This history of kinetic sculpture - or art that moves in three dimensions - is relatively brief. Before the twentieth century, it was clockwork and the primitive automata that entertained the courts of Europe in the eighteenth century. It then became stage craft in the nineteenth. Kinetic sculpture began to emerge as an independent genre in the 1920s with the Constructivists and Suprematists in Russia and the work of Lazlo Moholy-Nagy at the Bauhaus School in Berlin.

The thread of historical continuum may be said to have snapped with Hitler and Stalin. Moholy-Nagy landed in Chicago, where he taught design, built a device for generating light and shapes in time called "The Light-Space Modulator" and composed a manifesto, “Vision in Motion,” which was only published after his death in 1946. His Bauhaus students, some of whom survived WWII in Switzerland, were those who refined his example. There is a certain science fair sterility to the work. Jean Tinguely existed on the periphery of this postwar movement, and evidently thought so, for he began making kinetic sculptures that self-destructed. Some billowed smoke or flamed. Some were very loud. The most famous of these - Homage to New York - executed itself in the courtyard of the Museum of Modern Art in 1960. Those who account themselves privileged to have seen it are also grateful to have escaped unscathed. It might serve as an emblem of the '60s.

Tinguely was profiled in Calvin Tompkins’ The Bride and the Bachelors along with Marcel Duchamp, John Cage, and Robert Rauschenberg, and so for a decade his reputation stood. It began to slip when he settled in France and began to be perceived as an adjunct of his wife, the sculptor Niki de Saint Phalle, who was constructing a folly on theme-park scale based on the imagery of the tarot deck. Was there a decline in his work? It is hard to say, for it is widely scattered. His reputation remains higher in Europe than New York. Curiously, we have an example here, at the Carillon building on Trade Center; it was donated by the Bechtler family, who have done the arts here much good. Recently, it was restored by the artist Kit Kube.

I remember the Tinguely from a decade ago, and my impression is that it is now a stronger and more lucid piece. The difference is in the relationship of the parts to the whole. It is somewhat like the difference between a Bach concerto played by a tubby full scale orchestra or by a snappy smaller ensemble using period instruments. You can hear everything that is going on in the latter, and in Kit Kube's restoration you can see what Tinguely sets in motion.

Kube is an extraordinary artist himself, one who has picked up the investigative strand that is kinetic art in an entirely different way. His background is that of a fabricator and problem solver rather than a theorist, and he came to the problems of time and motion in sculpture more from the sciences than from an art-historical perspective. But if an idea is interesting enough, it will be tested out in history in a number of different ways in a number of different places and times. In the history of kinetic sculpture, there are as yet few figures, but I am sure others will follow, as motion is a means of lending sculpture one of the properties of music, which is time. 

(Image: Kit Kube, Binary Bliss.  Mixed media installation.)

Kube’s work resembles Moholy-Nagy rather than Tinguely in that it uses light, but there is a huge advance in vocabulary. A Kube shadow-and-light device typically projects light through a series of moving grids or stamped patterns that rotate round the projected light. The light source may also rotate, or modulate, as part of a sequence. These form the "gears" through which light is sorted into imagery. What is created is a field of rotating interference patterns throughout a room, and upon the walls, floor, and ceiling. One grid- layer or perforated machine-part may rotate around the light source at a different speed or in a different direction, or in another ellipse from another, to which he may add yet another layer of patterning and yet another. It's an old saw that architecture is frozen music, but here shadow and light make architecture musical.

(Image: Kit Kube, Circadian Snare. Mixed media installation.)

One instance of how the Kube devices significantly advance light sculpture is that his patterning tessellates. Putting a grid over a grid creates the illusion of depth and dimensionality, which he orchestrates. The other significant advance is in the use of projected light as a drawing-medium. He can make light as fine as the trickle of sand through an hourglass, or appear to be as inscribed as a wall of hieroglyphs. I very much like the fact that he gets his "hieroglyphs," one of his monumental effects, from projecting light through the stamped patterns of circuit boards. Most of these devices are made from machine parts salvaged from shops throughout the area, and they work handsomely as stationary sculpture when not in motion. This means they are built from the bottom up. In motion, and in rooms adjoining each other, they have the air of post-Einsteinian celestial machinery, the sense of granting the viewer some insight into the train schedules of other planets, even of travel to other solar systems. That's quite a lot to derive from ball-bearings, tractor parts, light bulbs, wire fencing, turntables, and gears.

(Image: Kit Kube, Test Tube Mother.  Mixed media installation.)

A few others are exploring similar questions - notably Olafur Eliasson, who floated barges equipped with waterfalls which fell up on the Hudson river in 2008. But Eliasson has a team of engineers, physicists, hydraulists, and more. His operation is run more like a corporation than Van Gogh in Arles with his paint box. What slays me is that an artist rummaging through the salvage lots of a southern town can make work as radical as that of what amounts to a well-heeled consortium.

There is little of Kit Kube's work up presently, save for his sharp and very handsome installation for the transit station in Huntersville. It makes me wonder if we know what we've got here. No one is doing the kind of work Kit Kube is doing at the level of depth and originality that he is doing it, and no one - not even Eliasson, whom I admire - has his singular poetry. He is a great artist who deserves a great audience and most of his work is in storage. The term "world class" has been bandied about in Charlotte ad nauseum, but it seems absurd to me than even Kube's advocates can not quite bring themselves to recognize that in this artist they have a native product who might achieve world status given the support. Considering the Tinguely at the Carillon, the mid-century Swiss work at the Bechtler Musuem of Modern Art, and Kube himself, it would not be such a radical step to reframe Charlotte as a center of kinetic art. 

(Video: "Photons in Motion," Kit Kube.)

 

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Photo credit (all): Van Miller.
For more footage of Kit Kube's sculptures in motion, please visit the artist's website, http://www.kitkube.com.