Francisco Goya's best-know print, "The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters", seems to account fort he main events of the twentieth century to date: World War I, Communism, Fascism, Nazism, Worl War II, the Holocaust, the Stalinist terror, atomic destruction, rampant nationalism, population explosion, ecological and other assorted disasters. No wonder that anti-rationalist tendencies in art, such as Dada, Surrealism, and Expressionism have held sway. But the verb "produce" in Goya's title may not bet he right one. Both rationality and irrationality are inherent in human nature, and when the one sleeps the other takes command. One can only hope that reason will awake and provide a countervailing force, eradicating new social and political monsters that seem to spawn daily.
It is difficult to be optimistic, certainly not with the confidence of the innovators of rational or constructive art in the years after the first World War.
At that time the promise of the Russian Revolution dispelled the pervading pessimism about the future of humankind. Radical artists, affiliated with Russian Constructivism and Suprematism, Dutch De Stijl, and the German Bauhaus, could think of their abstract, geometric art as the harbinger of a brave new world, a world governed by reason and in which science, mathematics, and technology would play leading roles. Their utopian dreams were unrealized of course, and their ideas of progress, of human irrationality as a passing aberration, of the perfectibility of man, in the end became untenable.
Still, faith in reason cannot be repressed, and contemporary constructive artistes, prominent among whom is Michael Kidner, embrace a rational vision (even though Kidner has introduced indeterminacy and chance into his work, to take irrationality into account). Contemporary constructive artists are more circumspect about social claims, but they continue to look for inspiration to mathematics and science. They also look to the classicizing art of the past, unlike their predecessors who rejected the past. Indeed, the pioneers of constructive art considered their abstract art as a rupture with history. From the vantage point of the present, however, it appears that constructive art of the entire twentieth century has been a continuation of the classical tradition in Western art.
Classical artists have always valued intelligibility and coherence and thus have favoured clearly articulated form and colour. Modernist classicism stands opposed to modernist romanticism, notably Expressionism and Surrealism in all of its figurative and abstract manifestations. The modernist romantic artist turns in on his or her creative action, expressing his or her self, as it were. The classical artist formulates a problem external to self to be investigated and resolved and articulated as clearly as possible. But this problem solving is not without is romantic side, at least for Kidner. What he decides to investigate objectively is generated by a profound sense of wonder, intuition and feeling. He then proceeds an a rational and conscious manner but with passionate devotion, more than that, with a rage for order. And that passion must be conveyed to the viewer. As he has remarked: "Unless you read a painting as a felling then you don't get anything at all."(1)
To state it in another way, the pioneers of the constructive movements put their art in the service of universal absolutes, whether utopian or spiritual. Mondrian, for example, believed that his design was the consummate symbol of nature as well as the guide to a future utopia in which perfect men and woman would come into being and live in perfect harmony. Kidner has no such illusions or pretensions. He does rely on mathematics and science, because he prizes the truths they reveal, but these truths are only partial, and he chooses which to investigate on the basis of irrational promptings in the here and now of his being. Kidner yearns as avidly as Mondrian did for an absolute design, but he can only conceive of his in personal and temporal terms.
Kidner began painting full-time in 1953, when he was 36 years of age. Before then, he had attended Cambridge University, taking an Honors degree in History and Anthropology in 1939, and Ohio State University for a year, where he studied landscape architecture. In 1941, he joined the Canadian army and served until 1946. After the end of World War II, he taught for several years at a prep school in Scotland and during holidays, painted on his own in the south of France and Northamptonshire. From 1951 to 1952, he worked as a theatrical designer for repertory companies in Bromley and Barnstaple. It was only after these varied experiences that Kidner committed himself to painting as a calling. He had met André Lhote in the south of France and had enrolled in a number of his classes. Impressed by his exposition of Cubism, Kidner decided to continue his study with Lhote and travelled to Paris in 1953. He stayed on in Paris until 1955 when he moved to North Devon. There he painted abstract landscapes, akin to those of the St. Ives School. This led him to visit St. Ives in 1956 and stay for five or six months. Then, moving to London, Kidner encountered the new American painting in a show at the Tate Gallery, and came under the influence of Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and, somewhat later, Mark Rothko.
