On Art

...Sympathetic critics sprang to the defense of the Impressionists, claiming that their method merely practiced certain optical theories held by the scientists of the time...

...Laurence War-shaw's Light Cascade is radio controlled, sending falls of shimmering pink, green and silver light down a sheet of textured plastic...

...While their works were executed in the conventional oil medium and still retained references to the world of visible reality, they had nevertheless adopted a new perceptual mode by which the painter recorded??with brusque strokes of brilliant color??a series of optical sensations: the sparkling reflections along a stretch of water, the play of light upon a summer field flecked with scarlet poppies...

...Others work in major cities throughout the world such as Paris, Milan and London...

...The most jarring work in the exhibition, called the Seven Diffraction Hex, is produced by usco, a group which the catalogue lists as "poets, film-makers, artists and engineers working in Garnerville, New York...

...At this stage of its development, the merger between electronic engineering and art has produced largely an art of special effects...

...Only a few of the artists in the Wise exhibition??notably Otto Piene and Guenther Uecker of the Zero Group that originated in Germany??have considered other possibilities...

...Both this art and its criticism will have to be reformed before more light can be shed on the subject...

...The situation creates problems for criticism, especially for a criticism which??like most contemporary criticism??has been evolved to analyze and evaluate the formal contributions of a work of art...

...It is like watching a part of one's self disappear into yellow quicksand...

...Still, there are a good many electrical products on the market that are better designed...

...If it should connect up with computer technology??where its future seems to lie??it could become one of the most expensive forms of art ever devised...

...And the results are tidier and more beautifully luminous than one could achieve in paint...

...In the not-too-distant future, the computer is expected to become an ordinary household appliance...

...Its bent is resolutely pictorial...

...One wonders what else they are dreaming up out in Garnerville...

...Slowly, the shadowy hand grows pale, becomes ghostly and fades away...

...While it might be considered a harbinger of a brave new world, the truth is that this segment of kinetic art has advanced little beyond the slide projector stocked with a repertory of formal abstractions...

...If Monet could be spirited into the "Lights in Orbit" exhibition currently installed at the Howard Wise Gallery, he would never recognize??in that kaleidoscopic whirl of bright lights and brilliant color??the original germ of his ideas...

...There is, even, a measure of diversity to be recommended...

...Technological art, techni-color art, electronic painting...

...So far as one can separate the "art" from its inventive mechanical production, it does not go beyond what has already been achieved in modern painting...

...two projectors and 160 slides of crystalline structures programmed to change and dissolve into each other while polarized light produces a seemingly endless play of iridescent color...

...As soon as a machine begins to repeat itself, the magic of color and lights wears very thin...

...In a shrouded corner of the gallery he has set up a conventional canvas covered with a phosphorescent paint that has controlled rates of decay...

...But that is the fate of all technological art??it must wait upon the advances of technology...

...seven hexagonal metal discs are set whirling at dizzying rates, throwing off brightly colored reflections, while a dazzling array of blinking lights explodes in the viewer's face...

...The formal patterns which flow across screens and walls are, by and large, the same that one has come to recognize in the works of abstractionist painters over the past two decades...

...A large proportion of the artists are American, including Thomas Wilfred, the dean of this techni-color art, who produced the Clavilux, a light organ with which he gave color concerts throughout Europe and America during the '20s...

...these are only trial definitions...

...Earl Rei-back's Luminage is more complicated...

...Some months ago the same gallery presented the work to better advantage in a much larger installation through which one could walk...

...This predicates the black-box-and-translucent-screen format of many of the works and possibly accounts for the generally low level of sculptural interest the equipment provides...

...A metal box racks up, in seconds, arrangements of intense blue and red squares??instant Mondrians...

...A slab of metal, butted against a wall, leaks pastel hues...

...The pressure to extend the effects over longer periods of time and to avoid repetitive sequences appears to be pushing electronic art toward costlier and more cumbersome equipment...

