Kinetic art
Everything is in a constant move. There is no immobility. Jean Tinguely 1959
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Kinetic art has its basics in creating impression that an artwork is moving or looks like moving. According to Umberto Eco it is a form of visual art where the movement of shapes, colors and surfaces [1] is a mean to achieve constantly transforming unity. The definition includes not only the most distinct type of kinetic art (which includes the real movement) but some other as well. There are other types of artworks using movements – arts in which there is an illusion of move created due to to movement of a percipient in a relation to the artwork and an art which uses persistently changing lights. Threedimensional kinetic art objects made a wider range of choices available to the artist. They could either, as did optical painting, remain static, while relying on the action of light and on well-known optical phenomena to produce an illusion of movement, or they could actually move, with or without the aid [3] of mechanical power. `Mobiles`, which move at random, were essentialy the invention of two men – first made by the Russian Constructivist Aleksandr Rodchenko, they were then, after a lapse of some years, re-invented by the American Alexander Calder. Mechanically-powered art objects can be traced [4] back to Duchamp and to another Russian Constructivist, Naum Gabo. The golden era of kinetic art in 50s was not the first attempt to experiment with a movements. Main roots of this kind of art come from the 20s, from constructivism and dadaism. The interest about science and engineering which played an important role in constructivism was a permanent topic in kinetic arts. In 1919 a construction by Vladimir Tatlin was designed consisting of three buildings each moving separately (The Monu[4] ment to the Third International). Dadaists though were interested in playfulness and coincidence of kinetic art. One of the famous early artworks was The Bicyclewheel, first ready-mades by Marcel Duchamp (a wheel connected to a kitchen chair). It was Duchamp who first used the word mobiles. In further history of kinetic art development in 30s there are two remarkable names – László Moholy Nagy and Alexander Calder. The original Light-Space Modulator was an electric rotationg statue made from metal and glass changing a space around as it was emitting light rays. The real movement was incorporated into Calder`s works also. In 1926 he invited members of paris avantguarde into his atelier to introduce wire Circus.[1] In 50s the kinetic art became a common part of artworks. The most significant exhibition was the one in Paris in 1955 called The Move. Except of works of Duchamp and Calder, some new were introduced ( Agam, Bury, Jacobsen, Tinguely, Vasarely). The exhibition was popular and meant a boom for kinetic art. More artists appeared in 60s and 70s, such as Palatnik, Rickey, Snelson, Haacke, Medalla and Takis.[1] The revival of kinetic art objects was largely the work of Latin American artists, among them the Argentinian memebers of Madí group and Venezuelans such as Carlos Cruz-Diez and Jesús Rafael Soto. Soto`s original influences were Mondrian and Malevich. He made paintings which effect was created by repetition of units so that they seemed as a part of infinetly large fabric which the spectator was asked to imagine. The most intense of his works are large screens of hanging rods. Hung along the lenght of a wall, these layers seem to dissolve the whole side of room, calling into question all the spectator`s reactions to an enclosed space.[3] The kinetic art has many forms. From the objects by Pol Bury, moving with hypnotic slowness, to graceful kinetic statues by Rickey; from cybernetic towers by Schoffer to Takis`s telemagnetic objects hung from ceiling. The most beloved is however the craty strange automats from various junk by Jean Tinguely. His Meta-Malevičs and Meta-Kandinskijs were a witty reference to enormous seriousness of the abstractionist generation. The movement has still something to say also to contemporary artists and to the audience as it tries to, by the words of kinetic artist Tatsuo Miyajima, change constantly, connect everything with everything and proceed forever. 2
P1> M.Duchamp: Bicyclewheel 1913
P3> G. Rickey: Three Squares Vertical Diagonal
P5> A. Calder: Mobile
P2> A. Calder: Calder’s Circus 1931
P4> E. Degas: At the races
P6> A. Rodchenko: Oval Hanging Spatial Construction Number 12 3
Op art
More important than to understand an artwork is to experience it. Victor Vasarely 1963
