As large crowds of people regularly visit collections and exhibitions of historic art at the great museums and buy numerous books and posters, it is worth remembering how much we miss by not knowing much about the iconography of past periods. What we see is not necessarily what the artist or a contemporary spectator saw, let alone what experience was taken away. People will readily shy away from what is difficult. There is a similar kind of laziness in the way some present-day art is treated, because it looks immediately difficult. And in a way it is, for the artist as much as the spectator; a good deal of our art has been based in or inspired by ideas from modern science which are not readily amenable to iconography in the form of clarity and relevance and understandability, and an association with the uniqueness of the modern world.
In the sense, one has to separate somewhat the American us of the word constructivism from the European. The former tends to a wider definition, sometimes including any heavily assembled or geometric piece. In Europe there persists some of the original revolutionary force of an art destined to connect movements in science with progress in society, to inform and alert society about what is important and distinctive in modern life, to make a social engagement through art. In general, this is a more theoretical position. So, constructivism is by now a rather portmanteau term, covering many artists and many aims.
Nevertheless, it remains useful. It is useful to some people pejoratively to refer to cold unapproachable art; it is useful to some stylistically to refer to most modern architecture and design to some extent; and it is useful because its ambition remains valid - the attempt to find a place in the modern world, and display that attempt for public understanding. One of the liveliest strains of constructivism has been in England over the last twenty-odd years in systems and series art, and one of its most respected practitioners is Michael Kidner, who has recently had an exhibition at the AIR Gallery. By looking at Michael Kidner's career we not only get the work of an interesting artist but may also judge the seriousness and continued importance of this way of thinking. Kidner's work is very much a public, aesthetic investigation of how to live now, given the absence of God and a notion of space vaster and more accommodating than ever before - such is the essence of the modern world.
Kidner has devoted his time fully to painting since 1951. He studied initially in France and worked for a while in St. Ives. He found himself, in the late fifties, strongly influenced by the Abstract Expressionists and regarded colour in a very subjective, Rothko-like manner (though more brightly than Rothko). But such much expressiveness was, to Kidner, unsupportable and certainly unrepeatable, for the Americans had done it all. In 1959 he exhibited 'soft' rectangles, and striped paintings of contemporary colours; this was at St. Hilda's, Oxford, his first one-man show. Then, partly stimulated by a winter school in Leeds under Harry Thubron in 1960, Kidner began to see more precisely how colour could have objectivity and be in itself a legitimate problem, something to bite on, and he produced a number of after-image paintings. The point of these was to find a purpose for colour, in terms of shape, to allow colour relationships to determine shape rather than the other way round, which he saw as figuration. However the shapes themselves soon became dominant, and gave the paintings the air of puzzles to be solved but nothing more.
A return to the basic striped paintings offered a partial way of this trap, for the repetition of the stripes helped to diminish the identity of shapes used in the earlier after-image paintings. Logically, though, the stripe was a vehicle for two colour only. The next problem was to find a means or shape that would require a third colour. Such a step would greatly increase the range of satisfy the three colour. The results (as in the 1963 John Moore's prizewinner) involved shapes again, not stripes.
At the same very busy time, Michael Kidner was working on a 'subprogramme' of painting onto relief surfaces. They were usually wavy or corrugated and the process had to do with the continued working-out of Rothko. He attempted literally to float colour, with the intention that the colour seen was not the actual colour but its reflection, representing real, tangible depth, not the illusionistic depth of the field paintings. The changes over a relief surface sometimes created a moiré effect, and as so often in Kidner's career this was the unforeseen consequence seized on as the fruit of his labour and the springboard for development. It illustrated Kidner's steady and persistent artistic progression. If the world of the Abstract Expressionists had been to private for Kidner to enter, at least it released in him the idea that a picture need not be complete of prefigured before being realised - 'it could be the end product, however surprising, of a working process,' he stated. The process was to be apprehended through our perceptual mechanism and was, for Kidner, a paradigm of how the world we inhabit is also in effect an end product.
The moiré itself held a key, espacially when Kidner thought of it as an interference pattern, as waves out of phase. When he introduced a fourth colour things got almost too complicated; all the while Kidner wanted to equalise colour and shape, and this usually meant holding strong shape back. To get shape down he needed a regulating system between it and colour. The first systems were all rotational ones, such as Three Sets of Primaries, shown at Axiom in 1967. But before this investigation could go far, Michael Kidner took the post of Artist in Residence at the American University, Washington DC, which turned out to be a happy but disorienting time. The overwhelming size and spaciousness of America was not conducive to tight systematic thinking. Besides, Kidner was suddenly able to use acrylic of better quality then he had been used to, and he also worked on cotton duck, not linen, for the first time, which absorbs more and encouraged experiments in stain painting, though not many were finished.
