Over then years ago, in his statement for the 'Systems' exhibition, Michael Kidner wrote: 'A painter may think of himself as creating order, as discovering order, or as observing order.' These three possible variants in the artist's relationship to his work also imply quite different attitudes on the part of the spectator. He can respond to the work by participating in the mythology of the creative act, by conniving at the implication that is this creator, and this creator alone, who was capable of engendering it. Or he can accept the artist as having a privileged, quasi-scientific role in directing our attention to a particular aspect of the world, and concentrating our focus upon it as with a microscope. These are the well-known justifications for what could loosely be called an Expressionist and a Realist aesthetic. But what of the third possibility - 'observing order'? Relatively few historical precedents exist for this type of relationship which takes its distance equally from the personal mythology and the scientific project. But its slogan might well be Cezanne's statement: 'The artist is simply parallel to nature.'
Michael Kidner's discreet and absorbing show at the Air Gallery puts one in mind of these distinctions. The work is individual without being idiosyncratic. It exhibits a remarkable consistency and continuity of development since that period in the early 1960's when Kidner was misrecognised as an 'Op'artist. It sets up systems of measurement, and then progressively modifies those systems, in a way that affords us genuinely new insight into the possibilities of repetitive form. But, dominant over the individual effect and the experimental project, is the sense that the artist is committed to a special kind of 'parallel' activity. Kidner writes about this type of work that it is 'a speculation about space, not only objective space but the space I feel operates around me....' The word 'speculation' is an exact one in the circumstances, since it suggests an open, disinterested exploration whose goals do not have to be precisely defined. The perception of space as not merely 'objective', but also (so to speak) environmental, is again exactly relevant to the effect made by Kidner's work. We do not view it with a commanding eye, constructing a rational, geometric space. Instead we are both outside the work and inside it, observing it and at the same time caught in the oscillating patterns of its linear emphases.
The greatest problem for an art on this type is the problem of format. How can the 'speculation about space' be pinned down? Kidner has answered this question with considerable ingenuity. Finely judged prints record both the systematic distortion of a 'Square and Circle' figure and the framing apparatus which has enabled him to achieve this distortion in the first place. This displacement of the wooden apparatus into its spectral image is extremely effective, and not so unsettling as when Kidner actually presents his 'Bed of Procrustes' as part of the finished work. The large assemblage of panels, 'Formation and Transformation' (1982) achieves though silk-screening on perspex a suitable material equivalent to the fluid and intricate wave pattern of the drawing. 'Requiem' (1982/83), a set of five perspex panels arranged sequentially, exploits the resources of a simple colour range in order to intensify and solemnise the progressive developments of form. In all these examples, there is the sense of an original and appropriate choice of format, which does not confine the speculation but allows it to have free rein. We should be grateful for the opportunity to participate in it.