Kidner came to believe that colour in itself could be "subject matter," and that idea was key in his subsequent development.(2) With Rothko's colour-field abstractions in mind, he conceived of colour as purely visual or optical-as "pure sensation;" as he said.(3) The high-keyed colours in paintings such as Moving Green , 1959, seem to hover in front of the canvas, like relieves composed of coloured atmosphere. These improvisational chromatic abstractions are beautiful in the best sense of that old-fashioned word. In them, Kidner was revealed as a masterful colourist. But this more "scientific" side asserted itself. He became increasingly fascinated by the optics of colour, and this prompted him to investigate opticality -perception itself- and he was arguably the first English artist to do so.
As Kidner recalls, while painting his chromatic abstractions he discovered that "the brightest image is produced by an after-image on the retina of the eye,"(4) and he tried to create this effect. For example, in Moving Green , as the eye scans from the green area to the red field, a bright red spot appears in the field. It is an afterimage but seems as if it might have been painted. Kinder found that he could create afterimages more directly by juxtaposing aggressive and reticent colours, as inTuscany Church, 1961. But these geometric abstractions composed of rectangles and circles of different sizes still did not deal with optical activity directly enough for Kidner. He then began to repeat nearly identical bands of colour, two to each picture, "in the belief that they would build up a sensation of colour areas rather than a sharply defined image."(5) And he succeeded in producing an optical shimmer one shape fading into the other, as in Orange to Violet , 1961. While working on this series, Kidner recognized that optical activity is muffled by brushy painting and varied shapes, and by all forms of representation, even signs and symbols. He also discovered that the most intense optical effects are created by flat patterns whose edges are hard and that are all-over and uniform or only slightly varied.(6)
By 1963, working in two colours had come to seem too limited to Kidner. He wanted to introduce a third colour, but could not figure out how without that decision seeming arbitrary. Then in the spring of that year, he read an article on moiré in the Scientific American , and found the solution. Moirè effects were first noticed in Japanese silks; when the fabric is folded it generates new, purely optical patterns and colours that separate from and hover in front of the actual patterns and colours of the material. In pictures such as orange, blue and Green, 1964, kinder crossed two colour bands with a third at a slight angle, so that "the effect it produces is an entirely new pattern."(7) Moirè configurations could create an "optical `dazzle` more intense than in any previous modernist work,"(8) so intense that it could be hurtful to look at, and much of optical art was. Kidner however was not interested in pain but in the lyrical expression of his imagery.
Optical art appealed to Kidner and other artists of the sixties because it involved an investigation of the dynamics of seeing, of "the incompletely explored region between the cornea and the brain"(9) And it made spectators aware of these visual dynamics. Kidner viewed his enterprise as the latest stage in a long scientific tradition in art. As he wrote in 1964: "Optics presents the challenge that was once offered by perspective."(10) And optical art also offered one solution to an age-old problem in painting: how to make a static image seem to move.
The exploration of vision by optical artists was not merely physiological, despite the assertions of hostile critics. It was also psychological and social. The social side of optical art was greatly valued by Kidner. He believed that art could reveal vital truths about man and nature, and he wanted his work to communicate them. He found that his optical art did considerably more than his earlier colour field painting had. Viewers, while experiencing optical activity generated by the moiré patterns, could identify them, and despite the non -objective subject matter, fathom his intention and understand what he had in mind. Viewers might also sense that optical art was justifiable as an idealistic belief in the value of science and reason, and in an underlying order in nature- an awareness that had a Moral dimension. In human terms, a rational art suggest that problems can be identified and solved and that the conditions of life can be improved. And at the same time, viewers could respond emotionally to the elegance of Kidner`s works and their aesthetic quality.
