Short Guide to Optic Art
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By BRYAN ROBERTSON
dE notes which follow don't attempt a efinitive series of explanations, quoting chapter and verse, because the ramifications of kinetic and optical art are too diverse for this kind of capsule treatment. Two permissive gen- eralisations are, one: the whole field is engaged in the systematic exploration of visual percep- tion and, two: the roots and total ethos of all the artists evolving inside the framework of the new movement are European. The field is inter- national but the American contribution is mar- ginal. We are considering, in fact, Europe's unique alternative to what is otherwise still largely a US-dominated scene in painting and sculpture. Individual artists like Smith, Moore, Bacon, Giacometti, Matta, Tapies and Balthus are isolated from any general trends or directives.
One important digression. If you'll allow that the concrete nature of painting and sculpture demands its own specific language (for we don't denigrate scientific, musical or mathematical terminology as 'jargon') a great many phrases cause perplexity which, though not integral to this guide, move in and out of any discussion of the new movement. Labels like 'neo-dadaist' for instance. Helpful background reading includes, therefore, at its briefest, Herbert Read's `concise histories' of modern painting, and modern sculp- ture; and the recent studies of Surrealism by Waldberg and Dada by Richter, all in paper- back. There are more exended works on these and other aspects of modern art, Kahnweiler (and Golding) on cubism; and Motherwell's col- lation of all the Dada material, with his own commentaries.
But a crucial book to study for a better under- standing of our restricted theme is Camilla Gray's The Russian Experiment in Art. This covers the constructivists: Tatlin, Malevich, Gabo, Lissitsky, and their aspirations which are a radical foundation of the nod movement. To bring you more directly up to date four essays on Kinetic Art (Motion Books, 1966) and the short introductory essay by William Seitz to the New York Modern Museum's 'Responsive Eye' exhibition of 1965 are also valuable, though the range of artists selected for this show was, in my view, too broad. Finally, a large book by Biederman, Art as the Evolution of Visual Knowledge, is a kind of bible for most exponents of the different strands of the new art. Very few are able to stay with it for more than twenty minutes' sheer effort at a time; if you go as far as acquiring this tome you'd better also put your name down for Koffka's Principles of Gestalt Psychology and have done with it. Before a worried winter sets in I'd better get on with my list.
Kinetic applied to the fine arts simply means physical movement: 'science of the relations be- tween the motions of bodies and the forces act- ing on them.' The word is reasonably accurate when describing a machine-like sculpture which moves, but I've always felt it to be mildly pre- tentious outside the laboratory (Calder's mobiles, motivated by air currents, are, strictly speaking, inside the category but also borderline examples) and possibly the artist's retort to tht scientists and technologists who win hands down, in this era, in terms of money, backing and sheer power. Anyway, whenever you see a sculpture which rotates, whirrs or clicks, or a painting or construction with a built-in light that winks at you—all dependent upon electric or battery motor-power--then it's kinetic.
Good examples: Schoffer's machines with moving coloured lights; Tinguely's whimsical contraptions, often quite noisy, cranking and creaking away; the quivering or almost imper- ceptibly trembling petals, tendrils or wires that animate the surface of a construction by Takis (sometimes from motor-power, often through magnetic systems) or Pol Bury. Water can also be used as a kinetic force: e.g. a fountain jet with a ball bobbing around in continual sus- pension. Critical note: a disconcerting number of kinetic 'sculptures' or `assemblages' are for- mally weak when the engine is switched off and the object is static. The areas of density filled by all those engaging antennae are often pretty basic from a formal standpoint when they stop waving at you. Exception: Pol Bury.
Kinetic art at its purest is strictly pro- grammed: that is, events happen in planned progression. The ball at the end of a controlled jet of water is calculated to move in a particular way, and varies only according to schematically variable factors. The purest kinetic art stems directly from constructivism. Less pure, more romantic, exponents include Takis with nature references, and Tinguely, who invokes humour as well as the obviously extra-curricular elements of materials with specific connotations, and touches on neo-dadaism by making auto- destructive machines that are also rather akin to `happenings' in their surrealist manipulations of a bizarre spectacle at a given time in a given place. Example: a colossal 'machine' which gradually burns itself up. The New York City Fire Brigade were busy not long ago in the gar- den of the Modern Museum. There is also a decorative side to Tinguely, on occasion, which obscures the intention of his kinetic work and this certainly applies to the prettiness of Schoffer's coloured-light boxes. Richard Lip- pold's giant gold Sun in New York is a proto- type for this decorative tendency. Len Lye's austere, tightly programmed kinetic work (also in America) exemplifies the pure approach: he avoids arbitrary, unpredictable action—which Tinguely consciously exploits.
I've now sown all the seeds for the next defi- nition, which is Environmental Painting and Sculpture, with occasional associative use of the Play Element. Keeping to the first phrase, Vasarely is the best living exponent of this attempt to make whole walls at once functional and a work of art. This is the direct extension of the idealistic aims of the constructivists, who believed invincibly in the twentieth century and wanted to rescue• art from the constraint of frames—which also `distances' it—and bring it right into everyday life. Vasarely's work has imaginative authority (so does Agam's), but his point of view is amplified by others who push the environmental concept farther by incor- porating light and sound with a slightly self- conscious use of new materials—or old materials in a new way, like neon-strips or bright-coloured perspex. All put together, this can come peri- lously close to a 'happening' and, if vulgar or silly enough, can degenerate into 'gear,' as in Carnaby Street. Play element just means audi- ence participation: you can shift interchange- ably coloured shapes around or roll coloured discs down grooves or make the parts of a con- struction. move in certain ways. This play idea springs from surrealist theories: when you relax your detached critical faculties you remove a censor, and unpredictable things can happen in discovering a new creative potential: see Breton on dreams. Le Parc is an exponent of the play principle (he won first prize at this year's Venice Biennale), but this variant on environmental work, apart from its gear dangers, can easily be a visual decor equivalent to mindless back- ground music.
As we've been dealing with ambiguities, on and off, I come at last to Optical Art, which, like semantics with language, is scrutinising the whole of visual perception. Optical art is only coincidentally tough on the eyes: it disrupts complacent or lazy vision and makes us think again, but there's no interest in shock tactics. Bridget Riley is our best exponent of this pur- suit but she's also concerned with equilibrium or disequilibrium, plastic situations or events, which give an extra depth to her studies in ex- clusively visual perception. In general, she and a handful of others believe that from Monet on- wards the dynamics of pure vision have gradu- ally and in part been explored for their own sake, programmatically. Remember Monet's `Rouen Cathedral' series. . . . (Poons and Stella in America are peripheral to this belief.) Everything I've described is incorporated in the international movement called Nouvelle Tendance: in Paris the branch is Groupe de re- cherche visuelle; in Italy Gruppo IV; Germany has Group Zero, and there are others in Argen- tina and elsewhere.
It is essential, I believe, to try to assess all this as part of a broadly based progression of theory in all the arts. I must, therefore, point to the I Ching or `Book of Changes' as progenitor of the chance or 'play' element in philosophy; the essays of John Cage in Silence, and his music; the essays and music of Boulez and, quite separ- ately, Stockhausen with his electronic scores; above all, Mallarmes notes on the principles in- volved in his abstract poem 'Un Coup de Des' as well as his other published speculations, and his poetry. Mallarme and Monet between them started it all. (Mondrian brought it to a temporary impasse.) And Scriabin with his rather woolly music-and-colour (environmental) theories played his part too: a Russian, like those other father figures, the constructivists.
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