Motion," of which Tinguely's work was the centerpiece.11 Like video artists in the early 1970s, artists working with kinetic and light sculpture articulated early '60s optimism: the future of art was proclaimed as an alliance between artistic and technical concerns; the machine was paramount.

Kinetic and light sculpture represent two distinct yet overlapping movements, because, quite simply, most light work is inherently kinetic.  The genesis of kinetic work can be traced to the '20s when Bauhaus artist Laszlo Moholy-Nagy and U.S. artist Thomas Wilfred began exploring the artistic potential of light.  Moholy-Nagy built his Light-Space Modulator be tween 1922 and 1930.  It is a complex piece comprised of various light bulbs and reflective and filtering surfaces, which was rebuilt in the 1960s-and exhibited in 1970 at Howard Wise Gallery.  Wilfred is considered by many to be the U.S. pioneer of light sculpture, or what he termed "Lumia." Wilfred built a Clavilux in the early 1920s, which was described by Howard Wise Gallery as "an organ-like instrument of sliding keys controlling optical elements (lenses, color filters, mirrors, prisms and projectors)" which produced images on a theater-sized screen.  Soon after, Wilfred designed a self-contained, automatically operated Clavilux on which he exhibited new compositions.  In many ways, the roots of kinetic sculpture date to 1913 when Marcel Duchamp put a bicycle wheel on a stool and named it Bicycle Wheel, and Alexander Calder began constructing his famed mobiles in the '30s.

In the late 1950s and early '60s, kinetic and light works began to reemerge.  Both Wise and Douglas MacAgy, an art historian and curator who worked with Wise when he began to explore these new media, as well as others involved in this movement, saw light sculpture as an extension of Impressionism-a movement which took light as its subject matter-and kineticism as an outgrowth of Futurism, which attempted to depict motion on canvas.  In Europe, kinetic and light works were produced by several art collectives such as Group Zero in Dusseldorf, the Groupe de Recherche d'Art Visual (of which Julio Le Parc was a member) in Paris, and encouraged by establishments such as the Denise Ren6 Gallery in Paris, which held an important early exhibition called "Le Mouvement" in 1955.  Swiss artist Jean Tinguely received a great deal of attention with his notorious self-destructing sculpture-event "Homage to New York" at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960, but most kinetic artists were less heralded at the time.

The renewed interest in artistic machines in the early 1960s can be attributed to the proliferation and sophistication of available hardware as well as a renewed fascination with technology.  With characteristic aplomb, Wise defined this emergence as also attributable to a specific Manhattan phenomenon:

Two circumstances enabled the artist to use actual natural phenomena in his work, making kinetic light art possible.  The first was the development of devices by modern technology that permit the

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