The Museum of Modern Art “Garage” hosts the exhibition “Transatlantic Alternative. Kinetic art and OPAR in Eastern Europe and Latin America in the 1950-1970s. ” Employees of the museum library made a review of publications on the history of kinetic art on opposite sides of the Atlantic.

Without Kevordo

The material was prepared by Ilmira Bolotyan, Maryana Karysheva, Valery Ledenyov and Maria Shmatko

The Other Trans-Tlantic: Kinetic and Op Art in Eastern Europe and Latin America

Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, 2017

The publication was released by the Museum of Modern Art of Warsaw on the occasion of the exhibition Transatlantic Alternative, held in the Polish capital before coming to Moscow. This book is not a project catalog, but a collection of articles equipped with illustrations, considering the history of kinetic art and op-art on different sides of the Atlantic from the beginning of the 1940s to the first half of the 1970s.

Kinetizim and OPAR, according to the curators of the exhibition of Diter Rölstrat, Abigail grapes and Martha Dzevan, were undeservedly replaced and marginalized inside the “great” art history in favor of “high” modernism. Critics until the 1960s did not attach great importance to these areas, seeing in the works of their representatives nothing more than “crafts” (novelties), but in the famous monograph “Art since 1900. Modernism, anti -Modernism, postmodernism ”mention mainly Western European representatives of movement.

Meanwhile, they continue in the introductory article, kinetic art and OPAR became one of the few truly international movements in post-war art, uniting artists living in different countries and working in various sociocultural contexts. The authors who rethought the relationship between the work and the audience who rebelled the language of contemporary art based on the avant -garde and modern science, who tried to make this language understandable and democratic, based on the universal laws of physics, mathematics and human perception.

Separate publications included in the collection are devoted to the history of kinetism and op-art in Latin America, where Argentina, Brazil and Venezuela were the centers of kinetism, and Poland and Czechoslovakia were Eastern Europe. A separate article, written by the curator of the archive and library of the Garage Museum Sasha Obukhova, outlines the history of the Movement group and kinetic art in the USSR. Abigail grapes and Dushan bar prepared a detailed chronicle of the events of 1941-1973 related to the history of the direction.The application contains key articles and manifestos of artists and theorists of kinetism and op-art. V.L.

Visionary Structures. From Johansons to Johansons

The Latvian Center for Contemporary Art, 2015

From Johansons to Johansons – a catalog of the exhibition of the same name, held in 2015 at the Bozar Brussels Center for Bozar and an organized center together with the Latvian National Art Museum and the Latvian Center for Contemporary Art. The exhibition traced one of the trajectories of the development of Latvian art, which ran from constructivism to kinetism and further to art based on new technologies. The exposition united the works of three generations of artists who worked in different eras, but preserved, according to curators, committed by similar ideas and currents.

In the 1920s, Latvian artists Karl Johanson and Gustav Klutsis, who belonged to a group of constructivists in Moscow, proposed a new way to visualize the dynamics of modern life. The authors of the 1970s turned to their heritage: a number of artists, including Valdis Tselms, Janis Krievs and Arthurs Rinkis, were passionate about the scientific aesthetics and possibilities of shaping, which became possible thanks to this aesthetics. The authors of this circle worked not only as artists, but also as designers of urban and natural landscapes, interior designers and space technology design – so, Janis Krievs was the author of electronic dynamic lighting systems of residential premises.

The focus of the new generation of artists presented at the exhibition was modern science – computer technologies, the language of which, unlike the aesthetics of kinetism, does not claim universalism, but allows you to construct alternative microrealities, the post -human world. This world is shown by the works of Gints Gabrase and Voldemara Johanson, consists of particles, biological matter, gene chains and technological algorithms.

And if in the 1920s in the designs of Karl Johanson and the photomonts of Gustav Klutsis, we see a utopia created by a political and revolutionary imagination, and instead of artists-engineers and designers, then the visual thinking of the 1970s addresses the “cooled”, as the curator of the exhibition called them Iev Astakhovsk, socialist ideals. The kinetic objects of Valdis Tselms, Janis Krievs and Arthurs Rignkis, as Astakhovsk writes, emit cybernetic optimism and poetic cosmic escapism. These artists have found ways to use the state imperative of “technical aesthetics” for their own creative research and endow this aesthetics with freedom of form and content.

Astakhovsk is quoted by the researcher Andrei Kharitonov, who managed to accurately characterize the essence of the projects of the Latvian kinetists: Their objects are gifts to Soviet people from the upcoming galactic society, made on the principle of scientific and technical rationality.Some of the works of Celms, Krievs and Rinkis can be seen at the Transatlantic Alternative exhibition. I. B.

A Little-Known Story about a Movement, a Magazine and the Computer's Arrival in Art. New Tendencies and Bit International, 1961–1973

ZKM | Center for Arts and Media Karlsruhe, 2011

A weighty volume dedicated to New Trends, an international movement that emerged in socialist Yugoslavia and developed the ideas of op art and kineticism, as well as the computer art that was gaining momentum, was released as an afterword to the exhibition “bit international. [New] trends. Computer and visual research. Zagreb, 1961-1973. This large-scale project was shown at the New Gallery in Graz and ZKM | Media Museum in Karlsruhe in 2007-2008.

