Styles: The Movement Movement

In the century of cinema, television, and indeed Rube Goldberg, it was inevitable that art would start moving too. Now, hard on the heels of op artists, who address their work to the retina, has come a widespread number of "kinetic" artists, who try to combine mechanics and art. They are exploiting the human eye's capacity to perceive motion, and their work is the newest watchword on the fast-moving international gallery scene. Manhattan's avant-garde Jewish Museum is currently showing 102 works by kineticism's established practitioners, Jean Tinguely and Nicolas Schöffer. In Boston's Institute of Contemporary Arts, Matisse's grandson Paul is showing his Kalliroscope, an oozing suspension of metals in volatile liquids. An exhibition by kinetic experimenters will open in the University of California's art museum in Berkeley this March.

Manifesto Destiny. Although it seems to have blossomed suddenly, the kinetic kraze has been a long time germinating. As early as 1910, the Italian futurists wanted to "renew art by seeking the style of movement" and proclaimed a racing automobile more beautiful than the Winged Victory. Dadaist Marcel Du-champ set a bicycle wheel atop a stool in 1913 and called it Mobile. The Russian constructivists Naum Gabo and Antoine Pevsner issued a manifesto in 1920 proclaiming their freedom "from the 1,000-year-old error of art, originating in Egypt, that only static rhythms can be its elements. For present-day perception, the most important elements of art are the kinetic rhythms." Only a year earlier, a fellow constructivist, Vladimir Tallin, had designed a Monument to the Third International, a glass and iron tower 900 ft. tall with three geometric tiers rotating according to the day, the month and the year. This technological salute to the Soviet Revolution never got off the drawing board.

"It was Alexander Calder who really put movement into art," says W.J.H.G. Sandberg, former director of Amsterdam's Stedelijk Museum. The affable American's Circus of 1926 was an adult toy, perhaps, but his wind-and motor-driven mobiles that followed in the '30s became the first recognized aerial expressions of art in motion. Giacometti's Suspended Ball of 1931, Brancusi's Fish on a rotating pedestal of 1926, Thomas Wilfred's lumias of the 1930s with swimming projections of colored light—all these were what Watt's apocryphal teakettle was to the steam turbine.

Speed of Light. Today kinetic artists see their art as expressing not only the machine but also nature itself. Says Critic-Sculptor George Rickey: "Nature is rarely still. She follows natural laws: gravity, Newton's laws of motion, the traffic laws of topology." Gabo proclaimed: "Look at a ray of sun—the quietest of the silent strengths—it runs 300,000 kilometers in a second. Our starry sky —does anyone hear it?" But whether attuned to the music of the spheres or the metallic clanking of makeshift machines, artists by the score are now trying to make poetry out of motion. Among the leaders (all shown in following color pages):