Returning to England and systems in 1969 was not an easy transition. To get moving, Kidner was able to recall a particular piece he had seen in a Washington gallery which had an intriguing surface with gold sunk in, giving great depth. He began to experiment with the idea of a colour 'solid', and the attempt to relate colour to a highly distinct column-shape produced a fascinating collection of constructions and paintings over the next three years. The column, so tantalizingly twisted, could be painted as though it was rolled out, like a cartouche, or surveyed, and was often displayed in front of the painting, the clearer to explain the process. Kidner was aware of the work being undertaken at John Hopkins University on visual stimuli and had it in mind when considering how the eye would interpret the column shape and the account of it in two dimensions. By the time of the 1972 Whitechapel System Exhibition, Michel Kidner had largely finished with the column, for it was becoming a kind of surrogate landscape, threatening to dissolve into a loose, sentimental image, quite the opposite of what he wanted.
He was an active member of the System group, which included Jean Spencer, Malcolm Hughes, Jeffrey Steele, Peter Lowe and David Sanders. He became stuck on the question of whether his chief interest was perceptual or conceptual- if conceptual, as was the tenor of the group, the column paintings were again not pure enough. To be preoccupied with the perception meant looking for ways to record information, rather than where information came from. The ideas discussed in the Systems group clarified the notion that painting could look to new sources such as mathematics and language for its matter. The group was strongly influenced by the theoretical positions of continental artists, such as Max Bill and Richard Lohse, and by writers like Derrida and Levi-Strauss, and discussed ways their work could be extended. Kidner had had more American exposure than mist of the other system artists and to an extent resisted the theoretical drift of the group until, in the idea of number, he found something that united perceptual and conceptual themes, for number equalled measurement.
Measurement offered new terms for the notion of space. The permutations that had dogged his previous work as puzzles to be solved were now capable of being resolved by becoming part of something bigger, something that could be logically unresolved and could link perception to metaphor and so to social purpose. Whereas Kidner's earlier systems had seemed to him increasingly closed and limited, always able to offer some sort of result, the introduction of infinity which came with number and measurement held out the possibility of a very active metaphor for the space each of us occupies physically and psychologically. From this point, the challenge Michael Kidner faced could be summarised: how is an artistic connection to be made between the decision to base a piece of work on a mathematical procedure and an end result which is visually stimulating and able to be read and understood, not merely gazed at?
To see how Kidner has responded to this over the last ten or twelve years we should look at his output over those years a little more deeply. They are years marked by increased attention being paid to his work by continental museums and galleries, by increased teaching commitments here and abroad, by a new interest in printmaking and most pertinently through two new and original methods, grids and distortions. Both involved the use of simple figures and operations. This is for the sake of explicability and to help universalise the experience. To begin with, grids, the most neutral and vacuous of things, are found to have life and serious purpose without the necessity of imposition. Grids of wavy lines lent themselves immediately to systematic presentation. The patterns produced interesting shapes of a planar rather than a linear kind, covering the imperceptible changes from the horizontal to the vertical. Kidner discovered four families of shapes possible in the grids, and made quite a number of paintings describing more dramatically in colours and tones various parts of a grid, usually without knowing in advance what he would get.
The idea of number enabled Kidner to phase the waves, so the grid at first looked almost chaotic. The infinity of numerable stages between two positions made it possible to code paintings as he had done, assigning colours to different parts. With the grid based on an irrational proportion of wavelength different shapes could be produced indefinitely. University College's plotting computer was used by a series of drawing like this, but it revealed a flaw in the practical side of the system. The plotter moved in short straight lines which gave an unconvincing depiction of the fluid movement between points and the changes were brought about so slowly as never to be readily apparent. Both the small scale and the large were uncooperative, and the artist had to simplify things, keeping the waves in phase and just expanding or contracting the grid. That way they could be real. The nine-panel mural, seen at Air Gallery, in fact contains two ideas - a contracting regular grid and a changing wavelength of grid - but it is a large work.
There are certain historical precedents for this type of work, or at least suggestions towards it. In the late 1950s Kenneth Martin and Victor Pasmore were looking into time and movement as possible formal notions, and serial art owes a debt to them. The grid lines, as waves, manage to animate sequence and for Kidner are a sort of multi-perspective. He has been quoted as wanting to occupy this multi-perspective space; he is deliberately aware too, in saying this, of the cultural implications perspective had five hundred years ago, and could potentially have in a multi-perspectival world view.
