Lye’s working methods and theory

Roger Horrocks: Art that moves: the work of Len Lye
258 pp, b/w and colour illustrations, plus DVD
Softcover
Auckland University Press 2009

Roger Horrocks is well known for his fascinating biography of artist Len Lye, and properly much admired for that. This second Lye book he uses to elaborate on some aspects not elucidated earlier for reasons of space. He examines in close detail the concepts behind Lye’s movement-fixated practice, describing in detail his camera-less films and kinetic sculpture and many of their underpinning ideas – much of it centering on the viewer’s body. To do this Horrocks has recapped some of the biographical details around Lye’s production, put them alongside relevant portions of his writing and then often expanded on the various scientific theories that the artist was attracted to, as well as other research that has been developed since his death.

There are five chapters: one on the intellectual tradition Lye is part of that focuses on how we think about movement, another on his amazing life, and others on his distinctive films and sculptures. The third chapter on Lye’s artistic preoccupations overall is particularly rich in ideas, and the highlight of the book. This is because Horrocks is presenting new material that often comes from neurological research and other fields.

In this chapter Horrocks looks closely at Lye’s interest in the notion of bodily empathy: how we can be subconsciously influenced by the movement of objects or people in space we observe around us, like for example swaying trees, or people playing sport or dancing. We can be impelled to involuntarily mimic their movement. This muscular activity Horrocks links to mirror neurons, cells that assist us in acquiring learning skills by copying. Lye wrote about his conscious ability to get inside ‘the shoes of anything that moved, from a grasshopper to a hawk, a fish to a yacht, from a cloud to the shimmering rustle of icy leaves on a brick wall.’ (p.112), so it is interesting to wonder about this type of projection.

Let me digress a little. In a book published for last year’s exhibition of conceptual art The Quick and the Dead that Peter Eleey curated for the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis, he interviews the cognitive neuroscientist Olaf Blanke about the human sense of bodily location, and outer body experiences such as autoscopy (seeing yourself). In this conversation they discuss works like Magritte’s famous painting La reproduction interdite (1937),  and also Bruce Nauman’s video installation Live–taped video corridor (1970) where the viewer sees themselves moving down a long narrow space.

Blanke then talks about an experiment using virtual reality technology where the subjects are stroked on the back with a paintbrush while witnessing it happening to an avatar, a projected image of themselves two metres in front of where they are standing. When asked where they were bodily located they said a foot in front. The visual stimuli overruled the touch stimuli and the usually dominant proprioceptive (intuitive body location) and vestibular (internal balancing) senses.

This experiment seems to tell us about the power of the visual and also (in the case of Lye) the visual imagination: that the body’s sense of self-location is not as fixed as we might have thought – whether viewing itself or (as in Lyelike empathy) seemingly entering something else that moves. And perhaps Lye’s claimed hyper-intense empathy was something like the synaesthesia experienced by Kandinsky and others, a very unusual ability that certain artists possess.

Horrocks’ book is very good, methodically going through the main thematic threads of Lye’s working methods such as the importance of images from the deeply intuitive ‘old brain’, the process of carefully selecting specific patterns of movement, or his refusal to separate brain from body - and elaborating on them with great precision.

In book’s final chapter, Horrocks tells his readers the history and purpose of the organisation that posthumously creates Lye’s work and which promotes it internationally – the Len Lye Foundation. He explains its aims in carrying out a programme of preserving, restoring and constructing Lye works. He even sets out some of the issues raised by Lye Foundation critics – such as the view that a dead artist cannot maintain the same close scrutiny and quality control over their work as when alive, even when that posthumous task is delegated to admirers and close friends. Various key individuals in the work’s production like John Matthews, Evan Webb and Tyler Cann are all introduced, the crucial roles they play carefully explained.

Horrocks is probably the most lucid ‘hardcore’ intellectual New Zealand’s art world has, an unusually outward looking writer with a constant clarity that never indicates any compromise of idea (no matter how complicated). He also has a huge knowledge of many seemingly disparate fields (within the arts and far beyond), accompanied always in his expression by a sense of his own excitement. The Lye biography was very very compact with snappy short chapters, and that resolute focus was part of its appeal. This book in comparison is less so, particularly at its end, for the Foundation chapter could have been a separate smaller publication. Nonetheless the longer more detailed discussions of Lye’s art are an immensely valuable absorbing read, and the interpretative richness of the work is such that Horrocks and his updated research will invariably not have had the last word.

Len comes to Auckland

Len Lye: Art that moves
Curated by Roger Horrocks
Gus Fisher
27 November 2009 - 6 February 2010

It is almost exactly thirty years since Andrew Bogle curated the very first major survey of Len Lye work in this country – for Auckland City Art Gallery, and it is astounding it has taken so long for an updated version to return to this city. In the interim a lot has happened. There have been many remarkable kinetic sculptures posthumously created by the Len Lye Foundation, new films discovered overseas, and new photographic works and poetic texts dug out of the archives kept in New Plymouth’s Govett-Brewster. And considering the small size of the Gus Fisher compared to the New Gallery, this necessarily modest selection made by Roger Horrocks is suitably varied. It looks amazing good.

