Kinetics: Drawing in the Dark

In one semidarkened room of Manhattan’s Pace Gallery, a white box beams a ruby red light into a corner, then unmasks itself mechanically so that the dot of light draws itself around the room into a full square. Then the line undraws itself back into a red dot. In another room, a narrow wavy red line bobbles against the four walls simultaneously, producing a giant square of four red lines that imprints itself on the spectators as they walk between the wall and light source. In the last room, another homage to the square is created by a bold six-inch-wide band of white light that moves in continuous waves around the room so rapidly that it seems to flash, even though the light square itself remains intact.

The name of the show is “Dark,” and it is the newest wrinkle in kinetic art. It is instant light sculpture, produced by a laser beam (in the case of the red lines) and a mercury-vapor lamp (for the white). “Dark” was dreamed up by Robert Whitman, 32, an artist whose reputation in Manhattan art circles rests on his theater happenings and “cinema sculptures,” including a movie of a nude taking a shower. Whitman is fascinated by the fourth dimension, and, to work through his newest analysis of it, he called on the services of two Bell Telephone Laboratories engineers, Eric Rawson and Larry Heilos. They showed him how laser beams, controlled by motorized projectors, could produce the desired effect of hard-edge geometric light lines against the wall (standard incandescent bulbs would diffuse into a more abstract-expressionist glow).

The middleman between Artist Whitman and his engineers was a one-year-old organization called EAT (Experiments in Art and Technology, Inc.), which operates under an $8,000 grant from New York State, and expects to provide artists with the scientific savvy to produce even more far-out art. Among EAT’s first private backers, each of which has put up $1,000 to encourage the liaison between art and industry and will lend its technicians to the cause, are A.T. & T., IBM and the A.F.L.-C.I.O.