In a catalogue statement in 1974, Kidner talked quite poignantly about the function of the artist and how he has to challenge familiar perceptual habits that lead us so frequently to see only what we already expect. Art for him is a matter of both confirmation and discovery; as the cubists for instance, or Mondrian have allowed us to look back at past painting with a new layer of questions, so Kidner would like to help us look at the world around us with additional information and get beneath its appearance. Kidner (who was born in 1979) recalls how his early visual training took place in a world of self-explanatory forms - aircraft with wires and propellors, ships with funnels. As a culture we have gradually eliminated even a glimpse of the person involved. He finds this isolation worrying. In seeking to simplify the problems of the grid and concentrate on the elastic values of contraction and expansion, Kidner found a way to become directly involved and so remain as it were in sight. He used elastic sloth. Its materiality also gives a distinct presence and it evokes several traditional qualities in painting - texture and shade and so on. Kidner built his own computer out of elastic cloth, so he could be a part of it.
He has constructed several of these strange devices. Most simply, one consists of a plywood backing board, usually a rectangle a couple of feet square, onto which is laid a sheet of white semi-transparent elastic cloth which is clamped along two opposite edges. A simple image is drawn on the cloth and one of the side is moved and clamped down again, stretching the elastic and distorting the image, which may then be transferred onto tracing paper. The process is repeated with each move of the side made on a regular basis until the original image, a square, say, is virtually inverted and its character changed, perhaps made dynamic where once it was static. In more complex versions, Kidner has inserted perspex strips under the cloth to give contours and shadows, or has used mirrors to compound the lines, or has used a curved clamping arm to add a further distortion, or made the composites into relief constructions. Some of these were published as lithographs or photo-etching in the package entitled The Elastic Membrane in 1979 (Circle Press).
Every stage in the process remains described at the conclusion: each stage is a necessary consequence of the one before, conjugated like a verb and presented with deliberate clarity, even when some of the images achieve a mysterious beauty that a first glance defies analysis. As Kidner wrote in one of his notebooks, 'the image associate with rational art, of straight lines and prescribed angles, is dissolved.' On another page of the notebook, however, he raises the problem which is probably ever-present in systematic work, how one separates information from presentation - the computer gives the one and the artist gives the other, but what does he give? The delicacy and immediacy of the elastic has helped overcome this problem. The elastic moves 'imperceptibly from one state to the next', on a truly sliding scale, enabling him to approach the sort of flow between shapes that he has seen Lohse achieve between colours. Thus he could say that while he is not figurative artist, he is a 'descriptive one'.
One of the drawings called Relay or Nine Stretches (1980) is worth examining in detail as an exemplar of Kidner's work. A central square was first drawn on elastic, which was then stretched to the left along the top edge and the distorted shape traced off. This was done four times and the results are drawn out to the left of the central square. At the extreme left the square, by now almost a triangle, had a diagonal and circles were wildly curved. Then following four further stretches, to the right this time with the tension applied along the bottom edge, until finally a bizarre evocation of the original and apparently familiar shapes is discovered. The diagonal has gone from a straight line to a curve in elegant steps, each easily understandable, but significantly it was not introduced until a third of the way through the process adding in its delayed arrival another layer of complexity to the work. The sail-like images are arranged by Kidner to overlap slightly to make them readable in the manner of frieze and to reinforce the sense of flow. His own judgement was involved not only initially but during the process; the idea was no self-fulfilling prophecy nor is the computer an automaton. Its properties vary according to its size and shape and it contributes through its own character very much like a conventional artistic tool would.
In Stretched Square (1979/83) there are five stretches and tracings, with the original square sliced into five bars and reimposed as a control. The result is a pair of interweaving planes that are spread out using the original diagonal centre line as the new horizontal centre line, and the intervals derived from the spacing between the overlaps of bar and curve, spread out just far enough to prevent the crosses touching. The proportion of the image to the length of the paper was judged by eye, with the ends quite near the edges to compress and 'speed up' the features. Finally, the curved lines suggest a perspective not found in the bars. In all there is much of the sweep of calligraphy above a doorway- it is a work mounted high up. It points, with the grid murals, to an architectural application for Kidner's work, for which it seems as naturally suited as Islamic patterns have been.
The systematic artistic procedure is akin to laboratory experimentation in that both are forms of thinking, meditation even. Art has always tried to see over the horizon but always in the past in the expectation of the visible. Kidner is trying to come to terms with what is nowadays invisible- invisible but not ghostly, and susceptible in some degree to iconography.