Page 28 - Studio International - July/August 1967

Painting -a thing of the past

A French critic discusses kinetic art and the attempts on the part of certain kineticists to recreate 'the
festive climate of primitive society' as a counterweight to the 'isolating factors' of industrial society

Jean Clay

We are the prisoners of words. Hardly have we evolved a us a scaled down version of that great work which nature
new concept than it becomes fossilized and prevents our accomplishes incessantly in the universe as a whole.
thoughts from progressing. Born out of opposition to the Kineticism is not realistic art, it is the art of reality.
notion of static art, kineticism has become the whipping- Painting as such, which is the art of coloured pigments
boy of all those plodding daubers who interminably criti- inherited from the Van Eyck brothers, was radically
cize 'everything which moves' without even trying to questioned a few years ago by two important develop-
understand that there may be as much variety and as ments: the 'monochrome' of Yves Klein, which put an
many different facets in these works 'which move' as end to four centuries of speculation on illusionism and the
there are in 'works which do not move'. They confuse the fiction of space; the razor stroke of Fontana, which de-
effect with the cause and refuse to understand the pro- stroyed once and for all, in the most convincing possible
found reasons for which so much research has centred on manner, the traditional medium—supposedly set apart
attempts to break the bonds of static principles at a cer- from the confines of space and time—which had for so
tain stage of artistic, social, scientific and technical long sheltered the lie of art. As for those young sculptors
development. From jointed Greek sculptures to Giaco- who work in stone today, recreating menhirs or figures
metti's 'suspended ball', we could list many 'mobile' inherited from the ancient world, we know that they
works which do not reflect the new spirit or bear witness belong more and more to the past. Media such as stone
to that profound psychological revolution which is today or oil paint which cannot reflect the ductility and in-
shaking the very foundations of art itself. 1 We cannot stability of the changing world, are condemned by the
dismiss what is happening today as the work of a new new art.2
generation of 'handy-men' who are merely offering a Prophetically announced by Boccioni, a great era has
better puppet-show or more perfect robots than any we begun—an era which is as exciting as the period at the
have known in the past. What is in fact happening is that beginning of this century in which cubism destroyed
a whole generation of artists has intuitively become aware the spatial concepts inherited from the Renaissance.
of modern, physical reality and incorporated in the lan- Heralded by a few forerunners, Duchamp, Gabo, Man
guage of art notions such as relativity, evolution of the Ray, Wilfred, Calder, Moholy-Nagy, etc., a whole genera-
universe, links between space and time, the fluidity and tion has today set itself the task of destroying the static
ductility of natural phenomena, the corpuscular, un- object. While the fetichist champions of pop art and neo-
dulatory nature of energy-matter. Kineticism is the aware- dadaism indulge in their pious attempts to safeguard the
ness of the instability of reality. products or the debris of a consumer society in their
Of course the old masters were also intuitively conscious desperate endeavour to fix the appearances of the world
of this phenomenon. The originality of the new art lies around us which is breaking up on every side, the kinetic
in the instability of the medium. The metamorphosis is artists accept this decomposition and use it as an integral
played out in the heart of the material which bears the part of their message. Time impinges upon space, matter
message of the work. The work has ceased to be a mere is shown in movement, forms in a process of continual
static account of a movement experienced by the artist transformation. The static medium which used to bear
and then described through the intermediary of forms and the message of the artist is directly attacked, corroded,
colours which evoke and try to restore the original emo- and carried off in the great flux of the universe. This
tional shock. On the contrary, the aesthetic happening attack on formalism can already be perceived clearly in
takes place before our very eyes : we observe the work as optical art. The very notion of plastic art is put in ques-
it is born, moves, vibrates, consumes energy, dies and is tion by the new departures of Mondrian in 1918 and
reborn. A real, living phenomenon of nature is captured 1942, of Albers in 1925, of Soto, Morellet and Vasarely
by the talent of the artist. To draw a grammatical in the 1950s and of the Visual Art Research Group in
parallel we may say that a kinetic work is in the present 1959. The inter-relationship of forms, the equilibrium of
tense, whereas a conventional painting—be it a landscape volumes are no longer of any interest to these artists who
or abstract composition—is in the past tense, since it
represents primarily the transposition of an emotional
reality experienced previously by the artist. A kinetic
1 Whereas conversely, many static works bear the stamp of this
work exists only through the unfurling of a physical event
revolution.
before our very eyes : the forces of nature, waves, light, 2 For example at the last Venice Biennale there were very few easel
driving energy, are utilized in order to perform before paintings.