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“Art today is nothing but a great illusion,” Julio Le Parc lamented in his 1963 manifesto, presenting the home truths of French culture. “People are far away from the art scene.” The Argentine artist, who has died aged 97, moved to Paris and was caught up in the decade’s riots. The answer was a large series of works that tested light, movement and color, and required the active participation of the viewer.
The most ancient of these consisted of large telephones, which appeared spectacularly, metal wire and plastic pieces moving as the viewer walked around the sculptures, light shooting between the shiny objects. For Le Parc these works were not for spectacle, but to shake the viewer to apolitical laziness, a disease that he thought had crept into the museums and galleries of the time. He wrote, “the desire to lead the audience away from their apathy that makes them accept the carelessness that forces them to be an art, but a whole life”.
From these first experiments, Le Parc went on to create more ambitious, immersive experiences, including labyrinths, mind-sets and interactive games, all “artificial” with the audience, as he put it.
His Lumières Alternées (1963-93) featured moving lights that the viewer must negotiate; in the 1978 work from the series, included in the historical observations given to Le Parc is currently at Tate Modernviewers are encouraged to walk through a maze of laser-lit hanging curtains. In Ensemble of Eleven Surprise Movements (1965) and Pattern to Manipulate (1967), the viewer activates a series of noisy, mechanical objects, from spinning wheels to rattles, by pressing buttons. Le Parc’s manifesto decreed: “It is forbidden not to participate. It is forbidden not to touch. It is forbidden not to break.”
Born near the Andes in Palmira, a region west of the city of Mendoza, Julio was the son of Angelina Andino, a seamstress, and Juan Le Parc, a Frenchman who worked as a railroad engineer. Julio attended the local primary school until the age of 13, when he quit working at various jobs to bring some income to the family, such as repairing bicycles and at a fruit box factory.
His parents separated when he was 15, and he, his mother and siblings moved to Buenos Aires. There Julio resumed his studies with evening classes at the Escuela de Bellas Artes Manuel Belgrano while working during the day at a handbag factory. The family problems led to the politics that shaped his entire career.
He was also able to take weekly sculpture lessons taught by Lucio Fontana until 1947 when, at the age of 19, he left his studies with the family in “complete and confused rebellion submission and obedience”, leaving around Argentina and moving different circles anarchist and Marxist.
His return to technical school in 1954 coincided with a worsening political situation Argentina. However, that year he married Martha Boto, a textile artist who was also studying at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes Ernesto de la Cárcova. After the 1955 coup that ousted President Juan Perón, the family began to look for ways to escape, Le Parc received a travel grant from the French government.
He arrived in Paris in 1958, and began working on what he described as “systematic” black and white paintings, collectively known as Surfaces, in which the patterns he created seemed to move like illusions.
Two years later he founded Grav (Group la Recherche d’Art Visuel), six French and Argentinian artists who hated the “mystery” of art and distrusted its bourgeois and capitalist ideas. They participated in the 1963 Paris Biennale with the Labyrinth, a combination of 20 “natural events” including murals and electric machines, then Documenta in Kassel, Germany, in 1964, and the Venice Biennale in 1966, where they won the art prize. In the same year Le Parc had his first solo exhibition, at the Howard Wise Gallery in New York.
Grav’s most successful work, however, took place abroad. On 19 April 1966, from 8am to midnight, he planned A Day on the Roadwhich included artists planting balloons in the fountains of Paris and a large kaleidoscope in the Jardin des Tuileries, and those passing by the Opéra Metro gave the opportunity to wear kinetic sculptures. The day ended with a light show on the Seine.
Although Grav’s actions were not considered serious enough by the Situationist International (the Marxist activists who were in power during the protests of May 1968 believed that the group was only turning the “spectator” into a “spectator of pleasure”), Le Parc did not hold grudges. During the protests of 1968 he helped a lot Popular Ateliermaking posters for the student body. Because of this he was exiled from France for a while, traveling around Europe for several months.
While Le Parc participated in the 1967 São Paulo Biennial, he joined the 1969 boycott against the exhibition when the Brazilian military entered its most restrictive phase. In 1970 he went to Cuba to study the revolution, then to Puerto Rico for the first time Biennial of Latin American Printsand Colombia for the Medellín Biennial. That year his work was exhibited in London for the first time, in Kinetics, a group exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, dedicated to mechanical engineering. In 1972 Le Parc was given a retrospective exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris. “Incited by my anti-school beliefs, I decided to leave it at random with heads or tails. Therefore, they rejected the show.
However, museum research came to the Museo de Arte Moderno, Mexico City, in 1975, and the Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona, in 1978. That year he was also the subject of a BBC documentary. By this time Le Parc was producing several solo exhibitions a year, but his efforts continued. He joined the International Brigade of Anti-Fascist Painters and founded Espace Latino-Americain, a specialist in promoting art from the region and directing campaigns against the military regimes of South America. In 1986, he also participated in the Venice Biennale, as well as the Havana Biennial, in which he led a discussion of young Cuban artists.
In the 90s his popularity declined, but by the end of the 1900s he was given a return tour to Argentina, and another tour to the US between 2010 and 2011. Attracting 220,000 visitors, it was the most successful show in the history of the organization. A year later, the Serpentine Galleries in London staged his first solo exhibition in the UK.
He and Marta separated but remained close until her death last year. He is survived by his sons, Juan, Gabriel and Yamil, and five grandchildren.