One would suppose that the attempt by optical artists to communicate would have been received sympathetically. The response in European art circles was positive but not in America. In the New York art world, Op Artists, as they were commonly labelled, were accused of trying to entertain and thus pander to the general public. For example, Thomas B. Hess, the powerful executive editor of Art News , condemned the " social orientation" of Op Art. This, he maintained, betrayed high art, which was supposed to be " difficult, serious, remote, aristocratic (and) keeps its distance from the spectator." In contrast: "The dialogue of Op is with... the audience," It appeals to those "who always have felt that the function of Art is to teach, or at least divert, the People."(11) Kidner had no such elitist qualms, but the New York art world on the whole agreed with Hess. Op Art came into vogue in 1965, its high point a major international survey, titled The Responsive Eye , organized by William Seitz at The Museum of Modern Art, in which Kidner was included. But the show was so vociferously denigrated by most art professionals that Op Art was relegated to oblivion in New York.
Kidner`s move into optical art coincided with the emergence of two groups of English avant-garde abstract artists: the Situation painters who mounted their first show in 1960, and the London Constructionists, who had joined together in the early fifties but achieved their greatest visibility in 1960 in two shows, one at London `s South Bank arranged in conjunction with the Sixth Congress of the International Union of Architects, and the other, titled Construction England 1950-1960 at the Drian Gallery. Both groups reacted against Expressionist abstraction, which had dominated avant-garde art since the end of World War II (but had begun to wane): Tachism in France; Action Painting in New York; and, closer to home, the romantic nature abstraction of the St. Ives School. The Situation and Constructionist artists considered St. Ives painterly painting the " Established" modernist style and rejected it as provincial.
The Situation painters, the better know of whom were Gillian Ayres, Bernard Cohen, Robyn Denny, John Hoyland, William Turnbull, and Marc Vaux, hoped to join the international mainstream of vanguard art, which, as they saw it, was the colour-field tendency in American Abstract Expressionism, exemplified by the abstractions of Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still, and Mark Rothko. What stimulated the Situation artists most in Abstract Expressionism was the "big" picture, meant to be exhibited not as a mural but in a small room. In brief, their aim was to paint "pictures whose function was to create a more dynamic relationship between the painting and its environment and its audience."(12) They conceived of a painting as a total environment or as the controlling component of an environment. In fact, the Situation painters had banded together in the first place because their works were so large. London galleries were reluctant to exhibit outsized canvases, particularly by little-know artists, and the artists thought that as a group they would have a better chance of getting a show. One of the stipulations in the Situation shows was that no picture be less than thirty square feet in size.
Like Newman, Still, and Rothko, most of the Situation artists panted simple shapes or areas of colour. Their intention, according to the 1960 catalogue was to create "a kind of stable/ unstable surface... so that there is rarely, if ever, a moment when the spectator can satisfy himself that he has optically located all of the forms in a final spatial order"(13) The emphasis was on perception, on the "perceptual instability" of colour, unlike the Americans who were far more interested in colour as an open, expansive field, with the emphasis on openness and expansiveness.
Like the Situation painters, Kidner insisted on abstraction and was curios about how colour is perceived, and his paintings, such as Moving Green , were closer to theirs than to any other English paintings at the time. But his concerns had become more scientific. Moreover, the "big" picture as environment was of no particular interest to hi, although he did- and continues to- execute large-scale works.
The London Constructionists were led by Victor Pasmore and Kenneth and Mary Martin and included Anthony Hill, John Ernest, and Gillian Wise. They all had been strongly influenced by the American artist and theoretician, Charles Biederman, whose book, titled Art as the Evolution of Visual Knowledge , had been published in 1948. Biederman proselytized for design based on the right angle and the constructed relief, which he considered to be the medium most appropriate constructive art. The London Constructionists limited their composition to the right angle, but in other respects, it was intuitive, like that of Mondrian.(14) Kidner knew although little else of Constructionists reliefs. However, while he was taken with their use of geometry, his own interest had already turned to the systematic investigation of optics, a concern in constructive art not of English group. Kidner was not attracted by the Constructionists exclusive use of rectangles. Nor did he make a special claim for the constructed relief, although he has since built a considerable number of reliefs himself. However, several years later, Kidner would feel a close kinship with the more systemic of the Constructionist, notably Mary and Kenneth Martin; after Mary died in 1969, Kenneth became a frequent visitor at the Kidner home and a close friend. While painting his optical pictures based on moiré patterns, such as Orange, Blue and Green, Kidner discovered that when two horizontal colour bands were crossed with a third a wave-like vertical secondary image hovers into view. That image cast a kind of spell on him and he began to work directly with waves-like forms. Indeed, the wave became his form, and wave theory a passion. Wave patterns turned out to yield even more interesting optical effect than straight lines, because as he said." A wave has a measurable length from crest to crest which means that waves can be put in and out of phase in a manner that straight lines cannot,"(15) as in Blue, Green and White Wave , 1964.
