Beke László (szerk.): Instruktiv + Inter + Konkret. Művészet Malom Szentendre, 21. November - 26. Januar 2015 (Sankt Augustin, 2014)
9. Viktor Hulik
Movement in art Viktor Hűlik Ever since childhood, I have been fascinated by nature, its transformations, variations, diversity of shape, colour and form, with a multitude of surprising associations, relations, connections, by the omnipresence of movement. Movement - a manifestation of life It is only natural that the reflection of movement found, or rather intrinsically, had to find its place also in art. When did the first movable or moving works of art appear? László Moholy-Nagy refers to Greek water clocks as the first artistic application of movement, followed by medieval mechanics, astronomical clocks with moving figures measuring time on the forefront of town halls. Later, as an artistic category, movement discovered its reflection in the aesthetics of impressionism and early avant-garde cubism, Dadaism, futurism or constructivism - in 1913 Marcel Duchamp with his bicycle wheel set the invention of ready-mades “into motion”, Umberto Boccioni creates dynamic movement with static artistic media, while others who incorporated real movement in their artistic endeavour include the likes of M. Ray, V. J. Tatlin, O. Schlemmer and also L. Moholy-Nagy with his programme of luminous kinetic art. Movement as an expressive principle penetrates fine art through the revolution of vision and the formulation of form, as an accompanying phenomenon to moving away from the haptic and optical dependence on the illustrated subject. The history of modern art states that the first to come with a movable object was Naum Gabo - co-founder of constructivism, when in 1920 he connected electric motors to his works. In the same year, he and his brother, A. Pevsner issued the Realistic Manifesto - which was first to outline the problem of kinetic rhythms - a new time-space phenomenon breaking down the static perceptions of art. Since that time, world art has essentially not only fictively started to move, but also realistically. Movement as an expressive phenomenon in art is present in many directions and currents; with many artists devoting years to creating an extensive repertoire of representations, forms and methods of combining elements of movement in new concepts and expressions. I never liked things that were invariable, static. Since the 1980s, I have been examining ways of varying, manipulating and converting my objects. A moment of mechanical movement, offered to the viewer as a challenge to participate in the transformations, firstly took the form of a classic folding meter stick and its paraphrase, in the beginning still in interaction with appended images, which became the second level of manipulation, with the domain gradually becoming a sphere of pure geometry and movement, manipulation with simple predetermined geometric forms. From the initially dosed position of imageobject as a certain geometrical structure or form, new compositions, visual and colourful relations, differently organised space and relations between individual elements, appear at various phases of manipulation. By their variability and mobility, objects offer the viewer a game to create their own composition, format and tone of the work, from the initial status to the final options and back again. 111
