Page 23 - Studio International - February 1967

Origins of kinetic art

'A kinetic work moves within itself, changing the space relation of the parts;
and this movement is a dominant theme, not an incidental quality.'

George Rickey

Post hoc, propter hoc is the easiest historical fallacy. In art human interest in movement. Yet they cannot be seen, in
history one should distinguish between the origins of a relation to twentieth-century kinetic art, as sources, pro-
style and resemblant antecedents to it. One antecedent of totypes, influences, or even as preparation.
kinetic art is certainly the dance. This earliest of art forms The origins must be sought elsewhere. They are closer at
is still the least contrived disposition of objects in space, hand, within the twentieth century itself, and largely
measured by human stride, and in time, measured by within static art. Starting with the Impressionists and
drum-beats, handclapping, or a musical pulse. Kinetic accelerating rapidly after 1900 came profound changes
art is choreographic, but it does not derive from dancing. in the ideas of what art was and how it could be made.
Among other antecedents one may cite beribboned Among these changes were :
Maypoles, the Aztec flying game, acrobatics and trapeze desanctification of the faithfully reproduced object as
performances, flourishes with drumsticks and batons, subject;
Theorem XXXVII
of Heron of Alexandria which are partly ritual participation, partly spectacle; or the appearance in the early twentieth century of a non-
(second century B.C.) the models devised by Heron of Alexandria in the third objective art which enlisted major talents and gained wide
A model to explain the century B.C. to demonstrate theorems by physical pheno- acceptance;
expansion of gases. The altar
flame heats the air in the mena; or the eighteenth-century mechanical pictures, nineteenth and early twentieth century attempts such as
tube below it, which, some ingeniously driven by a cascade of sand; or the Scriabin's to produce non-objective visual equivalents of
expanding, pushes the water monkeys on a stick, articulated dolls from ancient Greece music;
through the syphon into the
bucket, evenly counter and Egypt, clowns balancing on their noses, clockwork the rapid spread of experiment in art, with its corollary,
balanced by the weight at toys of all kinds; or marionettes, jointed Javanese shadow an avant-garde, which eventually won stronger support
left. With the added weight puppets; or animated clocks, snuff boxes, chess players, than 'traditional' art (this experimentalism was similar
of water the bucket
descends, the rope turns and genre scenes; or the fountains and water works which to systematic discovery in science and led to rapid testing
the drums and the temple appear in every civilization; or headdresses of bobbing of a great variety of ways to make art, one of which was,
doors open inward. When plumes in New Guinea and masks with opening doors inevitably, the use of movement) ;
the fire dies down the air
cools, water is sucked and moving jaws from the shores of Puget Sound. Such the wide dispersal of a folk technology (do-it-yourself)
back, and the doors close contrivances demonstrate over the centuries the universal which permitted artists, without apprenticeship, to con-
struct devices which could embody (even if clumsily) a
kinetic art idea. (A mass-produced equivalent of the
tools a journeyman mechanic in 1900 acquired as a life-
time investment, were available for a few shillings in
Woolworth's soon after the First World War. They
wouldn't last a lifetime or permit the most refined crafts-
manship, but the artist could now construct by himself
in his studio.) ;
awareness of movement as something ponderable in
itself rather than as a transient quality of other things
(the Newtonian view). (This awareness grew slowly
through a half-century of widespread railway group
culture (e.g. Turner's Rain, Steam, and Speed of 1844),
followed after 1900 by very fast, individually controlled
movement by automobile and aeroplane. It was ex-
tended conceptually by space-time theory filtering down
from pure physics. Einstein published his General Theory
in 1905. References to a fourth dimension were made by
the Rayonnist painter Larionov in 1913, and by the
Constructivist sculptor Gabo in 1920.)
These factors were preconditions rather than causes of
kinetic art. Its stylistic origins lay in Cubism, in abstract
art, in the abortive attempts of the Futurists to introduce
movement into art, in the Dadaist idea that the presence
of movement in art was anti-art and a kind of joke (the