In 1965, Kidner began to think in new ways other than optical about his wave images. He grew interested in the forms his patterns were generating and how to more clearly articulate these forms. In one body of work, an example of which is Sussex , 1967, he distinguished form from color by systematically applying three colors in rotation to four forms, so that no form could be identified by a particular color, or rather each form would become a discrete color-form. He also shaped the canvas so that the waves would relate more to the framing edge, for example, by turning the waves into repetitive modular forms and cutting the picture at the other edges of the serial image, emphasizing both the shape of the picture and the shapes in it, as in Wave Multiple, 1965.
Conceiving color as from prompted Kidner to turn from painting to sculpture. In 1969, he made a columnar sculpture of a wave. He recalled: "When I first started to make a column...I had in mind a solid block of colour. Very soon however the shape became more interesting to me than the colour."(16) Kidner elaborated: " The column had two profiles, the first contained a single curve and the second a curve and a half. My interest... lay in the fact that it brought two wave surfaces into relation with each other and I found it difficult to imagine how one view would change into the other in real space."(17) That investigation was Kidner`s motivation, but for viewers, the free-standing column took on other associations. As Peter Brades observed, it "contains the great emotive S-curve of sculpture, of madonnas and dancing Shivas and crucified Christs."(18) And it also had monumental associations, calling to mind Trajan`s Column or Bernini`s Baldacchino.
At the time he was making the column, Kidner was reading Tobias Dantzig`s Number, The Language of Science, a book that was revelation, almost in the religious sense of that word.(19) Dantzig`s thesis, as Kidner interpreted it, was that all people have a sense of number-like language. And this language of number was used to describe reality. Dantzig traced the way that different ages used number in different ways, all the while adding to the body of number, an empire of mathematics." Then, in the modern era, a new mathematics challenged the old, and " the beautiful empire collapsed." Kidner was inspired by the thought that mathematics could reality and satisfy an emotional need that people have for order. He turned his attention from research in optics to the study of number as he key to "the nature of order" and "the structure of reality."(20) Although he could not have predicted it, Kidner `s career followed the course of Dantzig's book-from construction to de-construction.
Kidner does not recall being directly influenced by reading Dantzig, but is not surprising that he should translate the column into a system of numbers, colour coding the system , and systematically recording these measurements in two dimensions, in this way yielding a group of paintings. A number were exhibited along with the sculpture they were based on. Brades describes the process in Column in Front of Its Own Image, 1971:
The painting shows the faces and, more importantly, the curves between the faces as the column is rotated clockwise. Three of the four faces are shown, with the vertical stripes recording six turns of 15° from face to face, reading the canvas from left to right. The colours are coded from the spectrum, with red representing the curve on the edge nearest the spectator and blue the farthest, the valleys.(21)
Other variants of columns paired with pictures include Round Columns A and B and 3 Working Drawings of Round Column, 1984.
