Shaped by Strobe

By ROBERT HUGHES

Most kinetic art seemed to have been banished to attics in Easthampton and closets in the 16th arrondissement --those clicking fluorescent wall boxes, those spinning mirrors, those balky, home-wired devices that were about a tenth as complex, and nothing like as much fun, as a pinball machine.

Perhaps nobody could believe that a simple art machine would reconcile gallery culture and "life," when all his household tools, from stereo to juicer, are stuffed with miniaturized circuits and every discotheque routinely puts on light shows that eclipse anything that the Biennale ever offered. Yet, a few artists continue to produce kinetic objects of real aesthetic interest. One is an affable Chinese ex-engineer from Shanghai named Tsai, whose cybernetic sculptures--the result of a fellowship at M.I.T.--are currently at the Denise Rene gallery in New York.

A grove of slender stainless-steel rods rises from a plate. This base vibrates at 30 cycles per second; the rods flex rapidly, in harmonic curves. Set in a dark room, they are lit by strobes. The pulse of the flashing lights varies--they are connected to sound and proximity sensors. The result is that when one approaches a Tsai or makes a noise in its vicinity, the thing responds. The rods appear to move; there is a shimmering, a flashing, an eerie ballet of metal, whose apparent movements range from stillness to jittering, and back to a slow, indescribably sensuous undulation.

The rods appear to defy the laws of matter and occupy two places at the same time; or one can put a finger into an apparently empty patch of air and feel it hammered by an invisible solid.

It seems appropriate that the origins of Tsai's art lie in an experience of nature. One day in 1965 in a New Hampshire wood, Tsai spent hours watching the sun flickering through the wind-stirred trees. "Then I realized that this could go into sculpture. I was interested in vibration already -- but theoretically. It all came together that day in the woods." His working method is intuitive; one sculpture had to be remade 21 times before its movement was right. But the result justifies the effort. Tsai's work is free from the determinism and obtrusive simplicity of most kinetic art, and remains wholly poetic. "I don't have any fear of engineering," he asserts, "so I can't see electronics as an art fetish. The how isn't important. It's what you see that counts."

Robert Hughes

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