Sigurda Vīdzirkstes kibernētiskā glezniecība: Pazaudētais kods
Sigurds Vīdzirkste's Cybernetic Canvases: The Lost Code

Summary/Abstract: Sigurds Vīdzirkste’s (1928–1974) exhibition “Cybernetic Canvases” was on view at the Foreign Art Museum in Riga from 12 September to 21 October 2007. The initiator of the show, painter Daina Dagnija, singled out works from the 1960s featuring dot-like protrusions. Vīdzirkste gave them this title at the Kips Bay Gallery auction in New York in 1968. At the time viewers were most intrigued what the works could have in common with cybernetics. The term “cybernetics” was introduced by its founder Norbert Wiener and included computer science, biology, philosophy and knowledge of the societal structure, i.e. transmission of the natural process to a technical environment. The flourishing of abstract thought was closely related to the events of World War II. Socio-political transformations brought people back to the starting position, bringing to a head the “eternal questions” of spiritual aims. The American avant-garde absorbed the transcendental experience, was interested C. G. Jung’s archetypes and the collective unconscious, Lao Tze cosmology and Japanese Zen Buddhism. Vīdzirkste, belonging to the second generation of New York Abstract Expressionism, has not explained his identification. Vīdzirkste was born on 10 February 1928 in Daugavpils where his father was a clerk at the Railwaymen Sickness Insurance Fund. Vīdzirkste attended Daugavpils 2nd Elementary School. In Riga he graduated from the State Elementary School and continued his education at the Chemistry Department of Riga State Technical Secondary School. In autumn 1944 Vīdzirkste and his family fled to Germany, emigrating to the USA in Christmas 1950 where he settled in New York City and soon joined the Will Barnett’s workshop at the Art Students’ League. Vīdzirkste was mathematically oriented. He worked as an audiovisual specialist at the Federal Reserve Bank where he learned the principles of electronic calculation devices.Vīdzirkste integrates knowledge of mathematics, chemistry and music in his art. His creative career started in the late 1950s and involved giving up polychromes and reducing composition to dark-and-light, basic formal relations. Vīdzirkste says in an interview he does not aim to create landscapes or “pictures” but “the relationships of objects”. He organises information expressed as a point, line, circle and plane, creating an arrangement or iteration of elements where the same application uses different sizes and the element used in the application changes with each new painting. Vīdzirkste was interested in absolute rhythm, the spontaneous and calculated, regular and irregular, symmetrical and asymmetrical, changing and unchanging intervals, grades of protruding dots as the indicators of distance and gradations of timbre, multi-layered polyphony and minimalist asceticism. Peering into his canvases, the musically oriented observer perceives an intonation analogous to serial music that ignores the motif, condensing all the information into a single sound.

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