Kinetic
art is a diverse art practice, originating with Marcel Duchamp, Laszlo
Moholy-Nagy and Naum Gabo in the 1910's and '20's. At it's most basic,
kinetic art involves some element of movement, but that may be real
or implied!
The writer Frank Popper identified twenty or more sub-categories,
including optical (op art) and virtual, as well as light-based art
work. The most easily recognised form is the work of Alexander Calder
with his mobiles, and Jean Tinguely, famous for mechanical constructions.
It may seem that kinetic art has been and gone, a 50's/60's fad, but
many artists still work with moving elements. I would include the
likes of Survival Research Laboratories in this genre.
At
the end of this page *link* is a bibliography with titles that I recommend
for further insight into kinetic art.
My attraction to kinetic art is an extension of mechanics. I'm into
machines! By definition machines operate, they do something. Art machines
may move but they don't "do" anything, not like good machines are
supposed to. I recommend the book by H.G.Pontus Hulten, "The Machine-
as seen at the end of the mechanical age", a really valuable overview
of developments until '69. The obvious conclusion from the title is
that we don't live in the mechanical age anymore, the emphasis has
changed to the electronic, the computer age. While that is partially
correct, machines as such continue to exist, even develop: it is their
control that has changed.
Machines
have been likened to the body, through the physical act of movement
(even machine nomenclature refers to the body, with knuckles, nipples,
jaws, arms and ribs). The electronic or computic artefact is more
akin to the mind. What I enjoy about the overtly mechanical is the
transparency of it's operation. There is a cause and effect that can
be followed, parts located and visually interrogated. This transparency
is absent in the computic artefact, except by the specialist. Here
the relationship between input and output is encoded, hidden in a
black box. In a moral sense this acts to disenfranchise the viewer.
©
Andrew MacDonald. 2000
(No part of this material can be copied or used without written approval.)
Produced with the Assitance
of Arts Queensland's
Regional Arts Development
Fund and
the Toowoomba City Council.