Kinetic art

Thesis

Kinetic Art, a pattern of art, generally sculpture, in which action performances a prime role. The source of this action can be mechanical, the natural shift of surrounding air currents, or an interaction with the viewer.

Background

Kinetic Art seems to move art into a realm of 'real movement' (Popper 1968 p.223) where artists created machines, mobiles and projections that involved actual physical objects moving and changing. Prior to this, movement was of significant interest to artists but was generally captured in a still image or a series of images. So the move to 'real movement' required some sort of aesthetic framework within which to comprehend the 'real movement'. Frank Popper, in his book Origins and Development of Kinetic Art, 1968, describes several ways of establishing this typology, the most important of which is 'examining the procedures used by artists to convey, represent, suggest or introduce movement into the plastic arts.' (Popper 1968 p.215) Popper then defines, in some detail, a long and yet to his mind a non-exhaustive list of 'simple procedures'. These procedures cover areas such as composition, theme, colour, form, volume, transparency, texture and the competition between these elements.

The procedures continue through photographic and filmic categories, covering such issues as juxtaposition and decomposition and recomposition of cinematic film. Finally in his typology of movement Popper defines the category of 'movement expressed by movement itself'. Within this categorisation, Popper sees several important areas of movement which all seem to be inspired by movement in nature or the boundary between the natural and the mechanical. Art that uses simple mechanical movement plays with the movement of the modern machine age. Artists such as Picabia, Duchamp, Tinguely and Kramer adopted the use of mechanical movement to simultaneously explore the beauty and monstrosity of the machine in motion. By 1968 the previous introduction of electromechanical, electronic, thermal, hydraulic and magnetic forms of movement produced even more complex results. The work of Tatlin, Rodchenko and later the more playful pieces of Calder, are all seen by Popper as exploring less predictable forms of movement. Their use of mobiles and later the combining with colour projection and reflection, produced movement that was more complex and astonishing in the variety of the effects produced. Popper also explores movement in art that is produced by the active participation of the viewer. This is either in the form of starting the movement in a mobile or machine driven piece or by the need for the viewer to move in a certain pattern to reveal the actual images the artist has created. There is also movement as perceived by the growth or deterioration of the material used to create the piece of art. Finally, Popper defines a further category and with it makes a remarkably visionary statement. The idea of unpredictably is related to control but differs in expectation. If we are able to predict every response, interaction is boring. In growing a plant, for example, we should see a positive correlation between watering it and ...