Gego and the Line's Autobiography

The line, historically considered simple in its form, is a contemporary site of a rather complex set of activities: connection, joining, communication, channeling, processing. The line is at once something upon which living beings move and itself the embodiment of a trace of previous movement. In this way, the line image is abundant in any consideration of migration, its expression, and its mediation. Line terms that often accompany or give image to migration are flow, trajectory, traverse, borders, limits, lines in the sand, fleeing, escaping, deviations, errantry, etc. etc. The ubiquity of line images pertaining to movement and the human body recast the line as having a depth outside of geometry, an embodied depth that has time again been remediated and expressed in tandem with the drawn line of visual arts.

Lyotard wrote of the distinction between a line’s figural and discursive qualities that “it’s as if a line were a sentence pursued by other means.” The line as an expression of movement works to suggest so much without the luxury (or burden) of a semantic register. That this openly semantic line, bursting to express itself, enables movement in the visual art has been noted for some time. The futurists claimed in their Realistic Manifesto (1920) that they “affirm the line only as a direction of the static forces and their rhythm in objects.” The serpentine line as defined by William Hogarth was a way to express movement not as an ideal, but as an embodiment of movement in the stroke itself. Artists ranging from Klee, Kandinsky, Mondrian all put forth a theory of the line as it concerned the line’s strange capacity to activate the motional dimensions of materiality. However, no artist more clearly found expression in the line’s inextricable alliance with movement than Gego.