Kinetic Art

Kinetic Art, form of art, usually sculpture, in which movement is an integral part. The agent of that movement may be a current of air, water, a clockwork or motorized mechanism, magnetic forces, or the actions of the spectator.

Kinetic art emerged in the second decade of the 20th century. The most prominent of its pioneers were Naum Gabo, Marcel Duchamp, László Moholy-Nagy, and Alexander Calder. Gabo executed several works with moving parts, among them Kinetic Sculpture: Standing Wave (1920, Tate Gallery, London), consisting of a motorized sculpture assembled from a metal rod and doorbell vibrator. Between 1922 and 1930 Moholy-Nagy produced a series of assemblages that he called “Space Modulators”: these were made of steel, plastic, and wood, and some were equipped with a mechanism to activate movement. In Rotary Glass Plate (1920, Yale University Gallery, New Haven), the first of his “Precision Optics”, Duchamp painted segmented circles on a glass plate and set them spinning to create the illusion of rotating rings. Alexander Calder began making mobiles (first named as such by Duchamp). These wire, wood, and metal constructions, both abstract and figurative, are for the most part powered simply by moving air, though a few early ones were motorized.

Kinetic art did not blossom again until the late 1950s, when a booming economy supported renewed technological development. With the advent of Pop Art and its use of commercial products and images, machines became frequent subjects of kinetic art. Among Richard Stankiewicz’s assemblages of industrial junk, and Edward Kienholz’s melancholy tableaux, are several experiments with motorized components. Robert Rauschenberg, crucially important to the development of Pop Art, not only included motors and moving parts in his Combines, but also helped organize, in 1967, a series of collaborations between scientists and artists called Experiments in Art and Technology (EAT).

Perhaps the most elaborate examples of kinetic art were devised by Jean Tinguely, whose motorized Metamatics first appeared in the mid-1950s. Tinguely’s massive and spectacular Homage to New York, an assemblage of incongruous mechanical parts and other objects, was the first of a series of self-destroying machines. Len Lye and George Rickey were among sculptors of the period to set sleek abstract forms in motion. Other artists active in the early 1960s, including Jesús Rafael Soto and Yaacov Agam, used static optical effects to create the illusion of movement.

Today, many kinds of contemporary art involve movement—for example, Doug Hollis’s wind-powered abstract sculpture, Rebecca Horn’s body art and complex motorized assemblages, and various experiments in virtual reality—that it is no longer common to speak of kinetic art as a style in its own right.