Yaacov Agam — electronic transformations

1970

Artists: Yaacov Agam · Year: 1970 · Medium: Kinetic and electronic artworks — paintings and sculptures with viewer-triggered or time-based transformation · Substrate: Mechanical-electronic transformation systems; viewer-sensor interfaces; painted surfaces with motorized or solenoid-driven change mechanisms · Place: Paris, France / Tel Aviv, Israel · Institution: Independent; later Agam Museum (Rishon LeZion, 2018) Yaacov Agam — the Israeli painter and sculptor whose kinetic-painting practice had defined a specific strand of 1950s-60s European abstraction — produced his first fully-electronic works in 1970 at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris. The electronic piece Transformable Space, a room-scale installation of programmed light-panels that cycled through Agam's signature geometric compositions on a timed sequence, extended his long-running "transformable" practice from the mechanical (his 1950s paintings that reconfigured when the viewer moved around them) into the purely computational. Agam had been making transformable paintings since his Paris years in the early 1950s, and had been among the first post-war artists to take seriously the argument that a painting could have multiple simultaneous visual states controlled by viewer position or by programmed sequence. His 1970 shift to electronic realization was continuous with that earlier work — the computer was simply another way to automate the transformation sequence that his corrugated physical paintings had been executing mechanically. What makes Agam relevant to this archive is less his 1970 electronic work on its own terms than the specific bridging role his practice played. Agam was, in the 1960s-70s, a widely-collected artist whose paintings were in major institutional collections around the world; when he began to exhibit electronic work in 1970, the institutional context shifted immediately — programmed light-installations could be shown as Yaacov Agams alongside his painted Agams, in the same room, without the category break that most 1970 galleries would have required. This argued, through Agam's specific institutional standing, that electronic work belonged with painting rather than in a separate "technology art" ghetto. Agam continued to produce both painted and electronic work for decades afterward, was a major commercial success with public-plaza commissions across Israel and Europe. His eponymous museum in Rishon LeZion, Israel, opened in 2018 and holds the primary collection. Lore Agam was born Yaacov Gipstein in the British Mandate of Palestine in 1928, the son of an Orthodox rabbi, and had been trained in Jewish religious sources before his move to Europe to study painting in Zurich with Johannes Itten (the former Bauhaus master) and subsequently in Paris with Fernand Léger. The religious-scholarly background is legible in Agam's insistence that his paintings' multiple simultaneous states were a specifically Jewish iconographic move — a refusal of single definitive image that tracked the Talmudic habit of holding multiple commentaries on a single verse in simultaneous presence. He continued this rabbinical framing throughout his career and took it seriously; the painted state-switches in his work were not, in his understanding, decorative variation, but theological argument. Sources • Yaacov Agam Museum of Art, Rishon LeZion, Israel — archive. • Popper, Frank — Yaacov Agam (Abrams, 1990). • Centre Pompidou, Paris — Yaacov Agam collection files.