Kinetic Image Juror's Statement

Curating the Kinetic:
Form, Medium, and Audience

When the Target Gallery approached me to curate the Kinetic Image exhibition, I readily accepted, but also realized that I was suddenly in a bit of a conundrum. My curatorial work has focused primarily on New Media audiences, and this presented a number of questions. Given my usual engagement in computational and technological art that often has a limited audience, how can I curate a show that is challenging as well as playful? Also, what is a "kinetic image", given that kinetic art has been around for a very long time? And lastly, what is the nature of motion-based arts, and how is the idea of motion so inspirational to the human animal that it inspires us to create kinetic works? These are enormous questions; larger than I can answer in these few paragraphs, but I will try to add a few thoughts that I will hope will be completed by the exhibition itself.

When I think of the "kinetic image" as a curator, I turn to Laslo-Moholy-Magy's seminal sculpture Light Space Modulator (1930), and Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase as starting points for considering the nature of the kinetic in art. This first of these is one of the first and relatively few cases of a work that incorporates the kinetic, the sculptural, and light to create an "environment" as artwork, paving the way for installation and performance art. The Modulator rotates slowly, light glinting off its metallic components, and also throwing light off into space, creating compositions throughout the room where it is installed. The piece has a multifaceted nature of sculpture, kinetic work, and light composition that still represents a remarkable integration of motion and space in time. The remarkable thing about Moholy-Nagy's piece is that it still influences contemporary works, like Rafael Lozano-Hemmer's "Vectoral Elevations: Relational Architectures 4" where online viewers could control an array of searchlights in a public space. Although this vastly expands the metaphor of time, light and space, it still reminds one of the environmental quality of the Moholy-Nagy piece.

The other painting, Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase is a good metaphor for my dialogue with the Target Gallery in considering the nature of the kinetic in art. Nude, controversial in its time for being called an "explosion in a shingle factory" when it was shown in the Armory Show, challenged the understanding of motion in art. Following from the work of Cubism and the photographic work of Edweard Muybridge and Jules-Etienne Marey, Nude smashed serial time onto a plane. Motion was dissected like Marey's photography, with its stop-motion frames, smearing moments across the plane. For me however, the key point is that for Duchamp's time, Nude took the radical developments in perception of the recent past and translated them through use of the painting to that moment. I feel that with the advent of digital mass culture, artists and audiences are straining to negotiate and translate new forms into their lexicons, much like Duchamp and Marey in their time. In this way, I sought to include computational works, more traditional works, and even consider painting and print that engage the concept of time and motion through different cultural lenses. In this way the Kinetic image would become a site of translation between artistic traditions, cultures, and technological eras.

Working within a conceptual framework while seeking to stretch its definitions is the challenge and conundrum of the curator. For this exhibition, there were a couple hundred entries of all forms, from painting to web-driven New Media. There is a responsibility to tradition while investigating new forms, as well as simultaneously inviting and challenging the audience. One entry was a painting from Ukraine that obviously traced its lineage to Duchamp, but even though it was a contested piece, I feel that it challenged me, and the people at the Target Gallery what our perceptions of what constitutes a "kinetic" quality. Through our conversation around the works, I sought to put together a body of artworks that went beyond video, and acknowledged a spectrum of content that paid homage to historical notions of motion arts as well as new digital forms. It is in this spirit I offer these works, and hope that you find that they constitute as broad and rich of a conversation regarding kinetic art as I do.

Patrick Lichty
Chicago, IL, 2007