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.

READING ROOM THREE

Reading Room: A Journal of Art and Culture
Issue 3: Art Goes On
Ed. Christina Barton, Natasha Conland and Wystan Curnow
pp.183, illust. colour and b/w
Pub. E. H. McCormick Research Library of Auckland Art Gallery, March 2009

They say, third time lucky, and this year’s Reading Room is especially good. In the past, because of editors Curnow and Barton being particularly passionate about sixties and seventies art, it has slightly been out of sync with a contemporary ethos. But no more. This issue is particularly current in some of its featured New Zealand artists (notably Gambia Castlers, Dan Arps and Fiona Connor – the latter with some drawings of Auckland Art Gallery as demolition site: a witty comment on the theme of newness); pertinent also in its discussion of the recession and the reduced market. And it is comparatively accessible – is not turgid. Still academic but comparatively clear and focussed.

The issue kicks off with a twenty-four page roundtable discussion where the editors trade emailed thoughts with invited guests Peter Brunt, Damian Skinner, Greg Burke, Gavin Hipkins, Robert Leonard and Emma Bugden. In response to Tina Barton asking what characterises the current moment, Peter Brunt and Damian Skinner talk about Ngahiraka Mason’s re-presentation of Turuki! Turuki! Paneke Paneke - 50 years after this pioneer exhibition of Maori art in Auckland. Brunt sees the included artists as creating a variety of western modernism, but Skinner perceives Mason as intending a repudiation of modernism and the achievements of nineties artists like Michael Parekowhai or Peter Robinson, saying the show “demonstrates the reality of what I would call Maori art history – art history that is conceptually different to Pakeha art history, a kind of writing that conceives of history and art differently.” (p.10).

There are many threads moving in and out of this complicated conversation, but the most exciting section is when Robert Leonard laments the oppressive attributes of social and cultural history when applied as “the dominant narratives or concerns of art”. He points out that they result in “denying art any wiggle room, the chance to make its own case.” (p.24). Damian Skinner agrees, praising the way “art exceeds and confounds the struggle of political decolonization and denies easy or obvious definitions.” In a deft bit of double-speak he says “I’m hoping art will muddle decolonisation as much as decolonisation will order art.”

Gavin Hipkins then makes a series of damning observations about the conformity and avoidance of risk-taking by graduates and post-graduates in New Zealand art schools, and in the shows curated by this country’s top municipal institutions. There is a lack of critical dialogue and a self-constraint that ensures content is kept away from over ambitious extremes, a voluntary flattening out of artists’ agency. (p.25). One wonders if some of these criticisms can even be directed at Reading Room itself in terms of some of its content.

This round-table discussion has an amusing ending when almost everybody jumps down the convenor Tina Barton’s throat, for asking “what is art for?…what purpose does it serve?” Greg Burke is troubled by “the rush of many to declare art’s functionality” (p.26) and Natasha Conland finds Barton’s question “troubling, as (she doesn’t) believe in (art’s) utilitarian dimension.” Emma Bugden too admits that she “harbours great suspicion of the term ‘useful’ ” and is critical of defining “the worth of an action purely by outcome.” (p.28).

Burke praises the uses of images that make no sense in isolation, suggesting that Deleuze’s term ‘any-space–whatever’ is valuable for linking cinematic moments “removed from the rest of the narrative”, while Wystan Curnow lashes out at the confining character of contextual meaning, for “narrowing art’s sphere of action”. Rightly so I think.

This long and richly layered discussion bears repeated readings to draw out the many responses and counter-responses. It’s a good start for the magazine.

Of the very experienced art writers contributing to this publication, Wystan Curnow, Terry Smith and Adrian Martin go back to the seventies and even earlier. Curnow’s text on Keiran Lyons 1975 Welder’s Weakness installation is a much needed supplement to an article he wrote on Lyons’ Superimpression (1973) for the New Art: Some recent New Zealand sculpture and post-object art book he put out with Jim Allen in 1976. It is not Curnow at his very best (for that you need his writing on Apple, Lye or McCahon), but it is more informative than its companion piece in the New Art anthology.

The Adrian Martin article here is his second contribution to Reading Room. It is about modernist film sequels (post WW2) and a whole range of ‘linked’ paired movies that he explores with characteristic precision. Martin does not talk about sequel in the usual sense of the word but as ‘gesture’ (a term also referenced by Jon Bywater in his essay on Dan Arps, and Anthony White in his discussion of Fontana) – not as continuation ‘of a coherent, mappable fictional world’ (p.50).

