FEBRUARY 21 - 23, 2013
The first hosting project titled “G.R.A.V. & Kinetic Visual Art”, was a selection of works from the Penna Collection (Naples, Italy) featuring works from The Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (a.k.a. GRAV). The exhibition was well attended and we were able to help ART 1307 exhibit these works in Los Angeles for the first time.
Even though the real birth of kinetic art was in 1952, some artists had already made some attempts in this direction in the early Twentieth century, as the Russian Futurist Aleksandr Michajlovic Rodchenko, the Dadaist Man Ray, the constructivist Gabo or Marcel Duchamp, but it is Calder who is known as the author of kinetic works; he is universally known for his Mobiles, kinetic works of art in the literary sense of the word, where the visual effect depended on the arrangement assumed in a given moment by the forms in movement, and not by the forms themselves.
It was when Bruno Munari wrote the "Manifesto of machinism" in 1952, that he spoke of machines as living beings, and invited all artists to abandon canvas, colors and scalpels to begin to create art by means of machines. Still kinetic art only became a truly relevant phenomenon in the Sixties; in fact, amidst a general ferment, in 1961 a number of meetings and exhibitions took place in Zagreb, that represented the first real opportunity for artists of various origins to meet and search for something new. However, various research groups had been formed some years before; all sharing the same goal: to find a “new trend”. These groups that met in Zagreb comprised: the GRAV Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel, founded in Paris in 1960 by Horacio Garcia-Rossi, Hugo Demarco, Garcia Miranda, Julio Le Parc, Francois Morellet, Francois Molnar, Francisco Sombrino, Joen Stein, Yvaral (Jean Pierre Vasarely), the T Group founded in Milan by Davide Boriani, Gianni Colombo, Gabriele De Vecchi and Grazia Varisco, the N Group founded in Padua in 1959 by Alberto Biasi, Ennio Chiggio, Toni Costa, Edoardo Landi and Manfredo Massironi, the Gruppo Uno founded in Rome by Gastone Biggi, Nicola Carrino, Nato Frasca', Achille Pace, Pasquale Santoro and Giuseppe Uncini, the Dviženie Group, founded in Moscow in 1962 by L. Nusberg, A. Krivtchikov, F. Infante and A. Stepanov, and the Zero Group of Dusseldorf.
All these young artists, most of whom came from the academies of fine arts of Latin America and Europe, wanted to destroy the old communication system in order to create a completely new one.
As of 1962 the GRAV, the T Group, the N Group, and other leading representatives of kinetic art as Getullio Alviani, Leonardo Torres Aguero, Luis Tomasello, Martha Boto, Franco Costalonga, Carlos Cruz Diez, Enzo Mari, Yaacov Agam, Hans Jorg Glattfelder, Klaus Staudt e Gerhard von Graevenitz, began to organize a series of meetings, seminaries and an intense activity of study, comparison, discussions, manifestos and exhibitions. Through their research these artists sought to analyze the phenomena of human perception, using real or virtual “movement” as dominant element and means of expression, in order to contrast the static condition that had, in one form or another, dominated the artistic production of previous centuries.
The materials used to realize the works were, in most cases, very different from traditional ones, especially for reasons of a functional kind, as the works needed mechanisms to set them in motion. These works succeeded, by means of circles, squares, triangles, white and black, empty and full figures, to describe presence and absence in the same way and to fascinate the onlookers through the abolition of the real and the metaphysical representation of a new universe.
All the protagonists of the various research groups that had been formed since the Fifties had met in order to reach a single goal together; it therefore seemed like one could speak of a large and united community of new and young revolutionary intellectuals, but already in 1965, after the first collective exhibitions, it became clear that it was really a matter of a gathering of independent artists.
After the sixties, research of the artists belonging to the movement of programmed art became oriented towards art environments: also the last avant-garde has been defeated, but its inheritance and premonitions have been undeniably fundamental, especially if observed again today, in the light of the new frontiers of digital and technological art, where the figures of the collective author and the programming of works of art are being revalued. Programmed art has been able to reflect on scientific and technological progress, recontextualizing the role of the artist, giving artistic creation a new rigor, and above all transforming machines in an instrument for aesthetic production. The artists belonging to this current had realized that only by serializing the work could one fight against the art market and its commoditization of works of art.