New MCASB Exhibition, ‘Falling into the Future: Kinetic Art at the Edge of the World,’ Is an Elaborate Exploration of Art Gone Mobile
To state the obvious, kinetic art is moving art — literally and, in the best instances, qualitatively. Art of the kinetic kind, by its nature a peripheral slice of the fine art world, has made its presence known only rarely in Santa Barbara, making the major new Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB) group show Falling into the Future: Kinetic Art at the Edge of the World a special occasion.
For the record, there have been notable connections of this broad-based medium to the city’s arts scene over the years. Famed kinetic art practitioner sculptor George Rickey had his sleek, moveable steel sculptures displayed outside the Santa Barbara Museum of Art for years, and a major multi-gallery exhibition in 1990 hosted by The David Bermant Foundation, known as Pulse 2, seized the attentions of art-watchers and the general public.
The Bermant Foundation is also a key player in the MCASB exhibition, as a primary influence and part of the support system for this ambitious and multi-pronged undertaking. Jean Cocteau’s film Jean Cocteau Addresses the Year 2000, a 1963 speculation on the shape and texture of the future, screens in MCASB’s glass box outside the entrance and serves as a kind of intellectual welcome mat introduction to what’s inside.
What’s inside are artistic matters of a kinetic sort, but in this case, mostly involving the motion of video manifestations, filling the gallery with visual stimuli in motion, along with assorted sonic sources in the space. An as-yet revealed, but important, component of the show involves a cooperation with UCSB’s senses-engulfing immersive chamber the AlloSphere. Three of the exhibition’s artists have created elaborate pieces for the AlloSphere’s three-dimensional — and four-dimensional — space, to be unveiled and unleashed on November 15.