He emphasizes the fragmented nature of cinema, denying its often claimed coherency, and discusses Raúl Ruiz’s book series Poetics of Cinema, particularly his notion of ‘a film with 300 shots is 300 films’ as a fundamental discontinuity. There is an issue, Martin explains, for if film itself cannot have an internal continuity then how can a sequel be a continuation?

He points out how films like the Mad Max series shift as the central figure’s body and narrative context alter over time, this changing being also characteristic of documentary sequels. With their heterogeneous quality of film stock, black and white often mixed with colour, their inconsistencies create patterns within a bigger montage.

Martin’s main interest is to show how in over the last decade film-makers like Hal Hartley or Wong Kar-wai have let their characters stay static in certain sequels while the actors are allowed to age. Tone and genre alter drastically, links between films deliberately disconnected, and information methodically withheld. Displacements are created, and incongruous casts used with unrelated cinematic histories. Sometimes actors are recast to replay old roles; or there is a retelling and restarting of each sequel from scratch; a deliberate blurring between remake and sequel; or a rupture between the original film and its ‘contemporary correspondence’; or the retention of the same sound track – all these devices crating a new sort of mischievous adventurousness in a non-Hollywood film history.

Another Australian, Terry Smith has contributed a meticulously structured, highly inventive essay that deals with Walter Benjamin and his ownership of the 1920 Paul Klee watercolour ‘Angelus Novus’, a symbolic ‘angel of history.’ Starting with a discussion of this painting, and a poem about it by Benjamin’s friend Gershom Scholem, Smith looks at the forces of history, the global community and the current recession, using three models of listed concepts and economic realities to display the forces of social circulation.

One is based on a diagram by Thomas Friedman of the New York Times, of a top-down spread with globalization the key player at the top and agents, families and citizens at the bottom. Another is an inverted version of Friedman’s chart so that globalization becomes only one of many forces active in the world today, and the third is with the elements configured by nodal connections so that vectors move in all directions simultaneously, and any two elements can link up.

Smith then talks about the ‘civil society’ in global terms and starts to refer to various artworks that draw out a celebration of the values it upholds. Of particular interest are two works by Daniel Martinez, one a convulsing prosthetic humanoid, twitching frantically on the floor as if undergoing torture. Another is a gridded display of 121 gold-painted wooden panels presenting the names of various military organisations endeavouring to enforce a political position through violence. Such work Smith sees as espousing the vision of Klee’s Angel, and Jeff Koons’ Puppy as art that is operating contrary to it.

One of the difficulties of reading a text-dominant magazine like Reading Room is trying to get a clear picture of the art described, and then deciding if you will run with the writer in their discussion. Often the visual information (photographs and/or drawings) and the text don’t convince you. This is the case for many of the works in Helena Reckitt’s espousal of feminist and queer artists who search through art history (especially the seventies) for precedents that they can build upon - despite the rich content of her discussion. Such interactions Reckitt sees as a form of negotiation or conversation, not nostalgic celebration or fetishization. For me personally, only one work, Kajsa Dahlberg’s A Room of One’s Own / A Thousand Libraries, a massive printed edition of texts made by duplicating scribbled annotations found in a number of 1958 editions of Woolf’s book, really excites as a project.

In the archive section Liz Eastmond’s description of Fan (Feminist Art Networkers) projects in the eighties is highly informative and detailed, as is Mary Kisler’s account of the life and activities of the second AAG Director, the art historian Peter Tomory. I remember reading his and Hamish Keith’s pioneer set of three small books on NZ painting in the early seventies – long before Keith and Brown’s own historic publication appeared - and noticed then that he had disappeared.

Eastmond’s account of Fan though is unusual because of the breezy cadences of her written delivery. Most art historians use a standard tone which is ubiquitously standard in its emotional pitch, and a little dreary, but her crisp phrasing and buoyant expression here keeps the reading lively.

The highlights of RR3, in my view are the essays by Jon Bywater and Anthony White. Bywater has written several variations of an exegesis on Dan Arps and this version is the fullest and most richly layered. In it he analyses several recent Arps shows, documenting the themes and ingredients carefully.

Bywater considers that Arps’ practice reflects a ‘deep pessimism about the convergence of …the logics of artistic modernism and industrial or technological invention’ and that it ‘cynically parodies aspirations for art’s value’ by using ‘the market’s demand for novelty’ to coincide ‘with artistic invention’ as another symptom of a hegemonic capitalist mode of production.’ (p.107)

Bywater takes Giorgio Agamben’s notion of a sphere of aesthetic gestures (‘those means that emancipate themselves from their relation to an end while remaining means’) which Agamben sees as the ‘proper sphere of politics’ and applies them to a view that ‘the duty of the (film-making) director is to introduce…the element of waking.’ He sees Arps as doing something similar.

