Origins of Virtualism: an interview with Frank Popper

Joseph Nechvatal: Frank, you are, without doubt, a scarcity. Anyone who looks at the juncture of art and technology finds you nearly unaccompanied when it comes to documenting the historical record between the late 1960s and the early 1990s. Basically there is you, Jack Burnham's book Beyond Modern Sculpture, and Gene Youngblood's 1970 reference work Expanded Cinema. Specifically, your books Origins and Development of Kinetic Art, Art--Action and Participation, and Art of the Electronic Age are indispensable research tools in helping us figure out how art got to where it is today--in your terms "virtualized." (1) Technological and informational change is consistently cited as the splintering element which instigated mainstream modernism mutating into what has been called, for lack of a better term, post-modernism. Can you tell me why you first committed your attention as an art historian to this subject of art and technology when most historical and curatorial minds were focused elsewhere?

Frank Popper: During my studies of movement and light in art I was struck by the technical components in this art. Contrary to most, if not all, specialists in the field, who put the stress on purely plastic issues and in the first place on the Constructivist tradition, I was convinced that the technical and technological elements played a decisive part in this art. One almost paradoxical experience was my encounter with the kinetic artist and author of the book Constructivism, George Rickey, and my discovery of the most subtle technical movements in his mobile sculptures. Still more decisive was the encounter in the early 1950s with artists like Nicholas Schoffer and Frank Malina, whose works were based on some firsthand or secondhand scientific knowledge and who effectively or symbolically employed contemporary technological elements that gave their works a prospective cultural meaning.

The same sentiment prevailed when I encountered similar artistic endeavors from the 1950s onwards in the works of Piotr Kowalski, Roy Ascott, and many others, which confirmed in me the aesthetic option I had taken, particularly when I discovered that this option was not contradictory to another aspect of the creative works of the time, spectator participation.

Nechvatal: What drew you to a study of movement and light in art?

Popper: In 1960-61 I was working on a doctoral dissertation at the Sorbonne entitled "Autonomie et correspondance des arts selon Marcel Proust." But then I saw a large Robert Delaunay exhibition and fully appreciated the dynamic qualities of his paintings. Simultaneously I met several artists, including Schoeffer and Malina, whose works were founded on virtual and real movement, as well as on artificial or natural light. I was so impressed by their aesthetic, culturally topical, technical, and spectacular qualities that I decided to change my dissertation subject to "L'Image du mouvement dans les arts plastiques depuis 1860." At the same moment I was also asked by the UNESCO Courier to write an article on the subject of "Light and Movement in Art." The results of the research confirmed my attraction toward movement and light, which led quite logically to the publications that followed.

Nechvatal: What were your interests prior to the Sorbonne that led you there? How did world events impact on your choices, for example?

Popper: On the personal front, I could mention my unusual initiation into research at a very early age at an experimental primary school in Vienna. My training and experience as a textile engineer there and in the Sudetenland may have had some influence on my later itinerary. But it was mainly my thirst for wide-open spaces--England and its dominions, which, at the time, had privileged places for the research profession--that attracted me. That thirst could have had an impact on my inquiry.

Also, before joining the Royal Air Force as a wireless operator and technical interpreter, I joined a refugee Czech forestry workers camp in Somerset, England, where I met writers, artists, and other intellectuals, while at the same time teaching English literature there. Then came a long professional stay in Rome, where I frequented the Sapienza University. I was particularly concerned with Etruscology and Italian classical, contemporary, and even popular poetry. But then I came to stay in Paris--not only because I was interested in many aspects of French civilization, but simply because my wife, Hella Guth (1908-1992), a surrealist-abstract painter, needed this kind of Parisian environment. So I found myself a much-needed artistic and intellectual stimulant.

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Behind all these moves there was also a hidden motor made up of world events: the aftermath of the First World War, the advent of the Nazis in Germany, Austria, and the Sudetenland, the Second World War and its consequences. But I have the impression that my basic attitude was influenced by the positive side of emigration and exile: a kind of creative nomadism that could be put into relationship with the present-day political and cultural situation, in which geographical frontiers and intellectual privileges and distinctions are being abolished--thus clearing the way for such all-embracing creations as can be found in virtual art.