Bottomless: Frank Popper (b. 17 April 1918), Spiritual Rector of Kinetic Art

Like Vilém Flusser, who is but two years younger, Frank Popper comes from the city of Kafka, Dvořák, the Golem, over whose Moldau bridge the philosophers and Kabbalists moved, entangled in infinite fluency. Frank's parents had a "seat" in the Old New Synagogue. His early Judaism was connected to the idea that he would be the owner of an art object. At the age of three he moved to Vienna, where his mother came from. At the age of 20, he fled to England with his brother. The rest of the family was murdered.

In the "Bottomless" of the émigré summoned by Flusser, Frank Popper finds a home in art. He builds friendships with artists and moves to Paris in the early 1950s. When I meet him in the 1980s, he lives and works in an artist's hermitage—with thousands of handwritten papers in different European languages—on the Quai des Grands Augustins overlooking Notre Dame. He had written a doctoral dissertation from his encounters with artists—especially of the kinetic movement, light and environment. It was published in three volumes and about 800 pages in 1966 as L'image du mouvement dans les arts plastiques depuis 1860 (The Image of Movement within the Visual Arts Since 1860) [1]. Frank taught until 1985 as professor of aesthetics and the arts at the University of Paris VIII.

When the Paris May events broke out in 1968, instead of lectures and seminars, the student discussion forums, enmeshed in infinite fluency, determined the course. Frank was able to rise from the podium in the afternoon and say goodbye: "I am going to have my cup of tea!" For an hour he withdrew from the academic scene. However, when he wrestled for a new position on art and its protagonists, his Art, Action and Participation masterpiece, which appeared seven years later in New York, revealed 300 pages packed with comprehensive social analyses and images of the social-cultural "break-up years" ("signature years" in the words of Peter Weibel [2]). One wishes that this central art-social book would find a new edition.

For many of his contemporaries, Frank Popper, who turned 100 on 17 April 2018, remains the esprit recteur of kinetic art, of which he has curated historical exhibitions such as KunstLichtKunst in Eindhoven 1966 or Lumière et mouvement in Paris 1967. The former, in the Netherlands home and center of the Philips company, was indeed the first large survey of works using artificial electric light as a medium of art. It is intriguing to read the last sentences of Popper's introduction to the catalogue. "This is a young art, which has the capacity of remaining young. It is technical, but even in its most complex aspects it is directly concerned with the activity and emotions of humanity" [3].

Popper has until recently written key books on electronic and digital art, in part with his wife, art historian Aline Dallier. The major aesthetic problems he has discussed include the transit from audience participation to real interactivity, the relationship between the artistic process and the final result as well as that between human and artificial intelligence. Frank Popper became an encyclopedist of an Enlightenment based on art.

I may finish this very brief overview with a personal remark. In the commemorative to my own 80th birthday, Frank celebrated "our profound understanding on all human issues as exemplified by our conversations," which lasted about five decades [4].