This exhibition is loads of fun on two levels.
- The works themselves are funny, beguiling, surprising and inventive
- Takis was a creature of the 1960s and many of the works here, along with photos of art ‘happenings’ and manifestos and action poetry, all create a warm nostalgic glow for that long-vanished era of optimism, peace and love
Takis’s real name is Panayiotis Vassilakis. He was born in Greece in 1925, so he was a teenager during the German occupation and then a young man during the ruinous Greek Civil war of 1946-9.
He came from a poor background and had to teach himself about art and poetry and philosophy. To escape the repressive aftermath of the war he went in 1954 to Paris, centre of European art and his earliest works are sculptures, small ones which are derivative of early Greek cycladic art (so called because found on the Cyclades islands), and taller slender, featureless human figures which are a bit reminiscent of Giacometti.
Bronze Figure and Plaster Figure (1954-1955) by Takis © Takis
But in 1959 Takis had a Eureka moment and transformed his art into something completely new and different which he maintained for the rest of his long career.
He started working with industrial components and forces. Specifically, he became interested in magnetism. He had a revelation that sculptures merely gestured towards energy and dynamism – why not incorporate real, actual electro-magnetic energy into works of art? Why put an industrial magnet at one end of a plank of wood, and secure two nails on wires at the other end, and let the magnetic forces attract attract attract the nails but the wire not quite be long enough for them to touch it? Thus highlighting the space and energy and force.
Why not make these invisible forces which are all around us visible?
Magnetron (1966) by Takis
Thus a work like Magnetron which made me laugh out loud and there’s plenty more where it came from. Taut wires pulled by household or waste metal objects straining towards a magnetised lump or shape or implement of metal.
Takis literally grew up amid the wreckage of the Second World War, exacerbated by the Greek Civil War. In Paris he scoured second hand shops and army surplus stores looking for bits of kit and equipment he could reversion into his dynamic sculptures.
Why not create a field of scores of metal balls or nodes or cogs, each supported by a slender wobbly metal wire from secure metal stands, and over this field of metal flowerheads suspend a couple of strong magnets. All you’d have to do is brush your hand through the metal flowerheads and then the complex forces of attraction and repulsion will keep them swinging and swaying for hours afterwards.
Magnetic Fields by Takis (1969) on show for the first time since the 1970s
Many many artists have painted abstract paintings, big canvases of red or black or white or blue and then made them dynamic by adding on angular shapes, mathematical shapes, cones and triangles and so on. But – why not create the same effect in three dimensions be concealing magnets behind the surface of the canvas so that the black cones (and any other abstract shapes you want – are not flat on the surface but caught in suspended animation as if hurtling towards it!
Magnetic Wall 9 (Red) by Takis © Pompidou centre
Why not dangle wires with metal needles from the ceiling and have them brush against a wire suspended from two electrified poles and have the wire rigged up to an amplifier which amplifies the sound it makes and projects it from a loudspeaker. As the metal plumb or needle sways in the random breeze or zephyrs created in a gallery it will strike or brush along the stationary wire creating an eerie electrical signal.
In fact why stop at one? Why not create a set of them with different wire lengths and thicknesses to create an eerie orchestral or polyphonic effect?
Musicales (1984-2004) by Takis © Foundation Louis Vuitton
And why, after all, stop with magnets and electromagnetism? The greatest use of electricity is to power lights.
According to a wall label Takis got stuck at a train station somewhere on the journey from London back top Paris (an experience anyone who’s ever travelled on a British train is familiar with) long enough to become dazzled and awed by the forest of lights of all different shapes and sizes and colours which festooned the station.
Why not recreate that visual overload in a gallery – although filtered through his trademark fondness for the slender and tall, for poles and stands (remember those Giacometti statues?)
Installation view of Takis at Tate Modern (2019) Photo by Mark Heathcote
So it is that through his long career since about 1959, Takis explored all kinds of logical consequences of this basic insight, the idea of making dynamic sculptures using the electrical and magnetic forces created by industrial bric-a-brac.
Apparently he gave birth to a genre or field or movement known as Kinetic Art and, as you might expect, he became a daaaahling of the avant-garde, feted by Beat Poets and French intellectuals.
I love art made from industrial junk. I love the whole Italian Arte Povera movement and 1970s minimalism for this reason. We live in a society overwhelmed with machinery, defined by machinery and gadgets, it seems crazy not to incorporate it into art, to turn it into art.
There’s also just a boyish love of gadgets and ingenious devices. I liked the piece which looked like a clock face with one arrow headed hand swinging round it at random. There’s a love for the time and effort which has clearly gone to produce the sheer beauty of industrial design. And then there’s an anarchist, science fiction pleasure to be taken in seeing bits of important sober kit taken completely out of context and set to surreal and comic uses.
There are quite a few of the magnetic works but it is surprising how much variety can be wrung out of one idea.
The last room is enormous and contains a forest of the so-called Signals works, where he takes three large slender flexible poles and tops them with a wide range of industrial artefacts.
Triple Signal by Takis (1976)
The first Signals works were so distinctive they gave rise to a famous London avant-garde gallery named Signals in their honour, location of many a happening and event. As well as industrial parts some of them incorporate used ordnance from the Greek Civil War, or even fragments of apparatus which he himself blew up in the studio.
An abiding fascination with all manifestations of energy. Maybe that’s why I like industrial art as well. It bespeaks an enormous amount of design and effort which has gone into their manufacture.
