Future Shock

Bursting on the scene in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Impressionism was only the first of a sequence of shattering changes. It came at a time when industrialism was begi

If we roughly date the Impressionist interval from 1875 to 1910, we see a period of dominance lasting approximately thirty-five years. Since then no school or style, from Futurism to Fauvism, from Cubism to Surrealism, has dominated the scene for even that long. One after another, styles supplant one another. The most enduring twentieth-century school, Abstract Expressionism, held sway for at most twenty years, from 1940 to 1960, then to be followed by a wild succession – "Pop" lasting perhaps five years, "Op" managing to grip the public's attention for two or three years, then the emergence, appropriately enough, of "Kinetic Art" whose very raison d'être is transience.

This phantasmagoric turnover is evident not merely in New York or San Francisco, but in Paris, in Rome, in Stockholm and London – wherever painters are found. Thus Robert Hughes writes in the New Society: "Hailing the new painters is now one of the a

If schools of art may be likened to languages, then individual works of art may be compared to words. If we make this transposition, we find in art a process exactly analogous to that now occurring in the verbal language. Here, too, "words" – i.e., individual works of art – are coming into use and then dropping out of the vocabulary at heightened speeds. Individual works flash across our consciousness in galleries or in the pages of mass magazines; the next time we look they are gone. Sometimes the work itself quite literally disappears – many are collages or constructions built of fragile materials that simply fall apart after a short time.

Much of the confusion in the art world today arises from the failure of the cultural establishment to recognize, once and for all, that elitism and permanence are dead – so, at least, contends John McHale, the imaginative Scot, half artist/half social scientist, who heads the Center for Integrative Studies, State University of New York at Binghamton. In a forceful essay entitled The Plastic Parthenon, McHale points out that "traditional canons of literary and artistic judgment ... tend to place high value on permanence, uniqueness and the enduring universal value of chosen artifacts." Such aesthetic standards, he argues, were appropriate enough in a world of handcrafted goods and relatively small taste-making elites. These same standards, however, "in no way enable one to relate adequately to our present situation in which astronomical numbers of artifacts are mass produced, circulated and consumed. These may be identical, or only marginally different. In varying degree, they are expendable, replaceable, and lack any unique 'value' or intrinsic 'truth.'"

Today's artists, McHale suggests, neither work for a tiny elite nor take seriously the idea that permanence is a virtue. The future of art, he says, "seems no longer to lie with the creation of enduring masterworks." Rather, artists work for the short term. McHale concludes that: "Accelerated changes in the human condition require an array of symbolic images of man which will match up to the requirements of constant change, fleeting impression and a high rate of obsolescence." We need, he says, "a replaceable, expendable series of ikons."

One may quarrel with McHale's contention that transience in art is desirable. Perhaps the flight from permanence is a tactical error. It can even be argued that our artists are employing homeopathic magic, behaving like primitives who, awed by a force they do not comprehend, attempt to exert control over it by simple-mindedly imitating it. But whatever one's attitude toward contemporary art, transience remains an implacable fact, a social and historic tendency so central to our times that it ca

The impulse toward transience in art explains the whole development of that most transient of art works, the "happening." Allan Kaprow, who is often credited with originating the happening, has explicitly suggested its relationship to the throw-away culture within which we live. The happening, according to its proponents, is ideally performed once and once only. The happening is the Kleenex tissue of art.

This so, kinetic art can be considered the aesthetic embodiment of modularism. Kinetic sculptures or constructions crawl, whistle, whine, swing, twitch, rock or pulsate, their lights blinking, their magnetic tapes whirling, their plastic, steel, glass and copper components arranging and rearranging themselves into evanescent patterns within a given, though sometimes concealed, framework. Here the wiring and co

Many artists are working with engineers and scientists today, in the hope of exploiting the latest technical processes for their own purpose, the symbolization of the accelerative thrust in society. "Speed," writes Francastel, the French art critic, "has become something undreamt-of, and constant movement every man's intimate experience." Art reflects this new reality.

Thus we find artists from France, England, the United States, Scotland, Sweden, Israel and elsewhere creating kinetic images. Their creed is perhaps best expressed by Yaacov Agam, an Israeli kineticist, who says: "We are different from what we were three moments ago, and in three minutes more, we will again be different ... I try to give this approach a plastic expression by creating a visual form that doesn't exist. The image appears and disappears, but nothing is retained."

The final culmination of such efforts, of course, is the creation of those new and quite real "fun palaces" – so-called total environment nightclubs in which the fun-seeker plunges into a space in which lights, colors and sounds change their patterns constantly. In effect, the patron steps inside a work of kinetic art. Here again the framework, the building itself, is only the longest lasting part of the whole, while its interior is designed to produce transient combinations of sensory in-puts. Whether one regards this as fun or not depends on the individual, perhaps; but the overall direction of such movements is clear. In art, as in language, we are racing toward impermanence. Man's relationships with symbolic imagery are growing more and more temporary.