This monumental study collects information on the history of New Trends, which began with a meeting in 1961 in Zagreb between the Brazilian artist Almira de Silva Maviña, who lived in Germany, and the Croatian art critic Matko Mestrovic, who joined forces to organize an exhibition of new computer art in Museum of Modern Art in Zagreb, whose director was Bozo Beck, who supported their ideas. After Zagreb, exhibitions of New Trends were held in Italy, Germany and France, by 1968 the movement became international. The book provides a detailed timeline of exhibitions, symposiums, and New Trends publications, as well as the history of Bit International, a magazine published by members of the movement.

Many New Trends participants classified their work as research, not only at the level of method, but also in terms of reorganizing artistic practices, leaning more towards collective co-creation than individual work. Representatives of the movement promoted the idea of industrial production and multiplication of works, and in the new art they saw a reflection of the ideal of a modern democratic industrial society. The discussions that took place between 1968 and 1973 and are documented in this book describe themes and attitudes that still resonate in digital art. M.K.

documenta III. Malerei, Sculptur

Verlag M. DuMont Shauberg, 1964

4. documenta. Catalog 1

Verlag Druck + Verlag GmbH Kassel, 1968

In 1964, visitors to the Kassel exhibition documenta III had the opportunity to get acquainted with the art of kinetic artists in the section Light and Motion. The founder of Documents, Arnold Bode, single-handedly selected works for it (a committee of 15 people, including Bode himself, worked on the other sections of the exhibition). He chose mainly Western European artists, including Heinz Mack, Otto Pinet, Günther Uecker, Nicolas Schaeffer, members of the French association GRAV (Groupe de recherche d'art vusel – Visual Art Study Group) Francois Morellet and Julio Le Park, Jesús Rafael Soto (the works of Le Parc and Soto are featured in Garage) and others. However, in the introductory article to the catalog, written by Werner Haftman, member of the selection committee and documenta III scientific consultant, kineticism and its representatives are not mentioned.Formulating the curatorial credo of the project, according to which “art is what great artists do”, Haftman focuses his reasoning around representatives of pre- and post-war modernism (from Matisse and Kandinsky to Sam Francis and Anthony Tapies).

The baton was taken over by the exhibition 4. documenta, which took place in 1968 under the heading “the youngest Documenta in history”. Kineticism and op art – along with performance art and happenings, pop art and minimalism – were represented relatively widely on it. The exposition includes works by Bridget Riley, Victor Vasarely, Gyula Kosice, Zdenek Sikora (the works of the last three are also presented in the Garage), as well as the Movement group, however, not quite rightly signed with the name of Lev Nusberg alone, who in fact was not the author works reproduced in the catalogue. How these things got from the USSR abroad (a question for the 1960s is not an idle one), the publication does not explain, but only states that the works of Soviet authors cannot be given out for other exhibitions.

A large text devoted to kinetic art and op art was written for the catalog by Werner Spies, who described the works of representatives of these movements from the point of view of the latest developments in the field of perception psychology at that time. “Op art is what we call works that appeal to vision in all its self-sufficiency,” he sums up. – The mechanisms underlying kinetic art are only partially overlapped by the mechanisms of op art, but at the same time they should not be unambiguously separated. Their common denominator is in the definition of the artistic… in which the system of viewing/interpretation… is replaced by a system that destroys the identity of perception and apperception (direct perception and comprehension of what is seen. — V. L.).” Both catalogs are published in German. V. L.

Italian ZERO Avantgarde ‘60s

Silvana editoriale, 2011

The Paths of German Art from 1949 to the Present. From the collection of the Institute for Foreign Relations (ifa), Stuttgart

The publication was prepared for the exhibition “Group ZERO. Contemporary Italian Art of the Middle of the 20th Century”, held in 2011 at the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, and this book can be considered an almanac in terms of its structure. The publication, according to the preface, was decided not to be preceded by a serious art history text, so that the reader (and the visitor of the exhibition) could independently catch and restore the links between individual artists and works. This does not mean that the texts in the publication were not published at all. The history and meaning of the works of the Zero participants are revealed through the publications of the artists themselves: fragments of their letters, articles and comments on their own works, which are presented in detail in this publication.

Zero was an international movement, whose activity also unfolded in Germany, France, the Netherlands.In the case of Italy, one of the key figures of movement was Lucho of the Fountain, whose views are reflected in manifestos, partially reproduced in the publication. His ideas are developed by the article by Enriko Castellani and Pierrot Mandzoni, published in Azimuth magazine in 1960. In the “critical notes on theoretical contributions in the framework of a new trend”, Manfredo Massayoni formulated the theoretical principles of social relations in culture, which metaphorically was reflected in his work “unstable perception”. Readers are also offered the text of Nanda Vigo about Lucho Fontan, in form, however, more like memories than a critical essay about him.

OP-art Alberto Biazi, Geometrism Agostino Bonalumi, Design David Boriani, resembling the work of the “Movement” group, Bruno Munari machines, white surfaces of Paolo skeletons, mirror objects of Vigo Nandy-the catalog visually demonstrates how the shape and the illusion of movement for a certain period created by her In the history of art, it has become an actual artistic language.

You can find out about the German branch of the famous movement (Hinz Mak, Otto Pine and others) from the article by Werner Mayer, published in the catalog of the “Way of German Art from 1949 to the present,” held in 2014 of the Moscow Museum of Contemporary Art. M. Sh.