Page 27 - Studio International - February 1967

Right Hans Haacke Scylla and Carybdis (detail) 1966
Oil, water, plexiglass
Below Pablo Picasso Mandolin, 1914, Wood construction
23 5/8 in. high. Coll.: the artist; repro, Zervos Editions,
Cahiers d'Art, Paris
A construction of this kind was seen by Tatlin during a visit to
Picasso the previous year

Light is sometimes projected, through modulators, on to curved and moving reflector; to Colombo a gently
a screen, with a hint of the theatre, as with Healey, heaving segmented surface; to Bury the infinitesimal dis-
Schoeffer, and Palatnik; or rays may pass through placement of a line or a solid; to Haacke the tireless
prisms, plastic sheets, and rods, or bounce from mirrors effort of a liquid to be contained within the least surface.
as with Gruppo N, Le Parc, Vardanega, and Pohl; or the Current works may themselves be origins. Movement
activity of light itself may be directed at the eye with requires adept mechanics. Much kinetic work is still
interruptions, reflections, and refractions, giving it a primitive. It took centuries for painters to learn to use
sequence in time, as with Boto, Mack or Piene. This area colour for itself, to master and then bypass perspective,
of light in motion is developing so rapidly and so diversely to find out that the picture was an object to be experi-
that one needs a special set of terms and criteria for it. enced, rather than the re-enactment of a previous
However the attempts of some critics to identify light play experience. Moholy recognized in his own manifesto,
as the central theme of kinetic art as a whole seem myopic. written two years after Gabo's, that 'the first projects
The promise for movement itself lies in its use as a domi- looking toward the dynamic-constructive system of forces
nant expressive means, not in being accessory or auxiliary can be only experimental, demonstration devices.... Next
to some other expression. Used by now in very diverse comes the utilization of the experimental results for the
ways, movement continues as one facet of non-objective creation of freely moving works of art.' It may well be
art, already half-a-century old, which is independent of that kinetic artists, with their new dimension, will spend
outside imagery or association or mood, and which is its years, perhaps decades, forging adequate technical means
own excuse for being. and, after that, in sorting out and clearing away such
Such an art may present itself in the barest terms : to weeds as illusion, sensationalism, seductiveness, impact,
Malevich it was a group of squares; to Gabo a piece of scientific enquiry, demonstration of phenomena, and
space defined and revealed by transparent surfaces and anecdotal record. Only then can they cultivate the garden
strings; to Le Parc it is a ray of light responding to a they have entered.
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