...Although some of the practitioners can boast of degrees from mit, it should be noted that the state of the art has not reached that stage of mind-boggling complexity that one associates with a space satellite or even a very advanced computer...

...It was a radical departure from the established techniques of painting and it was branded scandalous...

...With more justice than the Impressionists, the artists involved in this festival of light can claim that they have drawn upon science and technology in the production of their art...

...Found-object collage makes its appearance in Roger Katan's Tide Light, a collection of broken egg shells arranged under a Plexiglas dome and lighted from behind with changing colored lights...

...Abraham Palatnik, a Brazilian designer of industrial machinery and control systems, introduces a somewhat erotic ambience into this world of color mechanisms...

...John Goodyear's Bent Wave Pattern, for example, is a comparatively simple device??a lighted screen of parallel lines in front of which a swinging plastic grid creates moire patterns...

...The examples at the Wise Gallery are not awesome...

...One holds a hand in front of the canvas and steps on a foot switch...

...The Kinetic Projector #1, a cooperative work by Jackie Cassen and Rudi Stern, simply projects onto a wall slides of painted images in overlapping sequences...

...Piene's Light Flower, a cluster of winking light bulbs mounted on a tall slender stalk, and his Light Cocoon, a large metal sphere which projects light through random perforations, may not be as audacious as a good deal of contemporary sculpture, but they are far more interesting, formally, than most of the works on view...

...These artists have constructed their works as sculptural entities rather than as pieces of equipment for painting with light...

...Here we have what was thought to be one of the most advanced forms of art, only to find it tied to old pictorial conventions and retrograde, or indifferent, to formal considerations...

...His Sequencia Vertical S-30, of the box and screen variety, consists of organic shapes, bathed in warm flesh-tones, that gradually open and close...

...Gerald Oster's Instant Self Skiagraphy provides a lonesome example of humanism combined with some do-it-yourself technology...

...A light flicks on and off...

...Into this expanding and contracting movement, circular forms are slowly inserted and withdrawn while the screen blushes into rich purples, blues and greens...

...All this may represent an advance over traditional methods of painting, but as an art form it is tied umbilically to Consolidated Edison...

...It acts like an obstreperous pinball machine, growling and chugging...

...There is, as yet, no glossary of terms to define this particular type of art production...

...A number of them live in or near New York, not presumably because it is the center of the art world, but because their professional careers as teachers and industrial technicians have drawn them to the area...

...Its control panel seems unnecessarily formidable since the main activity is relatively simple...

...Then, as now, science had a way of making such radical innovations seem more palatable to the broad public...

...The dark shadow of the hand remains fixed upon the canvas which is now glowing in an unearthly shade of yellow...

...The device becomes a near-relative of those frightful but ingenious electric contrivances used so often in display advertising...

...Like Uecker's Light Rain, a series of slender aluminum tubes with slits that emit flashes of intermittent light, they are intended as environmental elements for architectural settings...

...The exhibition represents the work of 36 artists, artist-scientists or artist-technicians (it is difficult to categorize them precisely) using a variety of equipment and techniques, ranging from the conventional to the complex...

...ON ART By James R. Mellow Tied to Con Edison When the Impressionists established the primacy of light and color as the basis for their painting, they could hardly have been aware of how far their ideas would carry in modern art...

...Its chief problem is that of duration...

...The gallery has been transformed into a dark grotto where a barrage of luminous sensations greets the viewer: Changing abstract shapes in rainbow tints are sent fluttering across translucent screens or are left, pinned and wriggling, on the walls...

...Certainly the forms move, change their shapes and colors??a distinct difference...

...There is hope, though...

...Uecker's work, however, because of the size of the exhibition and the small gallery area, is disastrously restricted to a few sticks of light that are easily overlooked as one steps off the elevator...

...A color television set has been altered to produce skeins of prismatic light that dance and float across its silent screen...