Madí

For other uses, see Madi (disambiguation).

Madí (or MADI; also known as Grupo Madí) is an international abstract art movement initiated in Buenos Aires in 1946 by the Hungarian-Argentinian artist and poet Gyula Kosice, and the Uruguayans Carmelo Arden Quin and Rhod Rothfuss.

Concrete art

The movement encompasses all branches of art (the plastic and pictorial arts, music, literature, theater, architecture, dance, etc.) and promotes concrete art (i.e., non-representational geometric abstraction). The artists in the Madí movement typically focus on the concrete, physical reality of the medium and play with the traditional conventions of Western art (for instance, by creating works on irregularly-shaped canvases). Representatives of the movement, in addition to Kosice, Quin and Rothfuss, are Martín Blaszko, Waldo Longo, Juan Bay, Esteban Eitler, Diyi Laañ, Valdo Wellington, among others.

Origin of the name

Gyula Kosice has explained that the name for the movement is derived from the Republican motto in the Spanish Civil War, "Madrí, Madrí, no pasarán" ("Madrid, Madrid, they will not make it in", i.e., the Francoist forces will not invade Madrid). The name is most typically understood as an acronym for Movimiento, Abstracción, Dimensión, Invención (Movement, Abstraction, Dimension, Invention).

Characteristics

A MADI work is non-figurative; it has a cut-out or irregularly-shaped form; its colors are flat and sharply defined; it is often three-dimensional and sometimes articulated and/or mechanical; and it is playful in spirit. MADI is perhaps the sole remaining art movement which can boast of a half-century of uninterrupted activity since its creation in Buenos Aires in 1946. Today, the MADI movement has over 60 members — painters, sculptors, architects and poets — working in France, Italy, Belgium, Spain, Hungary, Japan, Argentina and the United States. The man behind this fifty years of artistic creation is Carmelo Arden Quin.

Madí Manifesto

Gyula Kosice

Buenos Aires, 1946

Madí art can be identified by the organization of elements peculiar to each art in its continuum. It contains presence, movable dynamic arrangement, development of the theme itself, lucidity and plurality as absolute values, and is, therefore, free from interference by the phenomena of expression, representation and meaning.

            Madí drawing is an arrangement of dots and lines on a surface.

            Madí painting, colour and two-dimensionality. Uneven and irregular frame, flate surface, and curved or concave surface. Articulated surfaces with lineal, rotating and changing movement.

            Madí sculpture, three-dimensional, no colour. Total form and solid shapes with contour articulated, rotating, changing movement, etc.

            Madí architecture, environment and mobile movable forms.

            Madí music, recording of sounds in the golden section.

            Madí poetry, invented proposition, concepts and images which are untranslatable by means other than language. Pure conceptual happening.

            Madí theater, movable scenery, invented dialogue.

            Madí novel and short story, characters and events outside specific time and space, or in totally invented time and space.

            Madí dance, body and movements circumscribed within a restricted space, without music.

            In highly industrialized countries, the old bourgeois realism has almost completely disappeared, naturalism is being defended very half-heartedly and is beating a retreat.

            It is at this point that abstraction, essentially expressive and romantic, takes its place. Figurative schools of art, from Cubism to Surrealism, are caught up in this order. Those schools responded to the ideological needs of the time and their achievements are invaluable contributions to the solution of problems of contemporary culture. Nevertheless, their historic moment is past. Their insistence on ‘exterior’ themes is a return to naturalism, rather than to the true constructivist spirit which has spread through all countries and cultures, and is seen for example in Expressionism, Surrealism, Constructivism, etc.

            With Concrete Art—which in fact is a younger branch of that same abstract spirit—began the great period of non-figurative art, in which the artist, using the element and its respective continuum, creates the work in all its purity, without hybridization and objects without essence. But Concrete Art lacked universality and organization. It developed deep irreconcilable contradictions. The great voids and taboos of ‘old’ art were preserved, in painting, sculpture, poetry, respectively, superimposition, rectangular frame, lack of visual theme, the static interaction between volume and environment, nosological and graphically translatable propositions and images. The result was that, with an organic theory and disciplinarian practice, Concrete Art could not seriously combat the intuitive movements, like Surrealism, which have won over the universe. And so, despite adverse conditions, came the triumph of instinctive impulses over reflection, intuition over consciousness; the revelation of the unconscious over cold analysis, the artist’s thorough and rigorous study vis-à-vis the laws of the object to be constructed; the symbolic, the hermetic, and the magic over reality; the metaphysical over experience.

            Evident in the theory and knowledge of art is subjective, idealist, and reactionary description.

            To sum up, pre-Madí art:

A scholastic, idealist historicism

An irrational concept

An academic technique

A false, static and unilateral composition

A work lacking in essential utility

A consciousness paralyzed by insoluble contradictions; impervious to the permanent renovation in technique and style

Madí stands against all this. It confirms man’s constant all absorbing desire to invent and construct objects within absolute eternal human values, in his struggle to construct a new classless society, which liberates energy, masters time and space in all senses, and dominates matter to the limit. Without basic descriptions of its total organization, it is impossible to construct the object or bring it into the continuity of creation. So the concept of invention is defined in the field of technique and the concept of creation as a totally defined essence.

For Madí-ism, invention is an internal, superable ‘method’, and creation is an unchangeable totality. Madí therefore, INVENTS AND CREATES.

Why MADI?

To the question, "Why MADI?" Josee Lapeyrere, who met Arden Quin in 1962 and has since participated with her poem-objects in most of the events organized by the movement, replies: "MADI's goal is to be rigorous, inventive, gay and ludic." By the importance to which they accord spiritual and Imaginative games, even the most serious MADI artists can be described as playful. Already in 1795, Schiller focused on "the inborn playful nature of man" as an explanation for his production of art forms. In his remarkable essay, "Homo Ludens" ("Ludic Man") (1938), Johan Huizinga observed that, "Play reveals an aspiration to beauty. The terms we use to designate the elements of play are, for the most part, the same as those utilized in the aesthetic realm: beauty, tension, balancing, equilibrium, gradation, contrast, etc. Like art, play engages and delivers. It absorbs. It captivates, or, in other words, it charms. It is full of those two supremely noble qualities which man expresses through rhythm and harmony." The French art critic Dominique Jacquemin also remarks that, "It is possible that Arden Quin's passion for game playing led him to create MADI, the only remaining contemporary art movement which can pride itself in possessing both coherence and a truly international outlook."

External links

• Volf Roitman
• Madi Museum Dallas, Tx
• The Hungarian MADI art periodical in English
• Arden Quin