Piotr Kowalski — laser sculpture and light-measuring environments

1968

Artists: Piotr Kowalski · Year: 1968 · Medium: Laser-based sculptural installations — measured-light environments making visible otherwise-invisible physical phenomena · Substrate: Lasers (rare and expensive in the 1960s); mirror systems; physical installations integrating laser beams with environmental sensors · Place: Paris, France (primarily) · Institution: Independent; extensive European festival participation Piotr Kowalski, a Polish-born artist based in Paris since the 1950s, produced his first laser-based sculptural works in 1968 — the same year the ICA's Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition in London placed laser-light works alongside computer-generated plotter drawings as kin categories of the emerging "cybernetic art." Kowalski's method was direct: he used architectural-grade helium-neon lasers (commercially available from 1964 onward) to cut, draw, and measure in space, producing sculptural installations in which laser beams were both the material of the work and the measuring instrument producing it. Kowalski had been trained as an engineer at MIT in the late 1940s — he held a graduate degree in civil engineering from MIT's Building Engineering and Construction program — before he shifted into artistic practice in Paris in the 1950s. The engineering background is legible in his work. His 1968 pieces are not decorative-laser-light but precisely-measured geometric compositions in which the laser's physical behavior (divergence, interference with reflective and transmissive materials, specific angular characteristics) is the compositional material. A Kowalski installation from this period characteristically presents a room-scale light-geometric composition whose proportions can be read off the laser's measurable behavior. This archive tracks Kowalski as one of the European-based figures who worked across engineering and art without treating the two as separable. His subsequent practice — he taught at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1979 and ran a sustained teaching program in art-and-engineering through the 1990s — produced generations of French artists who operate in the same cross-disciplinary register. The French specific-institutional position of the "artist-engineer" (which is still more common in French than in American contemporary art discourse) owes much to Kowalski's example. Kowalski died in 2004 at 76. The Centre Pompidou holds a major collection of his work. Lore Kowalski had escaped Warsaw during the German invasion in 1939 as a teenager, made his way through Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and reached the United States in the late 1940s on a refugee-scholarship to MIT. His subsequent decision to become an artist rather than a civil engineer was, by his later telling, made in Paris in 1952 after meeting the sculptor Brancusi — who was then in his seventies — in a Montparnasse cafe. Brancusi reportedly told Kowalski that engineering was "a legitimate profession for a serious man, but art was a more difficult profession, and you look like you might be up to it." Kowalski changed trajectory. He continued to write and publish engineering papers occasionally for the rest of his life, out of habit, under his birth name Piotr Wolfgang Kowalski. Sources • Centre Pompidou, Paris — Piotr Kowalski collection. • Kowalski, Piotr — Piotr Kowalski: Sculptures, Installations, Measurements (École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, 2004). • Popper, Frank — Origins and Development of Kinetic Art (Studio Vista, 1968; Kowalski context).