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Even that every kind of art depends or relies on optical illusions in some way, the op-art is working with these phenomenon to affect the ordinary process of perception. A distinctive feature of Optical art is that it relies for its effect on certain physiological processes in the eye and brain which we are not aware of normally. It is an abstraction, operating in both two-dimensional and three dimensional [2] form. Op-art paintings consist of accurate geometrical pattern in black and white tones or is sets of pastel colors. They vibrate, shine, deceive, create moire effects, illusions of movements or short-lasting [4] impressions. The inability of an eye to find any focal point, any sailent feature or pattern to hold its attention, must certainly play a part in explanation of these phenomena. It may be helpful to show some random examples. /1/ As an eye approaches to the centre of McKay figure, the converging lines becoming thinner and closer, are more difficult to distinguish. Finally, they explode in a blaze of light. At the same time, shock-waves seem to detach themselves and radiate outwards from the centre. /2/ The optical effects of this illustration of triangles are less obvious than those in previous one. The tone of structure changes continually, from bright to grey. Sometimes triangles seem flat, at other times they seem to recede. /3/ By contrast Bridget Riley`s Straight Curve differs only to the extent that some of the triangles are smaller, sets up a definite pattern of change. There are also rhytmic movements up and down and across the picture. From this its obvious that Op artists want something to happen on the canvas. They do not present the spectator with a finished composition but rather with a situation which requires the spectator`s reaction for the full development of the work. It was said that these [2] works exist less as objects than as generators of perceptual responses. But of course, the responses are calculated by the artist. However, they have been accused of trickery and lower depths of illusionism. But op-artist do not create illusions to amaze the public. These effects are created for their visual qualities, their delicancy, power and there is no harm in that. In addition, the roots of optical arts are older than we might think. The forts experiments were done yet in renaissance (Brunelleshi, Massacio, da Vinci, Donatello...) and they were developed by impressionists as well (Renoir, Monet). If you isolate certain works of Seurat or Signac they look like Optical paintiings. One finds it also in Muslim ceramics [4] in Spain, in inlaid marble floors, in parlor games. The antecedents of Op art in terms of graphic and color effects can be traced back to neoimpressionism, cubism, futurism and dada also. Op-art started mainly as a reaction to then prevalent informal art: abstract expressionism, action painting. Younger artists wanted precision – but they didn`t wanted to return to pre-war de stijl or constructivist style – [1] there was a need for something else. Optical art also responded to another requirement: make a direct appeal to the spectator, involve him, call for participation. In their manifesto Enough of Mystification they mention: There must be no more productions exclusively for the cultivated eye, the sensitive eye, the intellectual eye, the aestetic exe, the dilletant eye – the human eye is our point of departure.[4] The answer for a substitution for pop-art appeared in 1965 on a exhibition called The Reacting Eye. Curatored by William C. Seitz, it took place in Museum of Modern Art in New York. Even with the presence of representants of the GRAV group and concretists, the biggest success was acheived by perceptive abstractionists, as nicknamed by Sietz. Americans Richard Anuszkiewicz, Larry Poons, British Michael Kinder and Bridget Riley and French with hungarian roots – Victor Vasarely were standing on the edge of new era. The era that belonged to them. Their art was given a name op-art, just before the exhitbition (an abbreviation of optical art together with a parallel with pop art), not from professional artists [3] but from media. The name first appeared in an anonymous article in Time magazine in 1964. During the exhibition it was used more often and stimulated the audience in a way that for the opening of the Reacting Eye they came dressed in op-art style. The new style found easily its way to fashion, interior 5
design and graphics. But rapidly gained popularity was disliked by critics, especially in USA where the followers of abstract expressionism, minimalism and abstraction overlooked op-art as a tricky matter. The artists themselves had an ambivalent relationship with their artworks regarding to the popularity. Bridget Riley, whose works were accepted with an excitement, once nearly sued a producer who created „rileylike“ dress. She expressed in public that „commericalism, fashion styles and hysterical sensation-hunt“ have the responsibility for disaffection between the world of artists and ordinary people.[5] Though seemed innovative, op-art had its precursors, especially in Europe. We can find its origins in a traditional optical illusion techniques. Also in the 20th century there were groups interested in the topics of visual perception and illusion, for example Bauhaus, dadaists, constructivists, orfists, futurists and neoimpressionists. Marcel Duchamp and Man Ray experimented with optical illusions in 1920 already, aparently in the object of Rotating glass planks. László Moholy-Nagy and Josef Albers were working with optical illusions produced by light, spatial, move and color relationships and [1] perspective. Their works were well-known in the United States and in Europe as well. The illusion of movement was the core topic for Victor Vasarely, the most infuential op-artist. Vasarely studied in 1929 in Budapest in the studio of hungarian activist