Kinetic Art
(Beginning in the 1950s)
Kinetic art explores how things
look when they move and refers mostly to sculptured works, made up of parts
designed to be set in motion by an internal mechanism or an external stimulus,
such as light or air. The movement is not virtual or illusory, but a real
movement that might be created by a motor, water, wind or even a button pushed
by the viewer. Over time, kinetic art developed in response to an increasingly
technological culture.
The Kinetic art form was
pioneered by Marcel Duchamp, Naum Gabo, and Alexander Calder. Among the
earliest attempts to incorporate movement in a plastic artwork were
Moholy-Nagy's Space-Light Modulator, a sculpture producing moving shadows made
at the Bauhaus between 1922 and 1930, certain Constructivists works, Marcel
Duchamp's Rotary Glass Plate and Rotary Demisphere (Precision Optics), and
Alexander Calder's motorized sculptures from 1930s.
The expression Kinetic Art was
used from the mid-1950s onward. It referred to an international trend followed
by artists such as Soto, Takis, Agam and Schoffer. Some Kinetic artists also
worked in the field of Op Art. Their works were influenced by a modernist
aesthetic and could be made with contemporary materials (e.g., aluminum,
plastic, neon). Most kinetic works were moving geometric compositions. In Italy
artists belonging to Gruppo N, founded in Padua in 1959 (including Biasi, Costa
and Massironi, among others), carried out experiments with light, projections
and reflections associated with movement.
The members of the French group
GRAV, which included Le Parc, Morellet and Sobrino and was established in
1960's in Paris, created optical and kinetic environments that disturbed and
interfered with meanings and relations to space.
The term kineticism broadened
the concept of Kinetic Art to all artistic works involving movement, without
any reference to a specific aesthetics. It applies to all those artists today
who work with any kind of movement, rather than only geometric art.