What is Kinetic Art?
Avant-Garde Art in Motion Challenges the Observer
They made it move. Kinetic art pushes against preconceptions people have about their relationship with the environment. No longer is an art-lover simply someone who stands for many minutes, contemplating brushstrokes and the use of colour in a painting on a gallery wall. Kinetic art interacts with the space around it, and maybe even with the observer.
Art, Engineering and the Environment
Kinetic art, sometimes considered a form of conceptual art (which prioritises the idea over the medium), includes a range of sculptures and other work that move, or have moving parts. It’s an artistic impulse in the spirit of the engineering work of Da Vinci, who in the fifteenth century made detailed concept drawings of submarines and helicopters. Marcel Duchamp’s Bicycle Wheel (1913) and Alexander Calder’s suspended mobiles were early examples of kinetic art. The term is wide enough to include art cars, and possibly also “wearable art” fashion creations.
Martin Creed’s Work No. 850, currently at the Tate Gallery in London, involves athletes sprinting through an empty hall every 15 seconds. It’s a testimony to the beauty of the body in motion and a challenge for the observer: what just happened here?
The Why? Of Kinetic Art
According to Andrew Bogle (Transformers: A Moving Experience. Auckland: Auckland Art Gallery, 1996), art that moves better represents reality in the modern world, a world of change. “Fixity, permanence, durability and immutability were properties that made sense in a deterministic word of discrete objects and enduring social structures. Relativity and industrialization changed that”. In the same book, Chris Saines observes that kinetic works of art “represent the continuous events that occur in our organic, elemental, scientific and technological worlds”.
With Bicycle Wheel, Duchamp was examining “the way in which a common object could become something rare by the addition of some personal detail”. (S. Alexandrian, Surrealist Art. London. Thames and Hudson: 1970). Creed, interviewed in Artists Now (London: Continuum, 2002) has also been concerned with showing how “simple, ordinary objects, seen in new ways, can suggest often complex and contradictory meanings”. In addition to the Tate Gallery athletes, another of his works involves balloons, “the simplest, most available way to package air”, half-filling a room (Work No. 200: Half the air in a given space, 1998).
Kinetic art often focuses on common items growing (such as crystals) or deteriorating (as dry ice when it vaporises). This notion of change is essential to the genre. As Bogle comments: “Imagine sculptures that the artist would meet years later, but only vaguely recognise”.
More information about kinetic sculpture, with a particular focus on New Zealand work, is available in the Suite 101 article Modern Art, Environment and Heritage.
