Lumino kinetic art

also: Lumino-kinetic art

genre c. 1920s-early 1970s Europe United States

Lumino-kinetic art is the branch of kinetic art whose materials are light and movement. Art historian Frank Popper treats it as an art-historical term for a small body of work - largely European, largely 1950s-60s - that fuses glowing or projected light with mechanical motion, and reads it as evidence of aesthetic preoccupation with technological advance: a starting point for high-technology art. Its ancestry runs to László Moholy-Nagy's Light-Space Modulator (1922-30); in the 1950s Nicolas Schöffer built walls of light, prisms and video circuits, while engineer-artist Frank Malina developed his Lumidyne lighting system and his moving paintings, the tableaux mobiles. Landmark group shows included Kunst-Licht-Kunst (Eindhoven, 1966) and Lumière et mouvement (Paris, 1967), and its dazzle aligned it briefly with Op art. By Popper's account the tradition ends in the early 1970s, a precursor to cybernetic and new-media art.

Occupy Portland protest at Pioneer Courthouse Square in downtown Portland, Oregon on October 6, 2011
Occupy Portland protest at Pioneer Courthouse Square in downtown Portland, Oregon on October 6, 2011CC BY-SA 3.0 (credit: Another Believer) · source

Defining characteristics

  • Light itself as the primary medium: glowing, colored, projected or reflected beams
  • Constant mechanical or motorized motion - rotation, oscillation, moving parts
  • Industrial and electronic materials: metal armatures, bulbs, motors and circuits
  • Spectacular, psychedelic glow that shares Op art's visual dazzle
  • Hybrid objects between painting, sculpture and machine: "moving paintings", light sculptures

Key figures

  • László Moholy-Nagy (1895-1946) — Bauhaus artist whose Light-Space Modulator (1922-30) pioneered combined light and motion
  • Nicolas Schöffer (1912-1992) — Hungarian-born French cybernetic artist who built walls of light, prisms and video circuits in the 1950s
  • Frank Malina (1912-1981) — Engineer-artist who invented the Lumidyne lighting system and made tableaux mobiles (moving paintings)
  • György Kepes (1906-2001) — Hungarian-born artist and MIT educator who experimented with lumino-kinetic works

Example works

Sources

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