Page 32 - Studio International - October 1970

choking in its own archives. Whereas in the strings, each had only one movement: one should go on stage.' His favourite adjective
past perhaps one or two works survived could only ride on a wooden wheel, another was 'spectacular', and human beings seemed
from each period, nowadays what we euphe- could only move up and down, another could to him too stale and too limited to achieve
mistically call an age of information is really only turn on its axis. In 1956 he moved to this quality. The stereotyped and restricted
a fight for survival between items of informa- Paris and made with his puppets a short film movements of his early puppets paved the
tion that exist in overwhelming superfluity. entitled Die Stadt (`The Town'), about the way to a complete mechanization of the
It thus becomes all the more important for blind, mutant survivors of an atomic holocaust. puppet theatre, and led directly to the
artists to present their own information, their Defense 58-24, his second film, made in 1958 Automobile Sculptures or Cars that he made in
projects and their claims to priority as soon (the title is a telephone number), represented, the summer of 1959 for his second object
as possible, in a reasonably objective form, in its uncanny, partly automatic figures (the theatre, later known as Signals in Shadow. In
through exhibitions and publications. Dis- `eye-magnets'), the result of Kramer's his- this, on a low, dimly lit stage, picked out by
coveries that have taken place within some- torical researches. And these seemed then to sharp spotlights, and accompanied by musique
one's studio become unverifiable after a few be almost apocryphal. concrete, there moved self-absorbed wheeled
years of conflicting claims and counter- Kramer had a studio near the Paris Flea devices, absurd cranes, tall arrows, and now
claims to priority. This was in fact why the Market, full of ancient automative devices, and then faceless figures inextricably inter-
German kinetic artists had such a difficult kaleidoscopes and clocks, all of them con- woven with motor cars, all in a state of total
time at the beginning. There was no recep- stantly in motion. In the illustrated technical isolation from each other. The performance,
tive context; they had to create one. folios of the seventeenth century he found his which lasted less than half an hour, left one
Looked at as a whole, kineticism in Germany confirmation. Gabo's 1920 manifesto, and the with a stunned feeling that this was a vision
was not a new style but a new technique, like same artist's oscillating needle which acquires of a future in which the human race had died
oil painting in the past and the use of mass- volume through motion (Kinetic Construction out and only a few functionless technological
produced objects today. The presentation of No. 1), Man Ray's metronome with eye, dinosaurs lived on.
energy as such, whether natural or artificial in Bellmer's universal jointed doll, Calder's first The machines, whose dominant aspect was
origin, never became an end in itself; me- Mobiles of 1932, Kiepler's mechanical stage their cogwheels, were made of hardwood,
chanical movement was always a means to set of 1922, and the denaturalized, often only painted white, and were propelled backwards
develop an artistic intention in a more apparently mechanical object ballets of the and forwards by built-in clockwork mech-
effective way than was possible with a static Bauhaus theatre; all this Kramer invented anisms, electric motors and metronomes.
work. The first German kinetic artists anew for himself, in an obsessive effort to Although they were anything but autono-
display more clearly than any others the overthrow the 'dictatorship of the abstract'. mous sculptures (they were seldom more than
nature of the two principal roots of kineticism : It should be borne in mind that at that time 30 inches high), the massiveness of their frame-
these are the automatons of Mannerism there had been very few publications about work and the back-lighting gave them an
(Athanasius Kircher) and the mechanical either Mannerism or Surrealism; Kramer extraordinarily monumental appearance.
theatre of the Bauhaus. This is reflected in the derived his ideas from antique shops, flea Curiously, these Signals in Shadow were dis-
careers of Kramer and the Zero Group. markets, underground channels of informa- covered by the French radio through their
Harry Kramer was born in 1925, and after the tion and personal contacts, and had the not sound, their 'motor music', and received their
end of the war, as a trained barber, became unjustified feeling that he was laying the first public exposure at the Festival du Ser-
batman to the interned German atomic foundations for a clandestine revolt. vice de la Recherche de la ORTF in 1960.
physicists, including Hahn, Heisenberg and The starting-point was the theatre. 'The cruel In the same year Kramer projected the
Weizsäcker. He had to abandon a career as a intimacy of the Mannerist machine has never machines as colossal shadow movements in
solo dancer because of a heart condition, and been recaptured. That is absolute theatre.' his orthodox ballet Nightpulse at the Festival
started up a puppet theatre which, when Later, when he had met Tinguely, he wrote in de l'Art d'Avant-Garde. This led him, in his
it performed in Berlin in 1955, he dubbed the last sentence of his manifesto these words : third film, Die Schleuse (`The Sluice'), to set
`mechanical'. The puppets, controlled by `What I demand of the movement is that it the machines in a landscape, using a living