The reason for Horrocks’ assembling of this small but condensed survey is to provide a palpable public context for two new books on Lye he is launching. He is already well-known as the author of a superb Lye biography (Len Lye, 2001), and the co-editor (with Wystan Curnow) of a wonderful collection of Lye’s writings (Figures of Motion, 1984). Horrocks has also edited two books of Lye’s drawings and writings for Holloway Press – is now launching the second - and very recently he and his wife Shirley made a film, Art That Moves. Some of Lye’s theories mentioned in the film Horrocks elaborates on in his new AUP book of the same name, particularly the notion of muscular empathy: how our bodies can involuntarily respond to movement we observe in nature (like swaying trees), art (dance or kinetic sculpture), or sport.

With this point in mind, it is especially exciting in this exhibition to see two posthumous, recently recreated Lye kinetic sculptures, Fire Bush and Zebra. Because of the small size of the venue it would not be possible to show the famous and extremely noisy works like Trilogy or Blade, but these ‘new’ works – set to timers as all the metal sculptures are – have real presence. Fire Bush is like a small version of Fountain with its cluster of delicate sprouting rods, but instead of revolving it is orchestrated to shake – in an increasingly frenetic fashion. Zebra is a twirling rod, painted in black and white bands, that moves at different speeds and also with subtly different sorts of trajectory at its base - in order to generate different sorts of what Lye called ‘harmonics’. Like the manically wobbling flat strip, Blade, Zebra in its movement goes through different stages where the blurry, solo vertical form splits into two and then three stacked swelling sections. Blade though is ferociously wild and untameable, but Zebra is gracious and friendly – a delicate, pirouetting, bending needle.

So in this show there are five kinetic sculptures, two large paintings, four films, four photogram portraits made with light-sensitive paper and no cameras, and in one vitrine, an intriguing sequence of a dozen abstract ‘doodles’ that look like story-boards for a scratch film or perhaps the choreographed movement of a suite of sculptures.

There is also some supporting material in the form of scribing tools, stencils, combs etc., that are good for the non-initiated perhaps, but not actual artworks. Maybe other Lye items (like his gorgeous book covers) would have been better.

The fascinating thing about Lye is his conceptual cohesion, how his various intellectual obsessions, while seemingly disparate, actually make up a tight package of research - the theory for his assorted, very manual, art-making approaches and their bodily focus.

The other interesting aspect is his espousal of art–making as a playful, pleasurable process, involving trial and error with materials with properties that excite you emotionally; that thinking is non-dualistic, about curiosity and imaginative (but visceral) hunches you can’t quite explain, engaging the world with your whole body.

This show is a rare opportunity for Aucklanders to catch up on what many New Plymouthites now take for granted in their gallery visits. A Christmas treat.

Best Lye book ever

Len Lye
Edited by Tyler Cann and Wystan Curnow
Essays by Guy Brett, Tyler Cann, Wystan Curnow, Roger Horrocks, Tessa Laird, and Evan Webb
Designed by Kalee Jackson
184 pp, b/w and colour illustrations, paperback
Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and Len Lye Foundation 2009

It has taken a little over thirty years but it has been well worth the wait: here at last is the first Len Lye coffee table book, with decently sized colour illustrations and substantial discussions on individual themes. Something to go alongside Roger Horrocks’ wonderful biography and Figures of Motion, Curnow and Horrocks’ exuberant anthology of the artist’s writings. Three decades have lapsed between Lye’s first show at the Govett-Brewster and the large exhibition currently on the Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, and there have been one or two remarkable publications in between (like Horrocks’ and Jean-Michel Bouhours’ 2000 Pompidou anthology), but this attractive and highly informative, yellow tome is very striking. It should really do something to spread the Lye 'gospel' overseas. Especially in the northern hemisphere.

Most of the six essays are superb. Accompanied often by images of recently made works they offer new perspectives on hitherto undiscussed areas, or fresh overviews.

Wystan Curnow’s contribution skilfully intertwines the series of fifty photograms Lye made in New York in 1947 with a writing project he was obsessed with: Individual Happiness Now – a postwar thesis about correcting the ills of the world. With the group of artists, musicians, tradesmen, friends and intellectuals that Lye asked to pose in profile for ‘portraits’ on sheets of light sensitive paper, Curnow speculates briefly but most interestingly about a group of baby images and the portrait of Nina Bull. Bull was a research associate in psychiatry at Columbia University whom Lye met through Louise Bates Ames, a curator at the Yale Clinic of Child Development. Ames he met when doing Life with Baby a March of Time newsreel assignment.

