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- Courtesy Minus Space
Through Aug 24
It’s safe to say that we all like sculptures that move (think babies and mobiles). These days, they come in the form of Tim Hawkinson’s body-centric, science-y contrivances and Jon Kessler’s Rube Goldbergian political statements. But there was a time when kinetic sculpture was made just for the sake of art and movement in themselves. That, of course, was the free-wheeling ‘60s, when Hartmut Bohm conjured up a grid of magnetized plastic squares that still leap and jolt with the silly abruptness of stop animation, and Jean Tinguely conceived a piece that appears to be a Constructivist painting before you realize that the white rectangles are slowly rotating on their black surface, creepily moving like a set of eyes in a haunted-house portrait. Gianni Colombo’s 1959 blocks of Styrofoam undulate almost imperceptibly, teasing you with their subtlety. The gallery fills with quiet clicking and clacking: It’s a room full of happy skeletons that came to exist before the impersonal slickness of digital technology.
It’s safe to say that we all like sculptures that move (think babies and mobiles). These days, they come in the form of Tim Hawkinson’s body-centric, science-y contrivances and Jon Kessler’s Rube Goldbergian political statements. But there was a time when kinetic sculpture was made just for the sake of art and movement in themselves. That, of course, was the free-wheeling ‘60s, when Hartmut Bohm conjured up a grid of magnetized plastic squares that still leap and jolt with the silly abruptness of stop animation, and Jean Tinguely conceived a piece that appears to be a Constructivist painting before you realize that the white rectangles are slowly rotating on their black surface, creepily moving like a set of eyes in a haunted-house portrait. Gianni Colombo’s 1959 blocks of Styrofoam undulate almost imperceptibly, teasing you with their subtlety. The gallery fills with quiet clicking and clacking: It’s a room full of happy skeletons that came to exist before the impersonal slickness of digital technology.