Sándor Bortnyk and together with other hungarian artists from GRAV group infulenced by him, he wanted to discoved a new form of art. It was supposed to be sharing, collective and utopian. His idea was to create patterns witch will be reproduced by other people or machines and which could possibly be implemented in architectural or urbanistic projects. The final goal was to create a new society, „a new geometrical city – sunny and full of colors“. Vasarely was sure that his cycle Planetarian folklore will contribute to achieve this as he sum up his thoughts how to apply works in architectural plans. During 50s Vasarely and other europian op-artists were supported by the paris gallery of Denis René. Most of their works were exhibited in a break[1] through exhibition Le Mouvement in 1955. Op-art is becoming a real work of art only with the presence of the audience. In this sense the works are „virtual“, they make the spectator to understand the perception process and thinking and doubt reality. The completition of the painting through the act of looking was in line with the view taken earlier in the century by Duchamp concerning the interdependance of the object and the spectator within the framework of the creative art, and foreshadowed what came back to be called Conceptual art. This subject is connecting op-art with other contemporary movements such as Fluxus, hyperrealism and GRAV group as well as with gestalt theory in psychology (the whole is percepted more important than sum of its units) and new discoveries in psychology and [2] physiology of perception. Even though op-art had been soon old-fashioned, its visual dictionary and techniques were re-used in 80s by a new generation of artists to whom belonged for example American Philip Taaffe or Dutch Peter Schuyff. The renaissence of op-art paid a huge tribute to op-art artists. The simultaneity of oppositions in the field of art-making is no new phenomenon. It is met in almost every epoch of art history. Thanks to the pluralistic thinking, the number of diverse and sometimes mutually exclusive tendencies co-existing on the scene i especially great. Pop-art and Neo-realism, too, were paralleled by a movement with quite different aims. As their representatives were developing an art determined by life and the outside world, inculuding all its banality, there were [4] artists devoting themselves to issues inherent to art. Because Op-art is so commonly treated as a completely closed, self-contained phenomenon, little has been made of its possible relationship to other developments in abstract art of the period. Essentially, these developments were the two related phenomena which came to be labelled Minimal and Conceptual Art. 6
P7> B.Riley: Fall 1963 /3/
P8> B.Riley: Straight Curve 1963 /2/
P10> V.Vasarely: Vega 201 1968
P11> R. Anuszkiewicz: Untitled
P12> P. Taaffe: Untitled
P9> McKay: Figure 1958 /1/
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Bridget Riley *1931, london
"I work with nature, although in completely new terms."
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An attack on perceptual habits was mounted with a great force by the London Artist Bridged Riley. She is one of Britain's best-known artists. Since the mid-1960s she has been celebrated for her distinctive, optically vibrant paintings which actively engage the viewer's sensations and perceptions, producing visual experiences that are complex and challenging, subtle and arresting. Riley is acclaimed as one of the finest exponents of Op Art, her work is characterized by its intensity and it's often disorientating effect. Riley is fascinated with the act of looking and in her work aims to engage the viewer not [6] only with the object of their gaze but also with the actual process of observation. Though her work is abstract, the optical experiences obtained through viewing her work seem surprisingly familiar. During her childhood, when she lived in Cornwall, she formed an acute responsiveness to natural phenomena. In particular, the effects of light and color in the landscape. Though her mature work does not proceed from observation, it is nevertheless connected with the experience of nature. This is of course strongy connected with her childhood backround. Bridget Riley was born in Norwood, South London, in 1931. She spent her childhood between Cornwall and Lincolnshire, before attending Cheltenham Ladies’ College in Gloucestershire. Riley’s artistic education began at Goldsmiths college of art [5] from 1949, then at the Royal College from 1952-5. Riley exhibited her artwork in a number of group shows at this early stage, including the ‘Young Contemporaries’, London , in 1955, and at the South London Art Gallery in 1958. A mental breakdown triggered by a deterioration in her father’s health led Riley away from her studio in the late 1950s. Upon her recovery she took up a string of teaching posts, including one at Loughborough School in 1959, and another at Croydon School of Art in 1962-4. [7] It was during this period that Riley honed her personal artistic style. Whilst teaching at Croydon, Bridget gained her first critical recognition. In the spring of 1962 she had her first solo show, at Gallery One in London, a defining moment. In 1963 she won a prize in the open