Kidner was not alone in adopting a systemic approach. Other English artists, who came to be called the Systems group, among them Malcolm Hughes, Peter Lowe, David Saunders, Jean Spencer, and Jeffrey Steele, also engaged in a rational practice and in 1969 began to meet together to discuss shared ideas. They were agreed, as Michael Parsons, a composer whose music was the aural counterpart of system art, wrote, that their work should be
based on the choice of a limited set of elements and the use of consistent principles to determine how these elements are combined. Single straight lines, for example, may follow numerical rules which determine their length, position and direction; the rules are not hidden from view but are made clearly evident in the work itself. There is an interest in working in series, in which a network of relationships is perceptibly transformed from one work to another. Rational procedures are seen not as a means of complete control, but as a method of inquire: within a defined field, further relationships can be discovered.(22)
In a catalogue introduction to a group show titled Rational Practice , which included Kidner, Norbert Lynton wrote that "the decision to investigate a particular set of relationships in preference to others must itself be primarily instinctive, but the intellect is...given a decisive role." On the whole, Systems artists accepted " the Platonic view that ascribed to mathematics an essential beauty echoing the grand harmonies of the cosmos."(23)
In their meetings the Systems artists discussed, among other issues, Max Bill`s equation of constructive with mathematical; the systemic colour theories of Richard Paul Lhose, and the relationship of the structure of language to the visual arts. They also speculated about the need to create an abstract art that was not hermetic in that it provided the viewer with access to the painting as figurative imagery did, and whether numerical subject matter could fulfil this requirement. The artists also began to exhibit together, taking part in 1969 in a show, titled Systeemi , organized by Jeffrey and Arya Steele in Helsinki. In 1971, twelve artists, including John Ernest and Gillian Wise who had been London Constructionists, exhibited together in a show titled Matrix at the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol, and in the following year, in Systems at the Whitechapel Gallery in London.
After he built the column and translated it systemically into painting, Kidner began to imagine the space outside of the solid sculpture and to attempt to describe that space pictorially. This prompted him in 1973 to crisscross wav lines to produce grids or lattices. His interest was in the " spaces between the lines."(24) The wavy grids could be drawn in phase so that the spaces were identical, and they could also be put out of phase so that the spaces did not repeat, yielding a confounding possessed" an infinite capacity to expand and replicate," denying any sort of closure. As Kidner observed: "The endless number of linear intersections."(25) In this body of work, he began an on going exploration of illimitable space.
The progression from "order" to "disorder," from construction to de-construction, and from closure to openness is clear in Systemic Breakdown , 1983, and in Requiem, 1982-83. In Requiem, a multi-panel work, Kidner presented a lattice of waves in the first section, which he progressively enlarged in the remaining ones as if to infinity. The underlying concept as revealed in panel 1 is logical and clear. But the magnified image in panel 4 is utterly ambiguous, unpredictable, and mysterious. Focusing on the in phase networks, Mel Gooding wrote: "What begins in cerebration...ends in celebration of regularities and rhythms-the continuities that invisibly accompany the turbulence of our physical and psychic experience."(26) But in his out-of-phase grids, Kidner celebrated irregularities and dissonances. There was always an element of de-construction in Kidner `s work, exemplified as early as 1959 by the elusive afterimages of the chromatic abstractions and also by the oscillating colors in the optical paintings of the early sixties, but it became pronounces in the wave-lattice pictures, and it would grow even more marked in future works. Indeed, the dialectic between clarity and ambiguity, and between containment and boundlessness has become central. Thus, the wave-lattices constitute a radical leap in Kidner`s body of work, and it is for his reason that this show at the Center of International Contemporary Arts begins with them.
