Exhibitions 1
All the fun of the fair
Martin Gaylord
In the mid 1930s, having largely given up art in favour of chess, Marcel Duchamp resorted to various expedients to earn a liv- ing. One idea was his `Rotoreliefs' — a , playtoy consisting of spiral patterns which gave an illusion of relief when rotated on the turntable of a record-player. He had these made up in sets of six — 15 francs the set — and launched them at an ama- teur inventors' fair in Paris.
. Unfortunately, Duchamp, surrounded by his rotating reliefs and sandwiched between garbage compressing machine and an instant vegetable chopper, attracted no attention whatsoever. 'Error, one hundred per cent,' he stoically concluded. 'At least that's clear.' But no such negative verdict can be given on Force Fields, the exhibition devoted to modern art in movement — Containing some `Rotoreliefs' — currently at the Hayward Gallery. Mind you, there is a slight air of the ama- teur inventor about many of the exhibits in Force Fields. The Hayward Gallery is filled With strange whirrs and clangs as some exhibit moves into fitful life — notices announce that they are timed to go off eve- five to ten minutes and visitors rush to catch them in motion. Thus Jean Tinguelys 'Totem IX' intermittently starts Gego's 'Drawing without paper no.5; 1985 thrashing and belabouring itself; or Duchamp and Man Ray's 'Rotative Glass Plates (Precision Optics)' begin slowly revolving (perhaps fortunately so, although the effect is disappointing, since on first test revolution the plates flew off and almost decapitated the artists). Motion has long been a dream of mod- ern art — since, at least, that famous asser- tion by the futurist Marinetti that a snorting automobile was more beautiful than the 'Victory of Samothrace'. And, as that comparison suggests, it was not only modern art that was in love with move- ment. The 'Victory of Samothrace' itself is an attempt at a figure in the act of alight- ing, drapery aflutter. Some works of the baroque age actually, positively move. A Bernini fountain, for example, is only made complete by sprays of flying water.
But by and large, as the works in this show tend to demonstrate, the truly suc- cessful kinetic work of art has proved elu- sive. It is not really surprising that the visitors to that inventors' fair found the instant vegetable chopper of more interest. The Duchamps are, whether judged as art Liliane Lijn'.s 'Liquid reflection', 1966 or `playtoys', distinctly on the quiet side. Much the same is true, I find, of just about any Calder mobile — and certainly a few go a long way — or Laszlo Moholy-Nagy's `Light-Space Modulator' of 1922-30, an object looking not unlike an instant veg- etable chopper that produces intricate shadows and reflections on the walls.
There are a number of futuristic fair- ground entertainments on show at the Hay- ward — indeed the whole exhibition is fun. Julio Le Parc's 'Continuous Light Mobile' from 1960-66, a series of suspended mir- rors in motion, casts beautiful, swimmy reflections on the darkened walls around it, rather as waves do in a cave. Gianni Colombo's `Spazio elastico' (Elastic Space) from 1967 is positively freaky — a cat's cra- dle of moving fibres in ultra-violet light, through which you walk.
But there is not much doubt that the works which best and most memorably dealt with the theme of movement are themselves static. Why this should be so is an interesting, perhaps profound question. Naum Gabo, the creator of the first kinetic sculpture in modern art — in 1920 — left it at that, believing that there wasn't a tech- nological basis for a successful mobile modernism. But, Heath-Robinson as many of these contraptions look, I don't think the problem is technical.
Calder once suggested to Mondrian that the great abstractionist should make the rectangles and lines with which he had dec- orated his apartment vibrate. 'No,' Mondri- an replied, 'it is not necessary, my painting is already very fast.' And surely he was right. It is static paintings and sculptures — perhaps because the senses and the imagi- nation can more easily grasp them — that best evoke movement. The exceptions prove the rule. A Bernini fountain, and also that early Gabo — a rapidly oscillating column — move in such a way that they always look the same.
As it happens, this exhibition hedges its bets. It partly deals with the history of kinetic art — a development that begins with Moholy-Nagy, Duchamp and co. between the wars, and grew into a widespread movement in the Sixties. When I first started visiting the Tate, it was full of furtively or openly unstill art by such fig- ures of the moment as Pol Bury, whose works rustle like quietly creeping spiders, and Jesus Rafael Soto. Not much of it has been on show since, and it is interesting to see it again.
But it is hard to see kinetic art as any- thing but a byway of modernist history. If the early specimens put one in mind of the mad inventor, the stuff from the Sixties has the look of other futuristic fantasies that have receded into the past: old Doctor Who sets, the house in Jacques Tati's film Mon Oncle, the Hayward Gallery itself.
A good deal of the show deals not with kinetic art at all, but with entirely static paintings, drawings and sculptures that deal in some way with the subject of movement (and, the exhibition claims, intuitively grap- ple with the universe of modem physics). Among these are some excellent things by Lucio Fontana and Yves Klein — both of whom have had solo Hayward shows in the last few years — and also by Piero Manzoni and Henri Michaux. There is an interesting revival of the wire sculptures of Gego (Gertrud Goldschmidt), which are like metallic cobwebs — not so much mobile as flexible. The only question that these prompt is: why stop there?
Why no futurism, why no Naum Gabo, why no Mondrian? Indeed, since making the motionless picture move is widely regarded as one of the challenges of paint- ing, much of the art of the 20th century could have been fitted into this theme. But a little loose and open-ended though it is — like many of the exhibits — this exhibi- tion is entertaining and was worth doing. A good one to take arty children to.
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