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Alfons Schilling «Random Pattern Stereo» | Randomdot Pattern Stereo, Broadway Studio
Alfons Schilling, «Random Pattern Stereo», 1973
Randomdot Pattern Stereo, Broadway Studio | Photography | © Alfons Schilling
 


 
Alfons Schilling «Random Pattern Stereo» | Random Pattern Stereo, Broadway SudioAlfons Schilling «Random Pattern Stereo» | Randomdot Pattern Stereo, Broadway Studio
Austria
 

 Alfons Schilling
«Random Pattern Stereo»

What Calder did for sculpture—the mobile, the sculpture in motion—Schilling did for painting—namely to set a surface in motion. Calder owes his idea of a motorized, moving sculpture, by the way, to a visit he made to Mondrian's studio in 1930, where he saw colored rectangles on the wall that he, to use his own words, «wanted to see in motion.» For Schilling, the moving sculpture became a moving painting or a painted circular picture in motion—a response, by the way, to J.A.F. Plateau and Simon Stampfer’s stroboscopic discs, J.C. Maxwell and R. Delauney’s colored gyroscopes, and M. Duchamp’s rotoreliefs. The 1955 Paris exhibition ‹Le Mouvement› marked the beginning of this kinetic art. Schilling responded to the sculpture in motion by Nicolas Schöffer to Jean Tinguely with a painted picture in motion.
The painting's surface rotated by itself. It was no longer an issue of representing motion, but one of experiencing motion. The representation medium ‹motion› moved itself. The carrier medium was set in motion. The notion of painting was revolutionized by this conception of the painting as a kinetic sculpture, as art in motion. Because of his advanced position with regard to the phenomenon of motion, Schilling was forced to, as it were, leave the picture—at least the historical notion of painting.

(Peter Weibel, in http://www.alfons-schilling.com/text2.html)