have slang gestures, just as we have slang words – thumbs up or down, thumb to nose, the 'shame on you' gesture used by children, the hand moving across the neck to suggest a throat-slitting. Professionals who watch the development of the gestural language suggest that it, too, may be changing more rapidly.
Some gestures that were regarded as semi-obscene have become somewhat more acceptable as sexual values have changed in the society. Others that were used only by a few have achieved wider usage. An example of diffusion, Flexner observes, is the wider use today of that gesture of contempt and defiance – the fist raised and screwed about. The invasion of Italian movies that hit the United States in the fifties and sixties probably contributed to this. Similarly, the upraised finger – the 'up yours' gesture – appears to be gaining greater respectability and currency than it once had. At the same time, other gestures have virtually vanished or been endowed with radically changed meaning. The circle formed by the thumb and forefinger to suggest that all goes well appears to be fading out; Churchill's 'V for Victory' sign is now used by protesters to signify something emphatically different: 'peace'
There was a time when a man learned the language of his society and made use of it, with little change, throughout his lifetime. His 'relationship' with each learned word or gesture was durable. Today, to an astonishing degree, it is not.
Art, like gesture, is a form of non-verbal expression and a prime channel for the transmission of images. Here the evidences of ephemeralization are, if anything, even more pronounced. If we regard each school of art as though it were a word-based language, we are witnessing the successive replacement not of words, but of whole languages at once. In the past one rarely saw a fundamental change in an art style within a man's lifetime. A style or school endured, as a rule, for generations at a time. Today the pace of turnover in art is vision-blurring – the viewer scarcely has time to 'see' a school develop, to learn its language, so to speak, before it vanishes.
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 beginning its climactic forward surge, bringing with it a notable step-up in the tempo of everyday life. 'It is above all the furious speed of [technological] development and the way the pace is forced that seems pathological, particularly when compared with the rate of progress in earlier periods in the history of art and culture,' writes the art historian Arnold Hauser in describing the turnover of art styles. 'For the rapid development of technology not only accelerates the change of fashion, but also the shifting emphases in the criteria of aesthetic taste. ... The continual and increasingly rapid replacement of old articles in everyday use by new ones ... readjusts the speed at which philosophical and artistic revaluations occur ...'
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
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
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
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 cannot be ignored. And it is clear that artists are reacting to it.
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 connections tend to be the least transient part of the structure, just as the gantry cranes and service towers in Joan Littlewood's Fun Palace are designed to outlive any particular arrangement of the modular components. The intent of the kinetic work, however, is to create maximum variability and maximum transience. Jean Clay has pointed out that in a traditional work of art 'the relationship of parts to a whole had been decided forever.' In kinetic art, he says, the 'balance of forms is in flux.'
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,