section of the John Moore’s Liverpool exhibition and took the AICA Critic’s Prize in London. Having flirted with pointillism, the technique of painting with dots which Georges Seurat had made famous in late nineteenth-century France, Riley discovered her own method of treating optics in paint. Bridget Riley’s paintings came to i[3]nternational notice when she exhibited along with Victor Vasarely and others in the Museum of Modern Art in New York at an exhibition called “The Responsive Eye” in 1965. It was one of Riley’s paintings that was featured on the cover to the exhibition catalogue. “The Responsive Eye” was a huge hit with the public but proved to be less popular with the critics, who dismissed the works as trompe l’oeil (literally ‘tricks of the eye’). It was around this time that the term ‘Op Art’ entered the public consciousness. Op Art captured the imagination of the public and became part of the swinging sixties. The fashion, design and advertising industries fell in love with its graphic, sign-like patterns and decora[9] tive value. Op Art was cool, and Bridget Riley became Great Britain’s number one art celebrity. Commercial demand for Bridget Riley’s artwork peaked in the 1970s, but crumbled the following decade. Riley began to travel extensively. Up until early 1980 she had been working on her 'curve' paintings, but these came to an end after a particularly inspiring sojourn in Egypt. Her extensive exploration of color and contrast began after this. The 1980s was a rather dark time for the artist as suddenly-and unexpectedly-her work fell out of fashion. Riley resigned herself to the comparative quiet of her studio. But she never stopped working and recent years have witnessed a revival in her popularity, as reflected in the resurgence of exhibitions of her work. Following a display of her artwork in the Serpentine Gallery in 1999, Tate Britain put on a major Riley retrospective in 2003. Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville, [5] Paris, hosted their own Riley retrospective in 2008. A freshly-discovered interest in Riley’s artwork has also been echoed in art market sales. 9
Now in her 80s Bridget Riley still continues to work. Exhibitions of her work are held all over the world – Sydney, Tokyo, New York, Zurich, London to mention just some of the cities where her work has been shown recently. In 2007 there was an exhibition of fifteen paintings done between 2005 and 2006 at the Timothy Taylor Gallery in London. Again her images had changed; the shapes of the ‘lozenge’ paintings of the 1980s and 1990s swept across verticals but this time they were fluid arabesques [7] in softer colours – blues, greens, lilacs and pale oranges. Bridget Riley is a consistent innovator in her field who experiments constantly with new ideas that mark new departures. For this reason nobody can truly know what the future will bring in terms of her original and unique art, which is demanding both of herself and of those who see them. Bridget Riley’s major paintings are very large and may take six to nine months to develop, almost to evolve. She begins by making small colour studies in gouache. Riley hand mixes all of the paints as the exact hue and intensity is vital and must be kept constant. Successful studies lead to a full size paper and gouache cartoon which prefigures the final work. These are then enlarged, ruled up, under-painted with acrylic and over-painted in oils. Everything is painted by hand – no rulers, masking tape or mechanical means are used when actually applying the paints. Riley has worked with assistants since the 1960s because of the large scale and the need [9] for great precision. Her concepts, once she said, was the open, planar space, a multi-focal space of this kind found, for instance, in Pollock. What she implied was a space without a compositional or perspective focus or center. It toll the form of „all-over“ compositions inspired by Pollock`s , but entirely [8] lacking in his dramatical gesture. The optical irritation or unrest caused by Riley`s pictures is purely visual in nature. Admittedly, changes in tempo, condensation or relaxation of the patterns of stripes, dots, wavy lines, trinagular or rectangular shapes, the virtual movements and countermovements and stasis or dynamics of the pictorial elements, evoke a suspenseful in non-relational expressiveness, which, however is always kept under formal control. Riley undrestands the counterpoint and polarization in her imagery to represent formal parallels „to our emotional life“. Apart from drawing inspiration from the Pointillists and Impressionists (especially Monet), and admiring the universal harmony of Mondrian, Riley has been influenced by van Gogh and the Futurists. Every on of her paintings has its own specific character, despite the fact that all individual touch has been expunged in an effort to make her art as objective as humanly possible. Bridget Riley does not deny art history but has [6] stripped away narrative to reveal the rhythmic movement within the traditions of western painting. Although she began by making work in black, whites and grays, color soon became integrated into her structures, giving them a unique coherence. The image pulsates, expands and contracts. Colors merge, interact