7.10.24 — Getting Up the Energy
Cannot get up the energy to go to a museum? Frederick Kiesler would understand.
He wanted his work to respond to body movements, posture, and sheer fatigue. He saw his architecture and design as creating and breaching “fields of energy exchange,” even when you cannot. With his Mobile Home Library, you need not so much as reach for a book to read sitting down. The book would come to you—and I work this together with a recent report on another modern experiment in living, by Sonia Delaunay, as a longer review and my latest upload.
Its bare white shelves at the Jewish Museum do not look all that relaxing. Museum-goers cannot enter their half closed circle, for fear of damage, even as they wheel around the room or in place, through July 28. Still, Kiesler was an idealist, and he took seriously the idea of Modernism as a science—a search for truth in service to humanity. 
If he seems largely forgotten, that may show how much that dream has faded, but do not be too sure. As postmodern critics loved to ask, has Modernism failed? Perhaps, but this modernist outlasted many a movement.
At a given moment, Kiesler can seem merely quaint or way ahead of his time. Born in 1890 in the Ukraine, he seems just right for a world at war now. He headed off as fast as he could nonetheless—first to Germany, where he could see home design as both artifice and household necessity, and then to the Netherlands. He had success with stage sets, just as he later worked with performers at the Julliard. He did not join the Bauhaus, with its dream of art for the many, but he did accept an invitation from de Stijl, the movement with Piet Mondrian, before leaving for New York. He can seem the Forrest Gump of modern art, present at everyone else’s creation, but he was more than a walk-on and never unwitting.
Where an artist as commercial as Andy Warhol saw his early work in fashion as a step toward something more, Kiesler anticipates today’s growing interest in design as art. Nothing was above or beneath him. He undertook displays for Saks Fifth Avenue and a gallery for Peggy Guggenheim, Art of This Century in 1942. He worked with Film Guild Cinema starting in 1929. Does its name evoke both avant-garde film of the past and a revival house in the present? He taught for years at Columbia University, where he showed his students short films on everything from “radioactive rays” and “tiny water animals” seen under a microscope to “the world of paper.”
He aspired, then, to art as a science, but also art of the everyday, and he could not separate the two. It led him to found the Laboratory for Design Correlation at Columbia in 1938. Mobile Home Library recalls prefabricated, affordable housing, but it incorporates mobility and vision as well. Architecture for him had to be light on its fight and had to design with light, well before lighting as art for James Turrell and Dan Flavin. Naturally his culminating projects were Vision Machines. Naturally, too, they drew on the science behind “how we see” in order to stimulate hallucinations and dreams.
That science seems all but incomprehensible today, although a typescript spells it out in brutal detail. It turns, though, on the interaction between a machine and a human subject, much like AI art now. It gives new meaning to design correlation, as correlation between the mechanical and human, and it issued in a Correalism Manifesto. Rather than a mirror or window onto nature as a passive subject, Kiesler saw his work as “activating the active object.” He divided his design for Peggy Guggenheim into spaces for abstract, surrealist, daylight, and kinetic art. He thought of film itself as “photographs in motion.”
Interactive art has high aspirations even now, as with Rirkrit Tiravanija and relational esthetics. Yet it is almost impossible to replicate in a museum. What a show once called “theanyspacewhatever” may be nowhere at all. The curator, Mark Wasiuta, is left with display after display of the sketchiest of plans and sketches. He gets off to a strong start with the mobile bookshelves, live and in person, and a modest screen for films. Yet the library still bars visitors as it twists ever so slowly in the wind.
Just two more rooms follow, as if to rub in Kiesler’s broken dreams for contemporary living. His biomorphic Endless House never began—or at least never got past a 1958 model, seven years before his death. He called picture frames “deadening,” in contrast to the active object, but they do offer something to contemplate. Most good art is very much the active object, but it can also slow time and take time to come to life. His own art is well worth rediscovering, but it may not take all that long. Better grab a book.
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.