Systems Aesthetics: A Key Polemic in Contemporary Kinetic Art History

Abstract

This chapter positions Jack Burnham’s writing on modern sculpture as critical to common misconceptions around kinetic sculpture and installation. Burnham argued that artists working with mechanical movement failed to remain relevant to the technological postmodern aesthetics that emerged in the 1960s. Burnham’s perspective is a key contributor to the assumption that kinetic art is an antiquated precursor to other investigations in art and technology. For instance in ‘Systems Esthetics’, ‘Real Time Systems’ and Beyond Modern Sculpture Burnham argued that the popularity of movement in real time with the viewer became superseded by conceptual investigations such as the use of systems theory in art. However, I argue that artists such as Hans Haacke depended on the use of movement in order to investigate systems theory. Therefore, while Burnham’s antipathy towards kineticism separated it from the emerging systems aesthetics in art, Haacke explicitly emphasised the importance of movement and form to connect media with specific conceptual messages

This is a shift from being to becoming. Kinetic works reflect this shift since kinetic works refute static space. They destroy lineal time. Kinetic works do not occupy space, they create space. Kinetic works do not contain time, they create time. Kinetic works so not interpret reality, they are reality.

(Sharp 1968, p. 4)