“Art today is nothing but a tremendous bluff,” Julio Le Parc complained in his 1963 manifesto, presenting a series of home truths to the French cultural establishment. “The public is a million miles away from artistic events.” The Argentinian artist, who has died aged 97, had relocated to Paris and was caught up in the social revolts of the decade. His solution was a radical series of works that experimented with light, movement and colour, and required the active participation of the viewer.
The earliest of these included large-scale mobiles, each dramatically spotlit, the wire-hung metal and plastic fragments moving as the viewer walks around the sculptures, light bouncing between the shiny elements. For Le Parc these works were not about spectacle, but shaking the viewer from apolitical lethargy, a disease he thought permeated the museums and galleries of the day. It was, he wrote, a “wish to lead viewers out of their apathetic dependency that makes them passively accept not just what is forced on them as art, but an entire way of life”.
