Kinetic art

Kinetic art. Term describing art incorporating real or apparent movement (from the Greek kinesis, ‘movement'). In its broadest sense the term can encompass a great deal of phenomena, including cinematic motion pictures, Happenings, and the animated clockwork figures found on clocktowers in many cities of Europe. More usually, however, it is applied to sculptures such as Calder's mobiles that are moved either by air currents or by some artificial means—usually electronic or magnetic. As well as works employing actual movement, there is another type of Kinetic art that produces illusory movement when the spectator moves relative to it (and Op art paintings are sometimes included within the field of Kinetic art because they appear to flicker).

The idea of moving sculpture had been proposed by the Futurists as early as 1909, and the term ‘kinetic’ was first used in connection with the visual arts by Gabo and Pevsner in their Realistic Manifesto in 1920. Gabo completed an electrically-driven oscillating wire construction in this year (Kinetic Sculpture (Standing Wave), Tate Gallery, London, 1919–20), and at the same time Marcel Duchamp was experimenting with Rotative Plaques that incorporated movement. Various other works over the next three decades made experiments in the same vein, for example Moholy-Nagy's Light-Space-Modulator (Busch-Reisinger Museum, Harvard University, 1922–30), one of a series of constructions he made using reflecting metals, transparent plastics, and sometimes mechanical devices to produce real movement. However, for many years Calder was the only leading figure who was associated specifically with moving sculpture (and many people regarded him as eccentric), and it was not until the 1950s that the phrase ‘Kinetic art’ became a recognized part of critical vocabulary; the exhibition ‘Le Mouvement’ at the Denise René Gallery, Paris, in 1955 was a key event in establishing it as a distinct genre. The artists represented in the exhibition included Agam, Bury, Calder, Duchamp, Soto, Tinguely, and Vasarely. Kinetic art continued to flourish in the 1960s and 1970s, when it was often combined with other means of expression such as Light art. It became less fashionable in the 1980s.