPOL BURY, 43, is a slow-motion artist. "Speed limits space," says the Belgian. "Slowness multiplies it." So Bury builds well-wrought wooden sculptures concealing tiny electric motors that twitch in a random, nearly subliminal manner. At first glance, his sculptures seem static; then by degrees the spectator becomes aware that they are gently trembling and jittering with insectile gestures. Like molecules jostling to the ceaseless rhythms of Brownian movement, they express physical uncertainty and ambiguous motion. "Watch a plane in the sky," says Bury. "It barely seems to be moving. The eye is no longer able to trace the action, although it can easily follow a horse galloping along a country road."

sbFLETCHER BENTON, 34, sees mobile art as the way of the future. "Kineticists are space-age artists," says the San Franciscan, and points to the small, spiky steel ball called Explorer I, the U.S.'s first orbital satellite, as an example of esthetic motion. "There's no reason to believe a living room could not be a kinetic experience," he says. "On a dark, rainy day, the walls would turn bright and cheery. We're the pioneers, but think of the artists growing up today. They will know about computers, programming and electronics. Think of what they'll be able to do. Buck Rogers is coming to life."

sbHANS HAACKE, 29, follows the natural German bent for scientific phenomena. At 18, he painted boxy Bauhaus abstractions, but this art seemed too rooted in place. "We now know that there is nothing stabile. For centuries, people tried to convey motion. Symbols, snapshot representations, impressionism. All this was based on a convention everyone understood. But it was never the reality of motion. I want reality." Haacke made sealed Plexiglas boxes with enough water inside to evaporate in the sun and then drip in random patterns down the sides. Next he tried what he calls "hourglasses," something like stereo-kaleidescopes, which require audience participation to turn them. According to Haacke, the viewer may enjoy the tubes full of immiscible liquids tumbling in colorful turbulence just as curiosity pieces or get a personal esthetic bang from them.

sbOTTO PIENE, 37, was a teen-age flak gunner in Germany during World War II. He vividly recalls the incredible light patterns of tracers and the bursts of bombs. Says he: "Fright inspires inventiveness and gives birth to giant monsters." In 1950 he helped found the Group Zero in Duesseldorf, which investigated the effects of light. On his own, he designed "light ballets" like sweeping projections of tracer beams. "I want to demonstrate that light is a source of life which has to be continuously rediscovered, to show its expansion as a phenomenal event." His Fixed Star may recall a revolving ballroom chandelier, but his intention is to turn art inside out: his light rays reach out into the spectator's space rather than coax him into their framework.

sbNAM JUNE PAIK, 33, a Korean, is a devotee of Composer John Cage, and his primary ambition was to compose far-out sounds. Electronic music inspired him to make electronic art, just as the Russian composer Scriabin made a motorized light display to accompany his Prometheus half a century ago. Now living in New York City, Paik buys up old television sets, scrambles the images they receive with electromagnetic coils and magnets. The results are a vertigo of discombobulated images, an early show of what kinetic art might become. "There are 4,000,000 dots per second on one TV screen," he says. "Just think of the variety of images you can get. It's so cool. It's like going to the moon."

Genius or Gimmickry? Film Maker Hans Richter calls kinetic art "the movement movement." He applauds its humor, which gives "us a feeling of liberation from the purposefulness of all the [machines] that condition our life." Yet he warns that since the machine expresses purposefulness, and art purposelessness, combining the two to make an art of motion is dangerous.

That reality is composed of motion, or constant change, is unquestionable. That art gains by truly imitating reality is not. For kinetic art, the dilemma is to surmount the gimmickry necessary to make it move. A question yet unanswered is: Would Leonardo da Vinci have been truer to life if, every minute or so, the Mona Lisa winked?

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