Art is often static, but that doesn't mean it wants to stand still. Painters such as the futurist Giacomo Balla, for instance, showed the dynamism of the modern city using geometry and colour - frantic conglomerations of brightly coloured shapes bursting to break free of the picture frames.
Geometry of Motion 1920s/1970s, an exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), shows a group of artists with a different approach to movement.
The Neue Optik artists of the 1920s, a group that included Marcel Duchamp and Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, used unconventional optical techniques to perform artistic investigations into the nature
of movement. In the 1970s, another group of artists used these artworks as inspiration for their own, experimental, works.
On show at MoMA are a diverse array of experimental artworks about space and time - the two physical entities that are necessary for movement.
There are the 'Prouns' - a Russian acronym for 'Project For the Affirmation of The New' - created by Russian suprematist artist El Lissitzky. These paintings were made to be rotated or hung in any direction, bringing the idea of movement into the work itself.
There's a picture of photographer and painter Moholy-Nagy's 'Light Space Modulator', a machine that he used to, as he put it, paint with light. There are the spinning discs of Duchamp's optical illusions, as well as more modern works by artists such as Robert Smithson, who filmed the Sun's reflection on water from a helicopter for 1970's Spiral Jetty.