and make new colors, fusing and separating to build a kind of kinetic web so that they float, sink and emerge as one continues looking at a painting. She insists that the experience of looking cannot be known, only discovered through the process of making. When looking at her paintings the eye does not know where to rest. With their repeated abstract marks and optical sensations they seem to release visual energy, to bring something into being through a process of trial and error. She works [8] from what she knows in order to discover what she does not. "You cannot deal with thought directly outside practice as a painter," she says, "doing is essential in order to find out what form your thought [9] takes." Bridget Riley has been committed to abstract painting for more than 40 years. She believes that painting was an abstract art long before abstract art became a style and a theory.As Maurice Denis famously said in his quote that seemed to anticipate 20th-century abstraction: "It should be remembered that a picture - before being a warhorse, a nude, or an anecdote of some sort - is essentially a flat [6] surface covered with colors assembled in a certain order." 10
P13> B. Riley: Kiss 1961
P14> B. Riley in her studio 1962
P16> B. Riley: Movement in squares 1961
P15> B. Riley: Breathe 1963
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Pictures that attacked the eye /and conquered the world/
Tricky geometric forms, a stunning game with perspective to fool the eye. Origins in many other movements from surrealism to bauhaus and especially its popularity among people throughout ages and economic statuses, brought op-art to the top of modern art history styles. Those moving breathtaking paintings caused a breakthrough in art history and we can see the influence of op-art even now in 21st century. The reason why the fame still continous is, in my opinon, that op-art, despite being so minimalistic comparing to other tendencies in art in that period, became popular among ordinary people. Because of its geometrically-based nature, Op Art is, almost without exception, nonrepresentational.The elements employed (color, line and shape) are carefully chosen to achieve maximum effect. Crowds have been always chained to pictures like this, they like the fact that even for a simple person, the painting is understandable and with the same joy as art critiques, they can stare at artworks. The art for the masses was a new approach, developed by pop-art originaly. But op-art might sometimes seem to overtake pop.art in popularity because of the big admiration among people. As a result, one began to see Op Art showing up everywhere: in print and television advertising, as LP album art and as a fashion motif in clothing and interior decoration. It happend to be real pop-art. Of course, Op Art would not have been possible - let alone embraced by the public - without the prior Abstract and Expressionist movements in previous periods, especially kinetic art. Also in previous times, we can find many other influental styles. The cubists experiments with form, Cezanne’s work with colour and the abandonment of representational art entirely in the form of abstraction. From here we looked at the simple geometric shapes of Mondrian and Malevich, the anti-art of the Dadaists, the wild imagination of the Surrealists, the expressive freedom of the Abstract Expressionists and the fascination with popular culture of the Pop Artists. It's also worth mentioning that, in the digital age, Op Art is sometimes viewed with bemusement. Perhaps you, too, have heard the comment: "A child with the proper graphic design software could produce this stuff." Quite true, of a gifted child, with a computer and the proper software at his or her disposal, in the 21st century. This certainly wasn't the case in the early 1960s, and the 1938 date of Vasarely's Zebra speaks for itself in this regard. Op Art represents a great deal of math, planning and technical skill, as none of it came freshly-inked out of a computer peripheral. Original, hand-created Op Art deserves respect, at the very least. Even though that as an "official" movement, Op Art has been given a life-span of around three years, its popularity stays the same up till now. It had been possible also because of the gogreous contribution of Bridget 12 Riley`s artwork.
Bibliography:
[1] Amy Dempsey: Styles, Schools and Movements, Thames and Hudson London 2002 [2] Cyril Barrett: Introduction to Optical Arts, London 1972 [3] Edward Lucie-Smith: Movements in art since 1945, Thames and Hudson London 1995 [4] Ruhrberg, Schneckenburger, Fricke, Honnef: Art of the 20th century, Taschen [5] www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/art/8152203/Bridget-Riley-biography.html [6] www.bittleston.com/artists/bridget_riley/ [7] www.suehubbard.com/art_critic/bridget_riley.shtml [8] www.op-art.co.uk/bridget-riley/ [9] www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/bridget-riley P1 - flickr.com P2 - whitney.org P3 - sculptsite.com P4 - commons.org P5 - tate.org.uk P6 - simultaneousvisions.tumblr.com P7 - flickr.com P8 - flickr.com P9 - flickr.com P10 - srcart.com P11 - artnet.com P12 - chloenelkin.com P13 - tate.org.uk P14 - telegraph.co.uk P15 - info.suspel.com P16 - designparty.com 12