The wave lattices did not satisfy the need for deconstruction that Kidner felt so urgently. He had to introduce indeterminacy, instability, change, and randomness more directly into his work, because they had assumed new significance in thinking about contemporary reality. In fact, the most advanced development in science and mathematics was chaos theory. Kidner did not begin to study the new theory until later, in 1988, but it was in the air, as it were. Kidner was not alone in his conviction that constructivist art needed no take into account forces working against order as well as for order. Kenneth Martin had experimented with chance and order in his paintings and so had George Rickey in his kinetic constructions. (27) In 1976, Kidner discovered that working with elastic cloths provided fresh possibilities for introducing indeterminacy and change into his art. Attaching a woven elastic cloth onto a movable wooden frame, he stretched and distorted geometric figures to arrive at unexpected images, both mentally stimulating and visually satisfying. Exemplifying this group of works is Extended Square subdivided into an eighty-one unit checkerboard. Then he attached the elastic to a sliding frame and moving the frame and clamping it at predetermined intervals, he plotted the increasingly misshapen square at every successive interval. As Brades remarked:
The final composite records the whole sequence in what has become a kind of self-commentary by the square, supervised by the artist. He has been the instigator, not the dictator, promoting the revaluation of an unexpected resource in a basic everyday shape .(28)
In stretching and distorting the square (and other geometric figures), Kidner treated "the distance between two points as a sliding scale-like the elastic...A sliding scale...presented continuity... continuous growth or movement away from a fixed starting point."(29) This sense of growth, of fluidity, introduced a sense of time, a temporal dimension in visual art, which would increasingly occupy Kidner. So would the unpredictability of the images. Manipulating the elastic yielded configurations whose appearance he could not foresee; they were the "end product... of a working process." (30)Kidner has increasingly welcomed the element of surprise. Much as he still values rational development, he seems more interested in what his preconceptions do not reveal - in the unknown.
In the physical manipulation of the elastic, Kidner used his own psychosomatic action to alter an impersonal mathematical figure, personalizing and humanizing it. The expansion and contraction of the elastic suggested a number of metaphors to Kidner, physical, psychological, social, and metaphysical. As he wrote recently:" Elastic expresses tension... The tension that I feel in my Body. The tension that exists in society. The tension that suspends the universe between the big bang and the force of gravity." It is noteworthy that cosmologists have likened space to a rubber sheet. Kidner concluded:" As the elastic loses its elasticity I view the change with interest," alluding to his need to express a sense of passing time and "of the relativity and uncertainty of values and the crumbling nature of certainties."(32)
In the middle of part of Extended Square, Kidner abstracted alternate bands from the original square and juxtaposed them with their stretched counterparts, reducing the composite to the minimum information needed to comprehend it, that is, the distillation of the image was estheticized because Kidner had found the perfect edge-the visual equivalent of le mot just between the conceptual and the visual. The abstracted image in the middle panel was silkscreened on a field of gray paint.
In the right-hand panel of the work, Kidner converted the printed image into a perspex relief, further estheticizing it, but equally important, emphasizing the order he discovered within his largely random method, making a tangible object of it. Kidner's practice parallels that of scientists who search for principles of order in seemingly chaotic natural phenomena, such as clouds and smoke.
Each of the three parts of Extended Square is stimulating in itself, but it is as a whole that the work is most impressive, in its interaction of order and chance and change; the stable and unstable; the static and the active; process and finished product; the transparent and the opaque; and two-dimensional drawing in pencil on the elastic and in silkscreen, and the wood frame and perspex reliefs, and their shadows. Thus, Kidner held on to traditional constructive premises, while deflecting them, opening up a new area for future development, initiating what Stephan Bann termed " a considerable expansion in the realm of constructive art."(33)
In 1987, Kidner came up against the limitations of his elastic cloths. They would only stretch in one direction and there was a limit to their size. To overcome there limitations, Kidner switched from cloth to suspender-elastic strips. In Dexion Net, he first began to weave the elastic bands into an open orthogonal network, which he suspended from an adjustable metal frame that moved not only laterally but in and out. This created greater flexibility in form and enable Kidner to project the work in three dimensions, turning it into a free-standing construction in the round. As Kidner manipulated the frame, each change warped the surface so as to yield a different sculptural form with a different kind of tension. The topological problems fascinated Kidner: what did it take to generate the tensions that coursed through the lattice-like surface? Wanting more complicated drawing, in the second stage of Dexion Net Kidner enmeshed a flexible fiberglass rod, bent into a circle, into the rectangular net of straps. He now could vary the configurations not only by manipulating the frame, but also by tightening and loosening the rod.
