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Visiting Takis’s survey show at Tate Modern for the Spectator, 13 July 2019<\/a><\/p>\n Steel flowers bend in a \u2018breeze\u2019 generated by magnetic pendulums. This is the first thing you see as you enter Tate Modern\u2019s survey show. And \u2018Magnetic Fields\u2019 (1969) is pretty enough: the work of this self-taught artist, now in his nineties, has rarely been so gentle, or so intuitive.<\/p>\n But there\u2019s a problem. \u2018I would like to render [electromagnetism] visible so as to communicate its existence and make its importance known,\u2019 Takis has written. But magnetism hides in plain sight. A certain amount of interference is necessary before it will reveal itself.<\/p>\n Does the interference matter? Does the fact that gallery assistants have to activate this work every ten minutes spoil the \u2018cosmicness\u2019 of Takis\u2019s art? The sculptor Alberto Giacometti thought so: \u2018One day, during one of my exhibitions, he told me that he didn\u2019t agree with my use of electricity for some of my works,\u2019 Takis recalled in an interview in 1990. \u2018He disliked the fact that if you switched off the power, the work would cease to function.\u2019<\/p>\n Why Takis\u2019s pieces should prompt such a finicky response isn\u2019t immediately obvious. What do we expect of this stuff? Perpetual motion? One moment we wonder at the invisible force that can suspend delicate metal cones fractions of an inch above the surface of a canvas. The next moment, we\u2019re peering where we shouldn\u2019t, trying to figure out the circuitry that keeps a sphere swinging over a steel wire.<\/p>\n We\u2019re presented with many wonders \u2014 objects rendered weightless, or put into permanent vibration. And as the show progresses (it\u2019s surprisingly large, designed to unfold around corners and spring surprises at your back) the work gets less intuitive, and a lot louder. A pendulum, orbiting a strong, floor-mounted magnet, whips eccentrically and not at all gently about its centre of attraction. It\u2019s like nothing in visible nature. There\u2019s no \u2018magnetic breeze\u2019 here, no \u2018force like gravity\u2019, just the thing, the weirdness itself. Now we\u2019re getting somewhere.<\/p>\n Born Panayiotis Vassilakis in 1925, Takis discovered his alchemical calling early. One memoir recalls how \u2018as a small boy, he would bury pieces of broken glass and other such oddments in the ground to see what happened to them when he impatiently dug them out a couple of days later\u2019. In 1954 he moved to Paris, where he fell in with Marcel Duchamp and Yves Tanguy. In London he inspired a group of young artists who went on to create the politically radical Signals London gallery. In America the beats admired him, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology gave him a fellowship, and the composer John Cage encouraged his shamanism. (\u2018I cannot think of my work as entirely my work,\u2019 Takis writes. \u2018In a sense, I\u2019m only a transmitter.\u2019)<\/p>\n Takis treads the same awkward line in visual art that Cage did in music. Cage promised us that behind the music of signs lay some sort of sonic essence. But his snark hunt proved rather dull. Takis\u2019s own search ends more happily, if only because the eye, in its search for signs, doesn\u2019t admit defeat nearly as quickly as the ear. Takis\u2019s traffic signals, stripped of context and perched on tall poles, become eyes full of sadness and yearning. They still mean something. They\u2019re still signs of something.<\/p>\n Made from oddments plucked from boxes of army and air-force surplus on Tottenham Court Road, some of Takis\u2019s more engineered work has dated. We look at it as a sort of industrial archaeology. Its radicalism, its status as \u2018anti-technology\u2019, is hard to fathom.<\/p>\n But the simpler pieces need no translation. They are (suitably enough, for an artist whose works often screech and rattle) a sort of visual equivalent of music. They do not mean anything. They are meaning. They reflect harmonious relationships between energy and space and mass. Takis\u2019s work is like his subject: it hides in plain sight.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Visiting Takis’s survey show at Tate Modern for the Spectator, 13 July 2019 Steel flowers bend in a \u2018breeze\u2019 generated by magnetic pendulums. This is the first thing you see as you enter Tate Modern\u2019s survey show. And \u2018Magnetic Fields\u2019 … Continue reading