The Signals in fact reminded me quite a bit of the mobiles developed by Alexander Calder in the 1930s, especially when you came to look at the shadows they cast on the walls. That was one of the claims to fame of the mobiles, not only the restless movement of the thing itself but its shadows fleeting across surfaces.
This big final room also contains a couple of massive balls
Electromagnetic spheres by Takis (1979)
When these are set in motion by external events (wind, a push) their movement over a live coil generates energy which can be translated into sound. In the 1980s he set up the Takis Foundation to encourage art and education. He took to talking about the music of the spheres, and how his objects restored a spiritual dimension to a world in danger of being overwhelmed by technology.
To be honest, I thought that was just artistic boilerplate. The kind of high-minded hogwash artists often come out with, which is often the result when they sit down and think about what they’re doing, or is often a rationalisation after-the-fact of something, a discovery or style or innovation, which they felt themselves towards much more intuitively. Or accidentally.
It was also an odd thing for him to be saying, as if he was trying to run away from the consequences of his own life’s work. Some of the wall labels explained his desire to get away from technology, the threat of technology, the encompassing power of technology – and I watched visitor after visitor step up and take photos of the work and its label on their super-smart mobile phones before posting them to social media.
It is far too late to try and revive medieval beliefs in the music of the spheres or Romantic ideas about earth and authenticity. Everyone lives in the cloud now, all our memories are digitised and stored half-way round the world, and being sorted and categorised by the artificial intelligence algorithms of countless advertising agencies.
If anything, Takis’s work, taken altogether, is testament to a vanished era of optimism when guys in polo-necked sweaters thought that playing with lights and magnets in small London art galleries could stop the vast tsunami of the future rolling over the human race.
The video
Curators
Writer and curator Guy Brett, who was closely involved in the original Signals art gallery, London
Michael Wellen, Curator, International Art, Tate Modern
Helen O’Malley, Assistant Curator, Tate Modern
Related links
Reviews of other Tate exhibitions
- Takis @ Tate Modern (October 2019)
- William Blake @ Tate Britain (October 2019)
- Natalia Goncharova (August 2019)
- Art Now: France-Lise McGurn: Sleepless (July 2019)
- Mike Nelson: The Asset Strippers (July 2019)
- Frank Bowling (July 2019)
- Franz West @ Tate Modern (May 2019)
- Van Gogh and Britain @ Tate Britain (May 2019)
- Magic Realism: Art in Weimar Germany 1919 – 1933 @ Tate Modern (April 2019)
- Dorothea Tanning @ Tate Modern (March 2019)
- Don McCullin @ Tate Britain (February 2019)
- Pierre Bonnard: The Colour of Memory @ Tate Modern (February 2019)
- Christmas slugs @ Tate Britain (December 2018)
- Turner Prize 2018 @ Tate Britain (December 2018)
- Anni Albers @ Tate Modern (December 2018)
- Edward Burne-Jones @ Tate Britain (October 2018)
- Aftermath: Art in the wake of World War One @ Tate Britain (September 2018)
- All Too Human @ Tate Britain (March 2018)
- Ilya and Emilia Kabakov: Not Everyone Will be Taken Into the Future (January 2018)
- Red Star over Russia (December 2017)
- Impressionists in London @ Tate Britain (November 2017)
- Giacometti @ Tate Modern (September 2017)
- Soul Of A Nation: Art In The Age Of Black Power @ Tate Modern (July 2017)
- Wolfgang Tillmans: 2017 @ Tate Modern (June 2017)
- Queer British Art 1861-1967 @ Tate Britain (April 2017)
- The Radical Eye @ Tate Modern (March 2017)
- David Hockney @ Tate Britain (February 2017)
- Robert Rauschenberg @ Tate Modern (February 2017)
- Paul Nash @ Tate Britain (December 2016)
- Painting with Light @ Tate Britain (August 2016)
- Georgia O’Keefke @ Tate Modern (July 2016)
- Performing for the camera @ Tate Modern (March 2016)
- Frank Auerbach @ Tate Britain (February 2016)
- Every Room in Tate Modern (January 2016)
- Every room in Tate Britain (part one) (January 2016)
- Every room in Tate Britain (part two) (January 2016)
- Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past @ Tate Britain (January 2016)
- Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture @ Tate Modern (December 2015)
- The EY Exhibition: The World Goes Pop @ Tate Modern (November 2015)
- Agnes Martin @ Tate Modern (September 2015)
- Fighting History @ Tate Britain (August 2015)
- Barbara Hepworth: Sculpture for a Modern World @ Tate Britain (August 2015)
- Sonia Delaunay @ Tate Modern (May 2015)
- Salt and Silver @ Tate Britain (April 2015)
- Sculpture Victorious @ Tate Britain (April 2015)
- Conflict, Time, Photography @ Tate Modern (March 2015)
- Late Turner @ Tate Britain (January 2015)
- Malevich: Revolutionary of Russian art @ Tate Modern (August 2014)
- British Folk Art @ Tate Britain (June 2014)
- Ruin Lust @ Tate Britain (March 2014)
- Richard Deacon @ Tate Britain (February 2014)
- Paul Klee – Making Visible @ Tate Modern (January 2014)
- Art under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm @ Tate Britain (December 2013)
- Lowry and the painting of modern life @ Tate Britain (September 2013)
- Lichtenstein: A Restrospective @ Tate Modern (March 2013)
- Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian avant-garde @ Tate Britain (September 2012)
- Damien Hirst @ Tate Modern (September 2012)
- Picasso and Modern British Art @ Tate Britain (July 2012)
- John Martin @ Tate Britain (December 2011)
