Page 33 - Studio International - July/August 1967

play of the suspended elements creates a difference be- psychological level the object as such which no longer
tween them. Multiplication of these works on an industrial bears the unique and precious imprint of the hand of its
scale is a logical development. There is no need for the creator, has been shorn of its value. When the work of art
special skills of a virtuoso to reproduce a geometrical is reduced to an effect of vibration or light, when its
kinetic work, and one is entitled to wonder whether the message is expressed fully through the superimposition of
present concept of the market, based on unique items, two sheets of Plexiglass or the trembling of a nail under
will be able to maintain for much longer exorbitant the action of a magnet, we may well think that the time
prices for works which consist of nothing more than a has come to organize production on a semi-industrial
sphere suspended from a piece of elastic, a grid illuminated basis and to help art escape the attentions of speculators.
by a lamp, a bowl half filled with water or a rod moved by Dematerialization of the work—an aesthetic concept — goes
a small motor—especially as these works are almost al- hand in hand with the reduction in its economic value
ways manufactured by the artist's assistants with perio- —which is a financial notion.
dic supervision by their instigator. The new school of Are we to conclude that 'multiplication' is a kind of
kinetic art has killed the old fetichist concepts; on the panacea? This is not the opinion of the members of the

Tinguely
Le Rotozaza 1967

GRAV group who express their objections with a great
Tinguely
Study of a machine deal of clarity in the catalogue to the recent Le Parc
Le Rotozaza 1965 exhibition in Paris. In their opinion if artists are content
Drawing merely to 'multiply' their products without changing in
121x 141 in. any way the relationship between the spectator and the
Galerie lolas, Paris
work of art, this will simply multiply at the same time the
contradictions of modern art. They therefore propose
multiplication not of works intended for individual con-
sumption, but of transportable units which will be sup-
plied to collective bodies—schools, barracks, blocks of flats
etc. —in order to enable each person to express his needs
without necessarily passing through the plane of indivi-
dual enjoyment. For the GRAV group, in the last resort
each individual must become an integral part of the work
of art, both on the active and passive planes; the spectacle
must be integrated with the spectator. The collective,
festive climate of primitive society must be recreated. q