Frederick Kiesler

Frederick Kiesler, a bit eccentric, also made slightly eccentric art, working in various fields: architecture, sculpture, inventions with an artistic slant, theater design, drawings, and writing. Born into a Jewish family in the Ukraine, Kiesler went on to study art in Vienna from 1909 through 1913, when he left without receiving a degree. In 1926, Kiesler moved with his wife to New York, where he eventually found work teaching in the architecture school at Columbia University. As an artist Kiesler tended toward the theoretical; he designed a pair of binoculars that provided visual stimuli to the person wearing the goggles. He also created a set of library shelves that rotated off a vertical axis; a facsimile was made and shown in the exhibition. These kinds of ideas occupy a shared space--of invention, conceptual underpinnings, and, especially, an architectural sense of relations between his art and his audience.

 

Kiesler also worked collaboratively with Constructivists, including László Moholy-Nagy and El Lissitzky. Additionally, he was friendly with Theo van Doesberg, who made Kiesler a member of de Stijl. The artist participated in the arts at a time when modern art was still a relatively recent occurrence. But he was hardly a deep-seated modernist, not in any classic sense. Instead, his sense of design and intention, attached to a visionary understanding of architecture, led him to eccentricity: as noted, rotating, white metal shelves for the display of books and a kind of binoculars constructed in such a way as to stimulate the user's vision.

 

Thus, his projects, as seen in the fine show at the Jewish Museum, were a bit beyond the pale. Even so, Kiesler's idiosyncrasies are representative of some of the most interesting art of his time, in the sense that his imagination found its voice in genuinely innovative work. Fine art mostly proceeds by intuition; and most often, it adheres to the conventional visual expression of the present moment. Some work extends beyond the years of its making, but usually, it is a matter of slow anonymity taking over, or a matter of the audience's inability to appreciate art from a different time. 

​

When Kiesler arrived in New York City in the middle of the 1920s, modernism had not yet fully developed. So he could take part in a creativity that still had much promise to it. But now, it is hard to see his art without being reminded that we are all prey to the spirit of the times, and it is very rare for art to transcend the circumstances of its making.

​

With Kiesler, a certain awkwardness of address becomes evident. Kiesler was indeed visionary, but it is also true that his work is regularly hermetic, ambitious but self-contained, both in concept and finished product. The moving shelf system seems like it is beholden to a time when this sort of concept was an advance, but now, when we see it, the white metal shelves seem outdated regarding current visual or conceptual concerns, especially when we compare it to contemporary means of information storage. The same is true of the artists’ visionary binoculars. As for the ballpoint pen drawings, they are not notably elegant at all; instead, they function as vehicles primarily for theoretical advancement.

 

In the long run, we will be seeing Kiefer’s innovative efforts as a construct of good modernism. But the work also stands for its originality because it is very much Kiesler’s own; the eccentricities in his work keep his imagination sharply connected to the last century, even as they make him one of a kind. It cannot be said that the artist jumps the gap between his time and our own—thus, the historical aura of his art, so that the implications of his work stay stuck in the time in which they were made, and do not communicate much contemporary insight.

 

An artist like Kiesler suggests that the imagination inevitably remains a product of the time in which it was made, reaching only so far into the future, which is when scholarship takes over. But many in Kiesler’s audience remain committed to a view that incorporates modernism into a contemporary context. In many ways, we remain highly taken with the art of the last century. So it would be easy to see Kiesler as close to us—that is if he were not a bit odd in his output. But, despite the offbeat ideas and forms, the artist remains clear about the visionary purpose of art, its language bridging the gap between people and things.

​

Let’s look at a few telling examples of Kieler’s works. In the show, there is a print examining the library set up by Kiesler; several people browse among its steel shelves. This Mobile Home Library is an illustration out of the Correlism Manifesto, published in 1941. The image is an illustration of the manifesto’s most valued idea, namely, encouraging the interaction of people with their technological and natural environments.

 

So the library stands out as an example of Kiesler’s thought—one bringing to the fore architectural, sculptural, and social interests, all within a limited environment. There are also other drawings related to study, of a desk and chair, for example. The drawings, done on brown paper, are not notable for their skill or elegance; instead, they point to Kiesler’s notion of the real: the exchange between people and a built environment. Kiefer, as much a theorist as someone who made things, took a strong interest in environments linked, here, to the pursuit of reading and intellectual work.