‘Singapore is a kinetic city’: Movement art founder Yaacov Agam, 97, shows in Tanglin Road
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Kinetic artist Yaacov Agam is showing his works at Bruno Gallery in Tanglin Road.
PHOTO: BRUNO GALLERY
SINGAPORE – Over 70 years ago, artist Yaacov Agam staged one of the first exhibitions in art history entirely devoted to kinetic art at Galerie Craven in Paris, France.
Today, the founder of this type of art – which relies on movement and optical illusion – says proudly of the ubiquity of Instagram-friendly digital experiences: “I am the grandfather of immersive art.”
At 97, the Israeli artist has seen his analogue experiments in turning art from static, framed objects into dynamic contraptions gain mainstream traction, from Icelandic-Danish artist Olafur Eliasson’s new immersive art theatre at Gardens by the Bay
Ahead of his exhibition, he hopes that people will indulge him in turning back time.
He says in an e-mail to The Straits Times: “An Instagram photo is a frozen second – it is the opposite of my philosophy. I hope people use their phones to capture the movement, but use their hearts to feel the transformation.”
Beyond The Visible Kinetic Art Exhibition at Bruno Gallery in Tanglin Road features more than 50 paintings and sculptures by Agam and French kinetic artist Patrick Rubinstein, 66. It runs from March 5 to 30. Admission is free.
The show includes Agam’s famous Agamographs – now wonderfully retro – where different patterns can be seen depending on the angle from which one views the work.
There are countless websites today teaching craft aficionados how to create these accordion-like objects, involving cutting and interweaving strips of paper.
When Agam invented it around 1953, it was in opposition to “still life”, the more pedigreed art genre that was in previous centuries the mark of a good artist.
He says: “There is no ‘still life’. If you stand still, the art is incomplete. You must move for the art to be born. I wanted the viewer to be a partner in creation.”
Born to a rabbi in 1928, Agam’s pioneering of kinetic art was steered in part by the Torah’s injunction that “thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image”. For a while, he struggled to reconcile his desire to be an artist with this forbidding of figuration. Kinetic art was his answer to express life as constant creation.
In 1955, at the suggestion of art critics, Agam gathered artists who were also interested in this philosophy to create the group Le Mouvement, or The Movement. They included American sculptor Alexander Calder, with his mobiles that swayed with the wind, and Hungarian-French artist Victor Vasarely’s paintings of optical illusions.
Agam has been commissioned for several large-scale works, including the world’s biggest menorah in New York; the Fire And Water Fountain in Tel Aviv, Israel, that spun and spat fire upwards before its removal in 2016; and nine 10m-tall rhomboid pillars in Taiwan, with 54 sides painted in 180 hues titled Peaceful Communication With The World.
Based in New York, Agam says he has not faced difficulties exhibiting amid backlash to Israel’s actions in the Middle East. His art is a prayer for peace and unity – and, moreover, has changed the course of art history, as he is not averse to boasting.
“The first dimension, the line, was introduced in the caves,” he says. “The second dimension, the area, in a regular painting. Egyptians invented the sculptures, the third dimension, and I brought the fourth dimension, change, to the art world.”
Fellow artist Rubinstein is a contemporary devotee of the movement who has given it new mileage by incorporating images. His works may contain a pop rendering of London’s Big Ben, or track the movements of a ballet dancer and the roundabout swing of a golfer.
Patrick Rubinstein incorporates pop images into his kinetic works.
PHOTO: BRUNO GALLERY
His first encounter with kinetic art was the making of an Agamograph with his father, though he did not then know the device’s name or its inventor, he says.
Learning of Agam later was reassuring. “Ah, this idea has a history. It has depth,” he recalls.
While Rubinstein admires the structural seriousness of Agam’s constructions, he sees his own works more as mutable portraits.
“The moment when someone moves in front of the work and suddenly sees something else appear. That small surprise – that’s everything. It says something about how we see people, and how quickly perception can change.”
On another count, the kinetic artists a generation apart agree. Singapore is that most kinetic of cities, always moving fast with clarity and intention, Rubinstein says.
Agam, who was last in Singapore in 2013 to celebrate his 85th birthday, says of his joy at being exhibited here: “It is a miracle of movement and harmony. Singapore doesn’t look backward; it looks forward, and that is exactly where my art lives.”
Book It/ Beyond The Visible Kinetic Art Exhibition
Where: Bruno Gallery, 01-03 Tanglin Place, 91 Tanglin Road str.sg/BSZ8
When: March 5 to 31, 10am to 6pm daily
Admission: Free
Info:
