Page 24 - Studio International - February 1967

Marcel Duchamp mockery of movement survives in Tinguely and Kramer), struction : Time as a new element in plastic art'.
Rotative Plaque Verre
(Optique de Precision) 1920 in the influence of the invention of collage on ideas of what There had already been ten years of mobility in art. The
Reconstruction 1961 materials and methods could be used to make art. The Futurists had written in 1910: 'Movement and light de-
Painted glass most immediate source was Constructivist thought in stroy the materiality of bodies'; and in 1912: 'composition
Russia between 1913 and 1921 and the painting and in sculpture will use metal or wooden planes... static or
sculpture it generated. This spread, during the '20's, first moved mechanically.' In that decade appeared: Du-
to Germany and then, largely through the Bauhaus, to champ's bicycle wheel (Mobile) of 1913, Rodchenko's
Paris and the rest of the world. The germinative thought bundle of moveable rings, the Complessi Plastici Mobili of
was Naum Gabo's. Balla and Complessi Motorumisti of Depero (Rome, 1915),
Kinetic art was defined by Gabo in the Realist Manifesto the Tatlin maquette for a Monument to the Third Inter-
in 1920 in these words: 'We renounce the thousand-year- national (Moscow, 1920) and Duchamp's Rotative Plaque
old delusion in art that held the static rhythms as the only Verre (Optique de Precision), 1920. Thomas Wilfred, a
elements of the plastic and pictorial arts. We affirm in true and persevering pioneer, had already given his first
these arts a new element, the kinetic rhythms, as the basic Clavilux performance in 1919, a variable painting with
forms of our perception of real time.' Such art had to be coloured moving light. These pre-Gabo ventures, except
'non-objective' —Malevich's phrase of 1915. Any figura- for Wilfred, were tentative, unclear, and sporadic. Gabo
tion, association or symbolism would be a dilution or a was clear and certainly brief. He made only three kinetic
confusing counter-interest. Only art with actual move- works at the time : the spring, the drawing of 1922,
ment as its essence would be truly kinetic. and Torsion, 1929 (intended as a fountain, rotated by
Gabo was the first to use the phrase 'kinetic' in reference reaction, with parallel jets of water making a division and
to art. In 1920 he made an object embodying time and articulation of space equivalent to his strings). Having
space out of a vibrating spring which was exhibited at the defined the field, he abandoned it, because he believed
VAN DIEMEN GALLERY in Berlin in 1922 as 'Kinetic Con- the technology of the time was still too crude.