ABSTRACT
In Gyorgy Kepes's organicist paradigm, modernist light art could act in the city similarly to a protective "organizing cell" charged with electricity in an organism, which repeats its own structure within its environment, or like a self-reproducing automaton of an open cybernetic system. Kepes's light mural and Hitchcock's Vertigo, even if unknowingly, develop a cultural dialog about the image of urbanism in the late 1950s. Kepes's KLM Light Mural is an attempt to salvage the practice of "action" photography in an electric medium to engender a more complex and temporally enfolding encounter in the public realm. Art in America in a 1960 issue published a full-page extreme angle shot of the light mural and the artist's accompanying article. The popularity of the movement and its anxious subjectivity peaked in 1957––58, when the Museum of Modern Art organized its commemorative Jackson Pollock retrospective, touring major cities of Europe and America.
