While the dance/architecture analogy does not have as long a history as music, the correlation covers similar territory. The tactic of mapping dance fi gures as the means to generate architectural form has been explored in the same manner as mapping music.13 However, most speculation has involved discussion of the use of dance notation as a way to describe movement through architectural space.14 The method potentially most applicable for kinetics is that of Eshkol-Wachman.15 In this approach, movement is abstracted as two-dimensional geometric forms, and, while it was developed for dance, it is proposed that the technique can be used to describe any movement in space. The method has been translated to the fi ne arts as shorthand for describing and conceiving visual art.16 Other references to dance occur in the work of Paul Virilio and his proposition of the dancer on an oblique plane, as a counter to Le Corbusier’s Modulor.17 However, despite this range of activity there is little that can advance this inquiry. The correlations are similar to music. Dance is interpreted phenomenologically, as a way of mapping movement of the occupant in relation to static form. Or, as in the mapping of musical phrases, it is ultimately realized as static architecture that requires the surveyor to make an intellectual association.
Part I
60
Kinetic art
While aesthetics generated by movement can be traced back to ancient wind chimes, the beginning of kinetic art is associated with avant-garde experimentation of the early twentieth century.18 The generally acknowledged starting point is Naum Gabo’s 1920 publication of the realist manifesto and his exhibition of Virtual Kinetic Volume in the same year. Kinetic art explicitly introduced the temporal dimension into art, and movement was incorporated into works hung and framed as conventional paintings, freestanding sculpture both in and outside the gallery, machine works, and installations at a range of scales. With Anthony Calder’s exhibition of mobiles in Paris and New York in 1932, the genre received heightened exposure.19 He dominated the pre-war period with a series of developments on the mobile theme, while the most prolifi c period for kinetic art was during the 1950s and 1960s. In addition to the continuing popularity of Calder, prominent artists include Schoeffer, Takis, Len Lye and George Rickey.
As illustrated by Kepes’ The Nature and Art of Motion, kinetic art was part of a larger movement, which explored the potential of motion to transform practice in a range of art forms.20 Within architecture there is a legacy of this larger move- ment within the Bauhaus pedagogy.21 From the 1960s onwards, kinetics began to be incorporated with early computers, and the associated genre of cybernetic art took centre stage.22 Despite this breadth of activity, there are relatively few artists, critics or historians who have developed signifi cant theoretical discourse on kinetic art. From the 1960s to the 1970s we can locate: George Rickey, Morphology of
Kinetic Art;23 Frank Popper, Origins and Development of kinetic Art;24 Guy Brett,
Kinetic Art: The Language of Movement;25 and Frank J. Malina, Kinetic Art: Theory
and Practice.26 This fl urry of activity was followed by two decades of relative silence. As remarked by Yves-Alain Bois, ‘kinetic art suffered the unhappy fate of a fl ash in the pan’, and became associated with mechanical gadgets and domestic kitsch such as the ubiquitous 1970s lava lamp.27 More recently, there has been some resurgence in interest, with Guy Brett editing Force Fields: Phases of the Kinetic in 200028 and
Art that Moves: The Work of Len Lye, published in 2009 by Roger Horrocks.29 The contribution of Brett and Frank Malina will be briefl y considered, before looking closely at Popper’s encyclopaedic survey and the distinctive contributions of Len Lye and George Rickey.
Malina compiled selections from the journal Leonardo as a book on kinetic art theory and practice. This provides a mix of intriguing artworks, which are categorized as pictorial (optical, mechanical, chemical), audio-kinetic or electronic. The majority are descriptions of technique or individual outcomes, with Malina’s paper being the exception. In describing his Lumidyne system (modulating light via mechanical fi ltering) he speculates on the broader issues of the range of a motion aesthetic. He briefl y articulates range in terms of natural motion (fl ames, water, wind) and machine enabled, such as the lateral translation and pivoting enabled by a crane. In a similarly brief discussion of aesthetics he considers the problem of attention span of the surveyor, arguing against imposing ‘a well defi ned plot in time’ in favour of constant variation. He concludes by stating the fi eld is too new to establish a full aesthetic understanding, leaving the artist to ‘search empirically for satisfying visual
experiences’.30 This description certainly fi ts his fellow contributors, resulting in the book being a compendium of experiments with a range of techniques.
Guy Brett, some fi ve years later, undertakes a similar review of practic- ing artists. His approach, by comparison to Malina, attempts to place kinetic art in a wider context. He locates kinetics as part of a wider arts language where ‘movement presents the possibility of a work of art whose form is a process of growth’.31 Brett is somewhat scathing of the tendency for ‘stylistic connotations, most of them techni- cal’.32 For Brett, kinetics is representative of a wider artistic shift from art object to art as process. He highlights the grappling of twentieth-century avant-garde painting and sculpture against the Renaissance conception of space. Kinetic art is considered, by comparison, a natural outcome of the ‘relativity of things’.33 Rather than seeing kinetics as moving objects, these are conceived as sampling a new space, that of matter and energy. Brett’s short book is beautifully evocative, but unfortunately not particularly useful for this comparatively prosaic inquiry. Given the intent here is to map the boundaries of kinetic form within a very specifi c context, we move on to perhaps the complete opposite of Brett: the compendium of Frank Popper.