13. Kinetic Multiples: Between Industrial Vocation and Handcrafted Solutions

In 1966, Julio Le Parc represented Argentina in the Venice Biennale (fig. 13.1) and received the international grand prize in painting. According to the reviews, his space was one of the most visited.¹ As the appeal of kinetic art continued to grow and draw crowds to museums, kinetic artworks seemed to meet the most ambitious objective of the avant-garde: to integrate art and life.

Kineticism² was an international trend composed of different groups of artists who were in contact with one another, including the Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel (GRAV) in France, Gruppo T and Gruppo N in Italy, ZERO in Germany, Dwizjenije in Moscow, and USCO in New York. In 1964 the Nouvelle tendance exhibition at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, had gathered about fifty artists from eleven countries.³ In Pascal Rousseau’s words, kinetic art was viewed “as a kind of Esperanto through which each individual would communicate with the world in the ecstatic intoxication of optical vibration” (Citation: Rousseau 2005:142–50 [Rousseau, Pascal. 2005. “‘Folklore planétaire.’ Le sujet cybernétique dans l’art optique des années 1960.” In L’oeil moteur. Art optique et cinétique, 1950–1975, edited by Emmanuel Guigon and Arnauld Pierre, 142–150. Strasbourg: Musée d’Art Contemporain de Strasbourg.]).

A cognitive understanding of perception allowed the kineticists to claim that optical effects were not merely illusions. Altering visual and synesthetic perception entailed the literal and symbolic alteration of the ways in which each participant perceived him or herself and the world. As Umberto Eco and Victor Vasarely pointed out in the early 1960s, while this art helped develop the sensorial capacity of modern viewers under new social and technological circumstances,⁴ the resources implemented by kinetic art also intended to call into question not only the system of the fine arts but also a society that artists such as Le Parc thought had become automated.

Unlike central vision, which privileges the recognition of objects, peripheral vision takes in the surroundings and facilitates spatial orientation. Using it under extreme conditions of perceptual instability means attacking the viewer’s sensation of his or her position in space. For example, Le Parc’s eyeglasses altered vision through fragmentation, kaleidoscopic effects, and inversions of image.⁵ Some of these artistic objects were made in series: the idea of kinetic multiples was at the core of these artists’ strategies of “demystifying” art objects by avoiding the uniqueness fetish. A potential future that included the industrial production of kinetic multiples made it possible to imagine the extension of those destabilizing effects to a wider or unusual audience, such as Catholic priests (fig. 13.2).

In this paper, I analyze the kinetic multiple as a visual production that discovered its limits and contradictions amid the arguments about culture, standardization, and consumption around 1968. Although, as we shall see, kinetic multiples never achieved industrial production, within the context of the rise in the cultural market in Paris in the 1960s, kinetic artists (and some critics, such as Jean Clay) nonetheless felt that it could happen at any time. Focusing specifically on multiples—a crucial aspect of kinetic art production and circulation in the 1960s that art history has not previously problematized—may allow us to explore whether this industrial vocation could inform approaches to its conservation and restoration. Collaborative work between conservators and art historians on the materiality of kinetic art could lead to a pivotal question: did the edition of multiples contribute to standardized models, components, and solutions? Although I do not provide an answer in the text that follows, I invite you to consider that we may have arrived at the point of being able to formulate new discussions.

Le Parc’s space in Venice (fig. 13.3) gathered around forty pieces,⁶ an anthology of the research done in the context of GRAV.⁷ The works were so appealing to the public that, through overuse, many of the mechanisms broke down only weeks after the Biennale’s opening. Le Parc, trying to solve this problem, was told by a friend that Luigi Scarpa (who was responsible for the international section of the Biennale) had said that Le Parc’s artworks were among the public’s favorites because they could be handled, and it would be a pity if the works remained nonfunctional through the rest of the show. However, because the space was open to visitors ten hours a day, it was a difficult problem logistically. Scarpa also asked if Le Parc wanted to have a Venetian put in charge of his exhibition.⁸

It is likely that more people visited Le Parc’s space after he won the international painting prize, but it was not unusual for his shows to be very well attended. GRAV’s 1964 exhibition in Buenos Aires had attracted 50,000 visitors (fig. 13.4).⁹ Two 1967 exhibitions—Lumière et mouvement at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and Le Parc’s retrospective at the Instituto Torcuato di Tella’s Center for the Visual Arts in Buenos Aires—attracted unprecedented crowds. More than 150,000 people viewed the retrospective over twenty days.¹⁰ The formal and material qualities of kinetic multiples also gave them wide appeal. Crowds were attracted to kinetic art exhibitions by the possibility of transforming an artwork’s shape (that is, volumetry) and by the use of novel materials, including bright, translucent, or reflective surfaces such as Plexiglas and stainless steel.