Lye was interested in human biological development and Bull’s published article Attitudes: Conscious and Unconscious, an account of how unconscious inclinations deep within the central nervous system, transmute via a particular three stage neuromuscular sequence into a certain kind of physiological orientation and positioning. This then through visceral feeling becomes a conscious act. He was intrigued by the origins of bodily dispositions and their relationship to language use and images that the subject might empathise with. Such an interest was obvious in the emotional and bodily properties of his films, and in the fifties it was to extend into kinetic sculpture.

On another tack, Evan Webb takes a brilliant observation made by the French film curator Jean-Michel Bouhours in 2000 and develops it into an elucidation of how the materiality of film and the mechanics of film projectors influenced Lye’s kinetic sculpture. Webb discusses Bouhours’ unusual installation of Lye’s work in Le Fresnoy where he placed projectors running with films alongside kinetic sculptures in a large exhibition hall, and how the projectors seemed to become kinetic ‘tangibles’. He points out Bouhours’ enthusiasm for the very early (1930) photogram Self Planting At Night which has an image of a blindly stumbling light-house, walking with a beam projecting from its head. It is also a tree ‘planting’ itself, a theme resurrected seventeen years later with Bull and the derivation of individual ‘attitudes’ - as discussed above.

Webb then goes on to describe the processes of posthumously contructing works like Water Whirler and Ribbon Snake, highlighting their projector-like properties: one using rollers (Ribbon Snake), the other an undulating, spinning wand emitting horizontal jets of water like a convulsing vertical filmstrip or writhing lighthouse (Water Whirler).

Lye’s fraught and highly ambivalent relationship with Surrealism is examined in depth by Tyler Cann, the curator of the Len Lye Collection and Archives. Lye participated in several Surrealist exhibitions and mixed in their milieu, but was often offended whenever he was classified as one. He felt that Surrealism excessively emphasised a literary dimension with an interpretative or narrative dimension that blocked the immediacy of the visceral sensations he was striving to achieve. This conflict Cann then elaborates on (possibly with unintended irony), discussing Lessing’s famous treatise on Laocoön where he champions poetry and text over the visual arts, seeing the serpents in Greek statues as improperly mixing symbolic language into sculpture. Quoting the art historian W.J.Mitchell’s use of William Blake to repudiate Lessing’s purity of genres, Cann then says Lye works like Ribbon Snake deliberately blur over such distinctions.

In another shorter essay Cann looks at Lye’s use of scale, coloured light, sound and motion within five versions of Fountain, the well known cluster of splayed rods on a turning disc, how the Len Lye Foundation came to be formed and the activities of himself, Evan Webb and John Matthews. Cann’s and Webb’s writings about processes behind the current posthumous creation of Lye’s art are an excellent introduction for those unfamiliar with the aims of the Foundation.

Roger Horrocks’ contribution goes back in Lye's career to 1939, presenting a detailed account of his use of direct painting and synchronised music in his film Swinging the Lambeth Walk. It discusses his use of music from Le Quintette du Hot Club (with Django Reinhardt and Stephane Grapelli) and the Milt Herth Trio. The records of these two jazz bands provided most of the soundtrack for its three minutes twenty second duration. Horrocks analyses how Lye pulled together solos from different recordings, put them into eight bar blocks, and sometimes repeated them. He would match certain repeated alignments of coloured shape or line with specific instruments, and plan the co-ordination (helped in sound editing by Ernest Meyer, a German composer friend) by listing in sequence descriptions of solos in instrument-coded, coloured pencil.

Guy Brett, the English curator who did a residency at the Adam Art Gallery last year, a well-known enthusiast for Brazilian art and seventies kinetics, has an essay that provides an international context for Lye’s sculpture, looking at his practice alongside others such as Vantongerloo, Takis, Soto and Tinguely. While it’s informative, there’s nothing revelatory that you can’t already get from the Horrocks bio or Brett’s own brilliant Force Fields publication - though it is a successful condensation.

Similarly Tessa Laird’s contribution is a little limited. She unfortunately focuses solely on film and colour, and perhaps this is what the editors asked her to do. What she says about younger Lye-influenced New Zealand film-makers like Lisa Reihana, Nova Paul, and Veronica Vaevae is accurate and a good read, but this publication should have also included some discussion of related contemporary New Zealand kinetic sculptors (like Andrew Drummond, Marcus Moore, Evan Webb and Tony Nicholls) and other artists influenced by his concept of ‘doodle’ – like Paul Hartigan. Lye’s influence has travelled through younger generations of artists in this country on several levels, and this book should have been able to tap that.

The only other quibble I have is that, although there is a good biographical chronology, there is no index. You can always use the Horrocks book for many such queries but here, with new research being showcased, easy accessibility to fresh information is important. However overall, this publication is clearly a huge success. It’s gorgeous and it’s thrilling. The sexiest Lye publication yet.