engleski

Politics of kineticism and "ideology" of New Tendencies

The international art movement New Tendencies is perceived by contemporary art history first and foremost as an art phenomenon which interconnects the early media art history with the social and political issues of the 1960s and 1970s. Following such a perspective, the main features of New Tendencies – collaborative group projects, a renewed confidence in the transformative powers of technology, an understanding of art as a socially responsible activity strongly involved with the patterns of scientific and social transformations – are also understood as fundamental characteristics common to early manifestations of European media art. A relatively recent interest in New Tendencies is also indicative of rather important and substantial changes regarding the centre-periphery dichotomy that, in the last fifty years, was strongly affecting the perception of that international art movement which – in spite of its long lifespan, and an extraordinary spatial/personal dynamic – almost fell into oblivion. Apart from attracting a new generation of researchers in media art history, the side effect of the restored interest in New Tendencies is a reduced engagement with the historical trajectories of other, “analogue” art phenomena involved in building up the theoretical and ideological foundations of the Movement, which also includes the conceptual framework of the new media paradigm described in the mid-1960s as a “Computer Assisted Visual Research”. In this paper, we shall follow the historical trajectories of the most vital among those “analogue” visual art practices – namely of kinetic art – describing the most important post-war developments, problems and theoretical disputes surrounding a complex relation among art, science and technology, critically marking kinetic art production. Positioned already in the late 1920s at the intersection of light, movement and matter, in the period between late 1940s and mid-1960s, kinetic art still made other advancements towards immateriality, but also towards a more intense involvement with its immediate social reality, which is also echoed in the programmatic texts of New Tendencies. Along with the explanations of selected artworks documenting a diversity of authorial approaches, we shall also describe the formation and development of trans-continental artists’ networks that were facilitating the exchange of information between the representatives of kinetic art active at different European and Latin American locations, as well as theoretical frameworks and socio-cultural circumstances that were conditioning and affecting research on kinetic art in Italy, France, Holland, Brazil and Argentina in the 1950s and 1960s. Those explanations will be supplemented by the analysis of political positions shared by artists and art groups from these, and other countries who were participants of New Tendencies between 1961 and 1965, aiming to identify the nature of their involvement with th articulation of the Movement’s key objectives, working procedures and theoretical propositions.

modernism, sculpture, kinetic art, social networks, network analysis

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