FORM AND MOTION
György Kepes
György Kepes: FORM AND MOTION. Chicago: Society of Typographic Arts, 1954. First edition. Slim quarto. Thick photo illustrated stapled wrappers. 8 pp. 4 photo illustrations. Ivory wrappers lightly soiled, but a nearly fine copy. Rare.
7 x 11 elegant keepsake produced for The Society of Typograhic Arts to commemorate György Kepes’ lecture at the Institute of Design in Chicago on October 23, 1947. Colophon: “This keepsake for the Society of Typograhic Arts designed by William Stone using Times Roman types on Teton cover and ivory Tintex. Printed via offset lithography at the Sequoia Press, 1954.”
Includes beautiful photo illustrations by Naum Gabo, György Kepes [x2] and Theodore M. Brown.
György Kepes (1906–2001) was a Hungarian-born painter, designer, educator and art theorist. After emigrating to the U.S. in 1937, he taught design at the New Bauhaus (later the School of Design, then Institute of Design, then Illinois Institute of Design or IIT) in Chicago. In 1967, he founded the Center for Advanced Visual Studies at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) where he taught until his retirement in 1974.
György Kepes had become acquainted with the theories of the Bauhaus and Constructivist movements as well as Dadaist expressions while moving in progressive circles in Budapest. He was apparently very impressed with the Dada photomontages of Hannah Höch and Raoul Hausmann. During the late 1920s and early 1930s he changed from photography and photocollage to making films. In the meantime Kepes had become familiar with the work of László Moholy-Nagy and collaborated with him in Berlin and London between 1930-1937. During his stay in London he also made the acquaintance of a science writer, J.J. Crowther, and it was through him that Kepes met some of England’s leading scientists - Joseph Needham, J.D. Bernal, and C.H. Waddington.
When Moholy-Nagy invited him to Chicago in 1937 to head the Light and Color Department of the Institute of Design (also called the New Bauhaus) in order to “form a nucleus for an independent reliable educational center where art, science, technology will be united into a creative program,” Kepes accepted. There he developed light and color workshops in which various forms and techniques were researched on their visual and psychological impact. However, in 1945 he was invited to introduce a series of visual design courses in the School of Architecture and Planning, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge (MIT), something new at the time, and was subsequently offered the position of Professor of Visual Design and started the Center for Advanced Visual Culture (CAVS). His association with MIT would prove to be a long and fruitful one. During the following decades György Kepes put his ideas on paper in a number of books which became widely publicized and gave him wide recognition as educator and theorist.
The Language of Vision (1944) was his first attempt to connect the different languages of the different disciplines of knowledge, taking visual communication as a starting point. In particular the idioms of contemporary media like photography, motion pictures and television functioned in his eyes as a universal language that could be understood internationally. Coming from the Bauhaus and Constructivism, György Kepes was of course highly interested in an integration of the visual arts with the visual idioms of the daily environment, including design and architecture. He was able to develop this ideal vision through the interdisciplinary research groups which germinated at MIT around that time. This development was partly accelerated because of the school’s involvement in war research as a consequence of the United States’ activities in World War II. In 1942, a secret research group came together under the title Radar Laboratory. It was their task to develop a new electromagnetic radar system or anti-ballistic missile system, called Radio Detecting and Ranging. Rad Lab’s success was succeeded by the first interdisciplinary (a new term) laboratory at MIT: the Research Laboratory of Electronics in 1952. Its director was Jerome Wiesner, and one of the participants was Norbert Wiener, who was making a name in the science of cybernetics at that time.
The interdisciplinary nature of these projects triggered Kepes’s interest to research possible relationships between art and science. While there was a growing exchange of ideas amongst a number of science departments, he noticed very little discourse between the humanities and science faculties. But even if many people thought that art and science were unmixable entities, Kepes was convinced that there existed a symbiotic relationship between the two, which would only grow stronger when nourished by each other. For him, technological progress was not in itself negative, but he warned against an uncontrolled utilization of it. Kepes: “The obvious world that we know on gross levels of sight, sound taste and touch, can be connected with the subtle world revealed by our scientific instruments and devices. Seen together, aerial maps of river estuaries and road systems, feathers, fern leaves, branching blood vessels, nerve ganglia, electron micrographs of crystals and the tree-like patterns of electrical discharge-figures are connected, although they are vastly different in place, origin and scale ... Their similarity of form is by no means accidental. As patterns of energy-gathering and energy-distribution, they are similar graphs generated by similar processes.”
When Kepes tried to give an account of the different functions of the visual arts and the sciences, and what might connect them, he kept returning to the idea that nature served as a common base, as a common language for both. Being both ordering devices in that they try to impose a structure upon the human experience, art and science could have a complementary function in restoring the balance in today’s society, which he felt had been lost. What connected them further, argued Kepes, was that both art and science were “image-making devices” which needed to visualize experiences. For György Kepes it was no accident that there was such a remarkable similarity between certain paintings and photographs and the images that had become visible through new optical technologies such as infrared and ultraviolet rays, microscopic and telescopic photography, X-rays and other radiation techniques. Both were looking for laws, such as pattern, structure, harmony, order or even disorder in natural and other phenomena. These technologies offered a completely new picture of nature’s order, which had hitherto been invisible to the human eye, giving new sensory experiences and expanding the range of perception. In order to make his findings known to the public, he organized an exhibition titled The New Landscape (1951), in which he presented the visual analogues between recent scientific visualizations of research models and the visual arts. Computer images, serial and other photographs of the “micro-world” and “macro-world” made by scientists, were presented next to artist’s images, showing analogous forms and patterns. A few years later he published The New Landscape in Art and Science (1956), in which he “attempted to present in pictures the new visual world revealed by science and technology, things that were previously too big or too small, too opaque or too fast for the unaided eye to see.”
After the publication of The New Landscape in Art and Science, György Kepes’s contributions to books and catalogues almost always revolved around a serious concern about the earth and the environment, emphasizing the thoughtless manner in which man-kind treats nature’s treasures. His arguments grew stronger in the early seventies when the ecological movement was rapidly gaining a large following and environmental concerns were vehemently and emotionally discussed in books like Charles Reich’s The Greening of America or Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. Kepes: “Our cities are our collective selfportraits, images of hollowness and chaos. And if not properly guided our immensely potent technology may carry within itself curses of even more awesome proportions. The yet not understood uncontrolled dynamics of scientific technology could do more than poison our earth; it is capable of wreaking havoc on man’s genetic nature.” (1972) It is here that Kepes found a social as well as educational role for the artist. Only an artist who was knowledgeable about the developments in science and understood the implications of new technologies could influence the expected environmental problems. For Kepes, this meant a new civic art (his term), based on interdisciplinary collaboration. One way to expand the vision of art was to create an exchange and communication for art with other disciplines, in particular the sciences. “In becoming a collaborative enterprise in which artists, scientists, urban planners and engineers are interdependent, art clearly enters a new phase of orientation in which its prime goal is the revitalization of the entire human environment; a greatly-to-be-wished-for climax to the rebuilding of our present urban world." — sourced from Marga Bijvoet, Art as Inquiry, 1997
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