In the same year the he constructed Dexion Net , Kidner hooked together a ten-footed high rope net which he hung from a metal frame attached to the wall in his studio. He did not know why he had made it, but he knew he had to use it. It hung there for a year. The he decided to introduce another kind of drawing by adding paper discs arranged in a square within the net, but that did not effect the degree of transformation that he desired. Then in desperation, he began to unhook the ropes, as a result changing the configuration of the discs into a new design that he could not have predict. When the net was completely released, it looked like chaos itself. In a flash of recognition, he realized that he had created a new variant of his order and change series, and that what seemed to be chaos had its own kind of order, and order that excited him greatly. At the time, Kidner was reading with avid interest James Gleick's book titled Chaos: Making A New Science(34) ; it did not influence his work directly, but he recognized a relationship, and that bolstered him.
As he worked on the elastic lattice pieces, Kidner was faced with the confinement and rigidity of the metal frame. He then recalled a remark by the Polish pioneer of Constructivism, Wladyslaw Strzeminski, that the picture limits circumscribed the artist's imagination, and that troubled Kidner, because such limits seemed so artificial. In 1988, imagination and his freedom, his dream of freedom, of boundless and continuous spacem the space of the cosmos, and cosmologists believe that space can stretch without limit. He had to break through the frame, get rid of it, and the fiberglass rods provided the way.(34) He began a piece by coupling a white fiberglass rod with a black elastic strip, stretching out the elastic and connecting it to the rod at a number of points so that its contraction and expansion caused the rod to bend into waves-like curves. in Five Chords, 1989, for example, the elastic bent the rod into five curves. The he connected the ends of the rod, twisting in 180 degrees in order to maintain the continuous wave. The resulting configuration - the elastic strip formed into a pentagon and the curving rod twisted around it, brought to life by tension - could not have been predicted by Kidner, and that enticed him to investigate further. He then introduced more curves, complicating and convoluting the configurations, as in Seven Chords and Nine Chords, both of 1990.
For Kidner, the balance of opposing tensions produced by his work evokes not only human experience but fundamental natural forces, gravity and magnetism, for instance. Furthermore, the fiberglass rods and elastic straps enable him todescribe the topology of real space out there, to create a vision of the cosmos truer than in his earlier work, and to feel space both somatically and psychologically. The prevailing effect of these works of Kidner's is the equilibrium of tensions. This state of order, as he views it, is a metaphor for harmony in life, a condition to be valued both in the private and public spheres.
But there is another, aesthetic, dimension to the recent reliefs and sculptures, in the quality of drawing in rod and elastic, drawings writ large, and in three dimension, and unbounded; and in the exquisite balance of black and white, of fiberglass and elastic, of the tangible materials and the spaces they create. Kidner's work exemplify what Mondrian once termed "the beauty of construction."
Kidner recognizes that his works have aesthetics quality or beauty, although he does not begin them with any preconceptions of what is beautiful but instead formulates a proposition of mathematical or scientific nature and then examines it objectively. His works turn out to be beautiful, in part because of the elegance with which he solves his problems and of the intuitive moves that he cannot help making.
Subjective decisions are unavoidable in any art, even the most systemic art based on mathematical formulas. The concept in a systemic work may seem objective, but it has to be chosen by an artist and the choice of one formula rather than another is primarily subjective, depending on whether the artist likes it or finds it interesting or moving. To put it directly, as its core, rationally based art is intuitive, at its best, inspired. Moreover, when an artist transforms a concept into an object, whether painting or sculpture, he or she makes decisions concerning medium, size, scale, surfacing, etc., that are intuitive, that cannot help being so, even if the development that the concept imposes and its execution is primarily rational, even mechanical. These decisions are like the inflections of an artist's voice; they contribute the force of an individual artistic personality, its intensity and vitality to the artist's statement. They enable viewers to experience it with more than just the intellect. Decisions of sensibility also imbue a work with its quality. (There is nor more guarantee of quality in a work that proposes an improvisational approach than one which proposes a systematic approach.) Works can be both visually or aesthetically and conceptually arresting.(36) And Kidner's are. Indeed, the images are "presented with deliberate clarity," as Brades observed, but they also "achieved a mysterious beauty that at first glances defies analysis."(37) And prolonged viewing, they remain beautiful.