After he won the prize, Le Parc took advantage of subsequent interviews to spread GRAV’s tenets about kinetic productions. They were meant to be collective, multiple, and foreign to the art field:

We should tend to the collective multiple, the playroom, the public demonstration, in which every group of spectators will be simultaneously involved and each of them become actor and object of the show at the same time. These labyrinths, these playrooms, have to be set up in military barracks, and HLMs.¹¹ It is necessary to overcome the solitude of the crowds and, in a way, rediscover the conditions of participation typical of primitive societies.¹²

The multiple as it was conceived by kinetic artists in the mid-1960s converged with the conventions of engravings, in that both involved the artistic production of series rather than unique pieces. But unlike engravings, the identical and reproducible kinetic artifacts were pervaded by the tensions between their industrial vocation and their effective insertion in the exclusivist logic of the art market (figs. 13.5, 13.6): series of kinetic objects were not numbered, as print series were, because the artists did not want to control the number of works in a series (and therefore the price in the art market). They desired an industrial manufacture that, although it seemed probable in the mid-1960s, never took place.

There are precedents of multiples before GRAV; for example, Victor Vasarely and Daniel Spoerri had explored the serial production of artistic objects.¹³ In fact, in 1959 Spoerri had tried, to no avail, to acquaint the Galerie Denise René with his Edition MAT (Multiplication d’Art Transformable). For these editions, he had called on artists connected to René’s gallery: Yaacov Agam, Pol Bury, Jesús Rafael Soto, Jean Tinguely, and Vasarely, as well as German artists Heinz Mack and Dieter Roth. But René’s strategy was based on the artists’ proven recognition before their multiples were placed on the market. The artists recommended by Spoerri were young and not yet established, and René did not pursue his initiative. Thus, it was only around the mid-1960s that the conditions to launch this form of art seemed more suitable.

Le Parc’s triumph in Venice provided the exposure and recognition necessary to place multiples in an art market already crammed with all kinds of artworks and reproductions. In July 1966, René opened a second gallery on the Left Bank in Paris specifically for multiples. The first exhibition focused on Vasarely; the second exhibition, Multiples recherches, opened in October and featured Le Parc.

Norberto Gómez, a young Argentine artist who had helped Le Parc assemble the artworks sent to the Venice Biennale, recalls that the first multiples had been handmade, but that after obtaining the prize, Le Parc and his assistants standardized the process and increased their production considerably. “After the Biennale, the sales came. They set up a large studio,”¹⁴ said Gómez. Having moved to Paris, Argentine artists Armando Durante and Gabriel Messil began to work on the production of Le Parc’s multiples commissioned by René. Antonio Seguí, another Argentine artist living in Paris, recalls that “Fatty” Durante and Messil also earned handsome sums of money.¹⁵

After 1965 an increasing number of galleries and artists produced and sold multiples to a restricted market that was quickly saturated.¹⁶ René registered the term multiple¹⁷ in the hope of enjoying exclusive use of it and thus asserting her long practice as an Abstract Art dealer and her close relationship with Vasarely, a pioneer in the serial production of geometric art. In late 1967 art critic Otto Hahn presented an overview of the success achieved by the multiples in Paris:

In less than a year, this trend developed and grew to the extent that the word “multiple” now sounds like “open sesame.” Even lithographs use the sweet name of “Multiples.” [ … ] Some want to do away with the structures of art distribution; others would socialize art. In times of euphoria, confusion is inevitable.¹⁸

Prices and options varied. The Galerie Givaudan opened in 1965 and specialized in multiples, following the model of publishing houses: large-scale editions, with the same price for famous artists and newcomers. Thus Givaudan aspired to moralize an art market that grew apace with France’s modernization without modifying its elitist logic (see Citation: Hahn 1968 [Hahn, Otto. 1968. “Les multiples à Paris.” Art Interanational 12 (1): 47–49.]).

René opted to have the production of the works supervised by their respective creators. Unlike Le Parc and GRAV members, she disliked unlimited editions. In her view, after 100 copies had been made, the others would be produced unsupervised by the artist, a fact that detracted from their quality. She also opposed the “demystification of art,” so much discussed by GRAV members, because she felt it meant equating an art object with a mere consumer item. She maintained that “art must keep its aura and continue to be a high quality product that bears witness to a way of thinking about the world.”¹⁹ Charging more accessible prices, René intended to spread modern art among social sectors whose purchasing power prevented them from buying unique works. For her, it was about democratizing access to ownership of art objects … and increasing sales.

