Kinetic Sculpture

In the early 1950s John Cage and Morton Feldman were commissioned to score documentary films on two significant American artists: Cage for the Herbert Matter documentary on sculptor Alexander Calder, and Feldman for the Hans Namuth and Paul Falkenberg documentary on Abstract Expressionist painter Jackson Pollock. Both artists saw these commissions as opportunities to formalize connections between their compositional approaches to sound and the visual approach to space, kinetic movement, and ground revealed in the time-based poetics of the moving image. Examination of archival documents from these film commissions, including original scores and correspondence, reveals numerous parallels between the New York schools of music and visual arts. Both films predate the radical shift in Cagean esthetics by only a year, and the commissions provided a self-conscious examination of the artistic ‘intermedia’ connections between auditory and visual approaches to a work of art.
Keywords: John Cage; Morton Feldman; Jackson Pollock; Herbert Matter; Alexander Calder; Kinetic Sculpture; Film Music

No início dos anos 1990, o artista neerlandês Theo Jansen – conhecido por projetos que associam arte e tecnologia – passou a criar esculturas cinéticas feitas de tubos PVC que se movimentam apenas com a energia proporcionada pelo vento, as quais nomeou Strandbeests (do neerlandês, strand = praia; beests = bestas; animais). Seus espectadores em geral se espantam com o caminhar aparentemente vivo dessas “criaturas”. Jansen costuma, inclusive, apresentá-las como “novas formas de vida”, desenvolvendo uma grande narrativa para sustentar essa afirmação – o que de fato gera muitos questionamentos nas pessoas acerca do que podemos caracterizar como seres vivos. Esta pesquisa pretende então, descrever e analisar o processo de desenvolvimento dos Strandbeests narrado por Jansen, sobretudo em seu livro The Great Pretender (2007), buscando compreender amplamente a gênese desses objetos técnicos. A partir daí, busca-se investigar gêneses mais amplas que perpassam a existência dos Strandbeests e que estão profundamente atreladas aos limites entre organismos e máquinas.

In the early 1990s, the Dutch artist Theo Jansen – known for projects involving art and technology – began to create kinetic sculptures made of PVC tubes that move only with the energy provided by the wind, which he named Strandbeests (from the Dutch, strand = beach, beests = beasts, animals). Spectators are often astonished at the seemingly life-like walk of these "creatures." Jansen often even introduces them as "new forms of life," developing a great narrative to support this claim – which, in fact, raises many questions about what can be characterized as living beings. Thus, the present research intends to describe and analyze the process of development of the Strandbeests narrated by Jansen, especially in his book The Great Pretender (2007), seeking to understand broadly the genesis of these technical objects. From there, it seeks to investigate broader geneses that permeate the existence of the Strandbeests and that are deeply tied to the limits between organisms and machines.

Catalogue accompanying the 2015 exhibition at the Len Lye Centre.

Taking inspiration from the musical elements in Lye’s work, Len Lye’s Jam Session presents well-known and well-loved works alongside lesser known and rarely considered material from the Len Lye Foundation Collection and Archives.

Published by The Marignoli di Montecorona Foundation in the occasion of Meta Grgurevič "Impossible Machines" exhibitions at Umetnostna galerija Maribor, Slovenia (29 November 2019 – 1 March 2020) and at Künstlerhaus, Halle für Kunst & Medien, Graz, Austria (1 February – 2 April 2020).
Edited by: M. Drascek / Texts: M. Drascek, S. Droschl, D. K. Marignoli, S. Vidmar / Publisher: Editoriale Umbra, Foligno.

This chapter appears in The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics edited by John Richardson, Claudia Gorbman, and Carol Vernallis (2013).

Animators and visual music artists have long experimented with technological devices to explore the image–sound relationship, often innovating new ways of composing motion in time and space. For Len Lye this involved pioneering methods of animation and exploring the material qualities of organic materials such as film and metal, creating a substantial body of handmade animations that continue to affect audiences and inspire contemporary practitioners. Lye’s work provided the inspiration and raw materials for the development of Zig Zag, an homage to Lye, which integrated traditional musical instruments with digital media, remixed and projected visual imagery, and improvised theatrical performance. This complex process of remediation is discussed in relation to the extracinematic animation of both Lye’s sculptures and the theatrical performances. Extending the term “animation” is fundamental to understanding the way Zig Zag is a reanimation of the latent material life force embodied in Lye’s resting sculptures.

"Halo is interesting because whilst the concept is meaningful and its execution minimal and precise, it does nothing except demonstrate kinetic motion, but in doing little, it achieves a lot. Public art by its very nature is spatial, and its experiential dimension provides the programming of the public space it is placed within or against. Halo is placed at the end of the sloping path (and cascading water feature) that leads down to the Chippendale Green, designed by Danish landscape architect Jeppe Aagaard Andersen with Turf Design. Halo forms an imperceptible canopy connected to the trunk and firmly rooted to the ground. It provides also a scalar element to the space, which would otherwise be lost amidst the towers under construction. Like a canopy, it is ever present, seemingly protective, and moving with the breeze. It materializes the immaterial element, wind. It also frames the sky – not just as the figure of nature (cloudscapes) but also as the figure of the urban, through the framing of the rising towers around the Green.
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The New Zealand–born American artist Len Lye (1901–1980) is recognized as a pioneer for his experimental films and his “Tangible Motion Sculpture.” More than thirty-five years after his death, Lye’s artistic legacy is increasingly dependent upon the Len Lye Foundation to reconstruct and realize his sculptural works, particularly the engineering of larger-scale iterations of extant models. In this paper, curators Paul Brobbel and Simon Rees discuss the making of Lye’s sculpture in the twenty-first century and the exhibition of Lye’s work at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre in New Plymouth, New Zealand.

Video introduction to the Victoria and Albert Museum's involvement in Play It Again SAM, a project to scan and 3D print a copy of Edward Ihnatowicz's Sound Activated Mobile sculpture. SAM was originally exhibited at Cybernetic Serendipity, an exhibition held at London's Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1968. Play It Again SAM was undertaken as part of Design with Heritage (www.designwithheritage.org), a twelve-month Knowledge Exchange project supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) (2013).