Though personally I think Arps’ work is more about a laboratory of semiotics (and not politics), Bywater has constructed an important document to be discussed. Yet Arps is more nihilistic than what Bywater indicates, though he does seem to have a programme where he systematically tinkers with meaning.

If there is any prevalent uniting theme in his exhibitions, it is more likely to be about the attaining of happiness. As for ‘the new’, he seems to be buying into it, and not critiquing it at all. I am not convinced Arps is a satirist.

Of the two remaining articles, Lee Weng Choy’s interview with Donna Ong is accompanied by some impressive black and white matt photographs of her installations. Choy is an exceptionally articulate and elegant writer but the conversation is too biographical and not sufficiently concentrated on Ong’s work. More on career than say practice, even though the notes with the images are richly detailed.

In commenting on the new, Choy says:

“Where I have been critical of the ‘new’ and how it is framed by the logic of relentless consumption… I’ve (also) wanted to point out how difficult it is to resist that. Criticism in general should attempt to slow things down and open up a space to reflect on the many processes we all get so caught up in.(p.86)”

Anthony White, in his lucid discussion of Fontana and Oldenburg’s attitudes to the new, points out that Lucio Fontana claimed his perforated canvases were devoid of gesture, and contained only cuts made mechanically without expressiveness. The ubiquitous egg shape Fontana used was often featured in the design of early sixties chairs and other European household items, and the bright hues he liked (emerald green, canary yellow and hot pink) were newly available fashion and design colours. He wanted to show his dismay at ‘inventions which follow one after the other’, and his alarm at ‘the speed of life’. His perforated ‘eggs’ had much in common with seventeenth century Dutch Vanitas paintings, intended as an allegory about life’s transience.

Claes Oldenburg’s 1961 installation The Store, with his enamel coated plaster ‘edible’ items had a similar theme. It was about a melancholic pining for the forties, the time of his childhood. The fake food products displayed in vitrines were based on what had been superseded by later novelties, only to disappear.

I enjoyed the pithy focus of this issue of Reading Room, and I say that (in contrast to much of its discussion) as someone who readily enjoys flux, the new and changes that regularly occur in art and social history. If art were static, I can’t imagine that I would be interested in it as a phenomenon, but possibly such a view is ideologically inculcated.

This Auckland Art Gallery publication is getting better and better. Looking forward to Number 4.

Reading?...Who, What, Where?

Reading Room: A Journal of Art and Culture
Issue Two: Transcendental Pop
Published by Auckland Art Gallery
Edited by Christina Barton, Natasha Conland and Wystan Curnow
200 pp, b/w and colour illustrations

It is hard to believe it has been a year since Reading Room 1 appeared. Hot on its heels we have RR2: Transcendental Pop, another good looking, substantial, academic publication set to consolidate the initial impact of the first. Its theme moves Pop Art’s perception of the ‘everyday’ as an all immanent surface towards what might now (without irony) be beneath it. It rejects Warholian ‘shallowness’ to seek out a foundation behind or above what could be a mirage.

Several of the essays touch on themes and issues raised in Mystic Truths, the international group show on the Occult that AAG curator Natasha Conland presented early last year. They present a broader context for her exhibition, particularly the papers by Lars Bang Larsen (on the Occult) and David Craig (on Mystic Truth participant, David Hatcher). When it opened Conland’s project was somewhat mystifying. Larsen’s essay now makes it less so as he explores his fascination with the paranormal and its growth as a theme of growing relevance to mainstream art. Amongst the artists he discusses are two Conland included, Joachim Koester (who looked at Aleister Crowley’s temple in Sicily) and Maria M. Loboda (who prepared a curse within a particular configuration of carefully selected flowers).

In terms of ‘Transcendental Pop’ Larsen sees this renewed interest in the unseen as a symptom of a prevalent global sense of tragedy, the rise of a developing biopolitic and a flight from capitalist spectacle. The attraction of the otherworldly is part of a reversal of Frederic Jamison’s ‘waning of effect’ where capital turned everything into surface. Now there an ‘increase of affect’ where new states of the communal psycho-physical body have become a sought after resource for advanced capitalism.