As Hahn pointed out, opinions about multiples varied. Blurring the work’s aura and the boundaries of the traditional art market by producing serial art pieces that did not meet the requirements of “uniqueness” or manual “touch” did not necessarily coincide with the notion of turning the word multiple into a trademark (figs. 13.7, 13.8). Amid the confusion, a manifesto signed by Le Parc declared that multiples were developments related to geometric abstraction, and he specified their characteristics in terms of authorship and possibilities of reproduction:

Multiples have come into being thanks to the quests undertaken by geometric, optical, and kinetic art, that have never ceased to emphasize that the intervention of the hand, the gesture, and the touch are definitely of secondary importance in an art proposal. [ … ]

1. A Multiple is an art proposal conceived to be multiplied ad infinitum thanks to the industrial resources available. Every copy of a Multiple is identical and interchangeable with others. Each of them fully conveys the artist’s original proposal.

2. Conclusion: any work conceived as a Multiple eliminates the material notion of an original (scale model, etc. …), which blends with the rest of the copies.

3. The notion of an internal transformation for each of the copies accompanies that of multiplication. Each Multiple involves a limited diversity principle (through permutation) or an unlimited one (an “open” kinetic work). Though strictly identical from a material point of view, time, movement, light, etc. endow Multiples with an ever-changing appearance, which makes them look different to different viewers.

4. To begin with, a Multiple may have a limited run. It can be gradually multiplied depending on the possibilities of the art market. However, it will be regarded as a Multiple as long as it is initially conceived as unlimited.

5. As part of its lack of limitations, the Multiple, which underscores the triumph of the artist’s thought above the dated, fetishist conception of the art piece, excludes the author’s signature. [ … ]

The Multiple is located at the junction of artistic creation and industrial production. It protects the whole of the former as it offers the possibilities of the latter. This is one of the meeting points between art and the technology of our days.²⁰

René had made reproductions, screen prints, and tapestries, but the manufacture of multiples brought new problems related to the distribution system and to the status of the artwork. From Le Parc’s point of view (and judging his complicated relationship with René), his own dealer was among the many who had distorted the profound, critical meaning of the multiple. At times, René was the enemy or, quite simply, the boss.

Le Parc arrived in Paris in 1958 for an eight-month fellowship (at a modest 300 francs per month) sponsored by French government; it was extended for another eight months.²¹ In 1962 he signed his first exclusive contract with René for a similar monthly sum. It was not until the mid-1960s that Le Parc found it easier to support his family through his arrangement with his dealer, who sold editions of his multiples for $80 to $200.²² This does not mean that the commercialization of multiples went smoothly. Marion Hohfeldt mentions that, in a number of cases, the pieces proved too costly for the nonspecialized public and lacked exclusivity in the collectors’ view.²³ Moreover, even when the prices were accessible, the works would not sell unless they were signed and numbered. The paradox about the multiple was that, while it had abandoned the original as a way of unfetishizing the art piece as a luxury consumer object, it did not abandon its artistic status and its proprietary nature.

In mid-1966 art critic Jean Clay felt optimistic about the dissemination of kineticism by means of multiples. He envisaged a near future in which gallerists would make way for “industrial-scale organizations” that would disseminate “the art product” along the same lines as music albums and books.²⁴ A couple of years later, in 1969, speaking about an initiative to sell multiples at the Fédération Nationale d’Achats (FNAC), a store that originally sold photographic and phonographic materials and equipment but was expanding its market by including other cultural items,²⁵ Clay refined his ideas by saying it would be a mistake to offer multiples in this type of venue.²⁶ In order to retain their meaningfulness, they should be exhibited in such a way that people would understand that kinetic multiples were art proposals rather than gadgets. The term gadgets pervaded discussions in France about culture, standardization, and consumption. In The System of Objects (1968), Jean Baudrillard offered a critical analysis of the multiplication phenomenon: “Nowadays objects are actors in a global process in which man is no more than a character or a spectator” (Citation: Baudrillard 1969:62 [Baudrillard, Jean. 1969. El sistema de los objetos. Mexico: Siglo XXI.]). In turn, in the balance between structural and ornamental components, a “functional aberration” resulted in a gadget, a novel utensil of questionable usefulness.

In the context of an unprecedented abundance of small, ingenious objects, the eye-catching multiple ran the risk of being mistaken for yet another gadget. Paradoxically, while kineticists’ main purpose in producing their works was to force viewers out of their passivity, those very works exhibited in a shop window could be mistaken for artifacts that, as Baudrillard pointed out, reduce the user to a mere spectator of the technical imaginary deployed by an undetermined set of consumer objects. The recreational nature of kinetic multiples revolved around this misinterpretation, for gadgets also were defined at the juncture of technology, recreation, and automation.

Notes