The colossal submerged hangar that is the University of Westminster’s Ambika P3 space, discovered as one descends through some decidedly utilitarian service tunnels underneath that 1960s artifact, seemed a fitting location for Kinetica Art Fair. Visiting this eclectic gathering of kinetic, robotic, electronic and new media art at times felt like a modernist arms bazaar, steampunk toy store, or a kind of Star Trek convention gone awry. Whatever one made of all this: it was anything but boring.
The name ‘Kinetica’ promised motion, and this the fair certainly delivered. Confronting visitors as they first reached the gallery floor was Christiaan Zwanikken’s Boar Suit Exoskeletal, a wearable vest with an animatronic arm protruding from its centre holding aloft a boar’s skull.
Its gears and motors ground and chattered, and the skull waved about in a precarious manner. From this beginning, everywhere the eye looked it found jerky, odd movement: possessed mannequins’ legs, mechanical birds and butterflies, uncanny mobiles and motorised Lego creatures.
This was also probably the only art fair in the world where the art was louder than the people milling about it.
In one corner, a pair of giant rubber hands on metal stalks intermittently clapped, sending echoes round the great hall. In another, a small crowd of visitors unashamedly adorned in cardboard 3D specs watched a piece of CGI video art, a kind of highbrow Windows 95 screensaver, projected above their heads, accompanied by a throbbing synth.
At times this all felt more like a collection of curiosities than an art fair, and indeed the word Wunderkammer was scattered several times on the walls and in the brochures. The other word hanging around most of the stalls was ‘Duchamp’. Does it matter that much of what the art explored, feels as if it was already explored before the Second World War? That the motors and machines displayed and sold at the fair, at one point in western art clearly so fearful and sexual and meaningful and exciting, now tend to look merely quaint, amusing, or retro?
Well, humour was central to much old mechanical art and, at least, some of the new jokes made here were very good. Take Paul Fryer’s Telstar, an exact copy of the famous communications satellite made in exotic hardwoods, or Pierrick Sorin’s Titre Variable series, miniature ‘optical theatres’ in which the artist appears to stumble and lurch about in an immaterial world of spinning disks and cogs.
Indeed, it was the work that explored light, materiality and perception that felt the most vital. There was a relatively strict separation in the fair between the analogue – motors and record players and such – and the digital, the latter largely given over to a blacked-out space by the side of the hall, to better see the menagerie of LEDs and lasers and projections on show. Gregory Barsamian’s The Trap, which utilizes a stroboscopic light to animate a menacing and dream-like sculpture, and Chris Levine’s Angel, which becomes visible only when the viewer begins to glance away, were both outstanding.
Much of this newer art consciously wrestled not so much with the technology of the 21st century, but the problems of attempting to portray it, to explore it and our relationship with it: the digital is confoundingly immaterial. If our relationship with technology defines who we are and how we think of ourselves, the best stuff here asked: who are you, the viewer, if you cannot even properly focus on the object of art any longer?
Rather than dodge the surrounding issues, Kinetica admirably attacked them head on, with a full series of talks, workshops and performances, giving the fair more the feel of conference than a sales floor. It was this programme that made the fair (rather than just the art) feel animated: proof, if it was needed, that there is good reason why Kinetica appears to have grown year on year. It may not be perfect, but there was more than enough here to say, yes, art that moves is still very much alive.
Words: Max Goldman