In her examination of Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s film, Zidane, on the French goalkeeper, and Harun Farocki's Deep Play, a twelve screen video installation, Conland explains the presence of the transcendental within the motion and action of sport. She discusses the structures of subjectivity embedded in such mass spectacles, within a tension between the individual and larger group, and how these films and installations explore that through the use of different forms of presentation and treatment of the ‘live’ narrative.

Morgan Thomas’ discussion of Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho starts by describing the different permutations of Gordon’s project and the role of Warhol in its genesis. Thomas analyses this artwork’s treatment of time, and views it as Baroque, with qualities such as folds, weightlessness and elevation. Although the later two aspects are feasible, to me ‘folds’ don’t seem applicable. Nor is it apt to compare this very unusual work with Baroque painters. It might be better to ponder the work of some eighties performance artists like the Butoh dancer Min Tanaka who is famous for his use of extraordinarily slow movement. The film is not wavelike (it doesn’t double back on itself to then repeat) but is about stasis as a referent, and incremental changes having an ongoing momentum.

Probably the most crucial text to the theme in this journal is Rex Butler’s discussion of Warhol, especially the films which he examines in the light of later developments by Koons and Hirst. He examines the notion of Warhol’s religiosity (as proposed by Jane Daggett Dillenberger) and how this actually contradicts the postmodernism normally associated with him, for it uncharacteristically introduces transcendence and depth.

To my mind the clearest and most pleasurable discussions in the journal are by Tan Lin and Daniel Palmer with their essays on two artists new to most New Zealand art enthusiasts: Eric Baudelaire and Darren Sylvester. While the former is particularly intriguing as a maker of films that defy category (they blend posters, still photography, performance and moving image), Sylvester’s images remind me of the late seventies portraits of children and teenagers by Jeff Wall, but with group compositions. They are images I would not personally normally be drawn to, but I especially enjoyed the content and style of Palmer’s argument, his use of surprising quotations from the artist, mixed with an accessible crafting of language.

In this vein the smaller sections at the back by Robert Leonard and Ron Brownson – on the late Giovanni Intra and Ed Ruscha – are a real treat. The much loved - and still sorely missed – Intra is given a much needed, insightful discussion by Leonard. With a Teststrip anthology of reviews appearing a couple of months ago, one hopes that perhaps a collection of Intra’s writings will appear soon. Brownson’s detailed account of Ruscha’s 1978 visit and Auckland Art Gallery Graphic Works survey is also a perfect contribution to the journal.

Two inclusions in Reading Room 2, though, baffle me. One is Aram Moshayedi’s article on Kamrooz Aram’s paintings (I can see the ‘transcendence’ but not the ‘Pop’); the other is David Craig’s article on David Hatcher. Craig used to write great pamphlets in the nineties on Michael Stevenson, but the freshness in his style has now been replaced by tedium. The sparkle has gone. There are several contributions like that, where the writing is somewhat turgid.

This issue worries me. This publication is deliberately pitched at a sophisticated, but very small audience, yet there is a growing market for more accessible publications that at the same time, don’t dumb down content. I am grateful for getting a free reviewer’s copy but one might speculate about how many people will actually purchase this Mayo Foundation-subsidised journal for their own libraries and future research. With a plethora of diverse tertiary institutions now established in this country maybe the hordes of newly educated art historians, artists and theorists will sustain it. Is that a realistic expectation? I wonder.

What this country needs is a classy magazine devoted solely to contemporary art that can win over a large audience. Reading Room though is not that. It is in essence a university publication, even though it is published by Auckland Art Gallery, and as such is closer to October than say Tate Magazine. So for a small country like New Zealand Aotearoa it is far too rarefied. It is pitched at post-graduate readers. Doctorate candidates.

The fact that it is not solely devoted to New Zealand contemporary art for its one issue a year, says a great deal about the background and interests of its editors, for it shows there are not, right now, sufficient NZ writers researching NZ art in this manner to sustain it or please them. I am delighted it exists, very happy indeed to read its enclosed discussions, but also aware that it is an opportunity lost – for what we have with Art New Zealand, our main national art periodical, is not a contemporary art mag but a promoter of historic art too. While Art News, the second contender, is good readable journalism but lacking in pithy issues.

There is a big audience of contemporary art lovers out there not catered for – desperate to learn more about this country’s contemporary art scene. Maybe the newly arrived Australasian publication Art World will help fill that need. Reading Room certainly won’t. It is the wrong sort of publication for Auckland Art Gallery (with its comparatively low door numbers) to be associated with. Something more accessible like Midwest would be infinitely more sensible, especially if it were smaller and came out more often. Having said all this - and declared my ambivalences - I'll still be first in the queue when Reading Room 3 comes out.