Inflatable Structures—action and installation part of the group exhibition Current Issues on Space in Art, in the framework of UNESCO Art Week
The 1974 exhibition of Sigma Group (1969–1978) has been acknowledged as one of the seminal moments of the Romanian art of the 1970s. Co-initiated in Timișoara by the former members of Group 111, Ștefan Bertalan and Constantin Flondor, Sigma gathered further artists, Ioan Gaita, Elisei Rusu, Doru Tulcan and the mathematician Lucian Codreanu. The activities of Sigma were triggered by the belief that interdisciplinary collaboration needed to become a general concern for society and therefore bridging the gap between science and art, art and public, was imperative. The theoretical, philosophical and pedagogical principles that were at the heart of Sigma’s work fostered a strong visual vocabulary, which radically juxtaposed various references from constructivism, cybernetics, bionics, mathematics, structuralism, semiotics, and psychoanalysis. The group was also characterized by an interest in visual research, holistic pedagogical practice, and conscious search for an exit from the traditional genres of art in favor of an experiential detour, which meant testing the boundaries between disciplines, and bringing to the forefront nature as a paragon. Their collective presuppositions took the form of mathematically generated structures, objects and large-scale environments, urban design projects, actions and interventions in nature, analytical photographs, and film experiments.
During the UNESCO Art Week, on 13 December 1974, at 6 pm the Sigma Group organized at the Bastion Art Galleries in Timișoara the action and installation entitled Inflatable Structures (Structuri gonflabile), which was part of the exhibition Current Issues on Space in Art. The work consisted of a series of pneumatic tubular structures, wooden bars and weather balloons onto which various slides were simultaneously projected. The film Game with Balloons (1974) realized by Constantin Flondor in the Sports Hall of the Timișoara Art Lyceum, involving the children of the Sigma Group’s members, was also projected. During the evening, the space was transformed into a full-immersive environment filled with the transparent balloons, the moving images and the colored lights, and the psychedelic sound created by Adrian Ilica (then a student at the Timișoara Arts Lyceum), which all overlapped with the sound of the children’s voices.
Artist Iosif Király, present at the event, recounted the strong impact of that “multimedia spectacle” aimed at all the senses, which was to change the “paradigm of understanding the art object, shifting everything into a multi-dimensional reality.”[1]
“Then the lights went out, the transparent balloons and snails began moving their bluish, red, purple or yellow entrails, somewhere overhead the film began with the black and white snails and the black and white balloons which the children touched, chased, elongated, hugging them and hugging each other in the game of their pre-natal city. At the end, when the kids in the film came down among us, continuing their game, we felt a memory from the unknown city, the city before birth, labrys[2], in its ancient name, and we began to wander along with the children through the gigantic womb, and the song followed in the wake of our game, winding in its turn in the snail-shaped ear, meant to hear the air around the air snails.” (The writer and literary critic Adriana Babeți wrote in her review published in Orizont, 21 December 1974[3].)
The use of pneumatic structures resonated with several preoccupations present at that time in utopian architecture and design, reflecting the Group’s own desire to bring closer art to science, to other fields of knowledge. Their pneumatic environment tested new ways of experimenting with space, perception, intermediality, time, and other materials. However, Inflatable Structures was not just an interactive environment, but a space that looked to merge poetics with playfulness, to underline different premises in art, as well as different goals. This unconventional “exhibition” changed the way one could experience and represent art, instead of focusing on the production of objects, it favored visual research, akin to artists’ intention to transform the gallery space into an open laboratory. Further, Inflatable Structures calls into discussion similar participative, individual and collective proposals from Eastern Europe, such as Stano Filko’s pneumatic sculptures, the interventions of Milenko Matanovic & OHO Group in Zvezda Park, Ljubljana, Happening with a Vacuum Cleaner and a Plastic Tube (1968), and at the Student Center Gallery, Zagreb (1968), using air-inflated tubes, which interlaced in the space with the help of artists and participants.
Sources:
Ștefan Bertalan, “Fragmente dintr-un program posibil” [Excerpts from a Possible Program], Arta, no. 8, 1970, p. 34.
E-mail correspondence with Constantin Flondor, February 18, 2016.
Constantin Flondor documentation, archive of the International Centre for Contemporary Art (ICCA), Bucharest, compiled by art historian Ileana Pintilie.
Octavian Barbosa, “Despre Grupul Sigma” [On Sigma Group], Arta, nos. 10–12, 1971, p. 75.
Iosif Király, “Happeningul grupului Sigma” [The Happening of Sigma Group], bewhere, http://www.bewhere.ro/arta/iosif-kir-ly-happeningul-grupului-sigma-3356/.
Flondor, de la 111 + Sigma la Prolog, ed. George Lecca (Cluj: IDEA Design & Print, 2005).
[1] Iosif Király, “Happeningul grupului Sigma” [The Happening of Sigma Group], bewhere, http://www.bewhere.ro/arta/iosif-kir-ly-happeningul-grupului-sigma-3356/.
[2] The root of the word “labyrinth” in Ancient Greek.
[3] Adriana Babeți interviewed by Alina Șerban, Parkour Video, 2021, https://institutulprezentului.ro/en/video/adriana-babeti-on-group-sigma/.
Date: 13 December 1974
Participants: Group Sigma (Ștefan Bertalan, Constantin Flondor, Doru Tulcan, Elisei Rusu, Ioan Gaita)
Location: Bastion Art Galleries Timișoara