Len Lye at the Govett-Brewster
RAY THORBURN
Last February, Len Lye, one of New Zealand's most distinguished expatriate artists, and something of a living legend in contemporary art, made his second visit to New Zealand in fifty-five years.
Len Lye came to New Plymouth as a result of a commission by the Govett Brewster Gallery to install three of his best known 'tangible motion sculptures' in the Gallery.
For over fifty years the creative genius of Len Lye has been active on the international art scene: first as a pioneer in film-making (he produced the world's first direct film in 1935, Colour Box, creating a technique with which the artist can make a film without the use of a camera by painting or etching directly on to clear film celluloid); second as a pioneer in the field of kinetic sculpture.
In the Christchurch of 1901 when he was born life was not easy for him. Having lost their father when they were young, Len and his younger brother Phil had to move around with their mother as she went from job to job. Len remembers as one of the most fulfilling experiences of his childhood the time when as a boy of eight or nine he lived for a time at Cape Campbell lighthouse where his stepfather was a keeper. This was a very exciting and formative period in his life. He felt that he lived in direct contact with the forces of nature and was enthralled by the sound of the rain, wind and sea which constantly buffeted their house. He used to lie in bed fascinated by the magic of nature's symphony; he would spend hours staring at the light patterns on the waves and observing the marine life that abounded in rock-pools until he had such an empathy with the natural elements that he felt completely at one with the forces of nature that were his constant companions. These experiences were to be a driving-force behind a life-time's commitment to controlling energy and creating motion in art.
After a series of jobs ranging from warehouse boy, newspaper boy, farm labourer, carpenter's mate, quarry labourer, miner, packer, sheep shearer and commercial artist, Len went to evening classes at Wellington Technical College. As a child he was constantly drawing, and his mother encouraged his insatiable thirst for knowledge about art by suggesting he attend classes.
At Wellington Technical College his teacher was Harry Linley Richardson. Richardson encouraged him to think about art in his own terms and develop his own ideas. . .
Richardson proved to be an inspiration he kind of steered me into thinking about art. Things that he said. .. for example, the great artist is the one who is continually thinking about art and has his own theory about art, his very own theory. That got me off the hook. There I was sweating over Ruskin and Sir Joshua Reynolds and all the early guys; and believe me, I was going through the whole lot to find out about art! I didn't know a thing about it, see? So that put me on my own haunches to think about it. I had a paper route early in the morning, so instead of getting up just in time to collect the papers, I got up way ahead of sunrise this was in summer and waited for the sun to come up, hoping to get a blinding flash of inspiration, or something. Anyway, it wasn't a bad idea something like Delphi where you struggle up a hill and all that sort of thing to go and see the oracle. I was waiting for the sun to come up and to give me a nice new idea. One morning, it had been raining all night, and there were these marvellous fast little scuddy clouds in the blue sky. 'As I was looking at those clouds I was thinking, wasn't it John Constable, the early English landscape painter, who sketched clouds to try and convey their motions? That's right! Well, I thought, why clouds, why not just motion? Why pretend they are moving, why not just move something? All of a sudden it hit me why not just movement? If there was such a thing as composing music, there could be such a thing as composing motion. After all, there are melodic figures, why can't there be figures of motion? Like the figure eight, for instance, and various other figures. So Christ, I start running around wagging my tail, thinking I have a nice idea! Anyway, I have stuck with it ever since.
At sixteen Len Lye created his first kinetic model - a crude construction utilizing fruit-boxes, cranks and pulleys. At the time he was ignorant of the kinetic experiments in Europe. In 1914 the Futurists Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero had built a kinetic mobile. But it was not until 1920 that Naum Gabo working in Russia created the first full kinetic work of art, titled Kinetic Sculpture Standing Wave, a steel rod linked to a pair of springs that were activated by an electro-magnet.
Lye's ignorance of European experiments is important: for had he been aware of what was going on it is very doubtful that he would have persisted in this direction. One thing is certain all his life he has sought to create a unique form of art. If anything had been done before he wasn't interested. His life has been motivated by a search for freedom. He believes that individuality is the key to happiness and the basis of fine art.
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| Len Lye making films in the mid-1950s. |
Like most children Len Lye was fascinated by the movies. Unlike other children he discovered in film the means to compose motion. This discovery, when linked with another childhood interest in sequential drawing (that is, a sequence of pictures that told a story) sent him in search of a way to express kinetically feelings about motion in film. As there was no film industry in this country he left New Zealand in 1921 and got a job in Sydney drawing scenario sketches for screen advertising - learning at the same time the basic techniques of film animation.
It should be stressed that Lye saw film as a means toward making kinetic art: he wasn't interested in a career as a filmmaker (he dismisses most film-makers as visual story tellers rather than creative artists). Once he had learnt all he could, he returned to Auckland doing a variety of jobs until in 1922 his restless spirit took him in search of his personal paradise.
In those days (as he still is today) Len Lye was interested in primitive art forms - which he considered far more exciting and vital than anything else he had experienced at that time. He spent hours studying the arts of Polynesia in the National Museum and as a result of his reading was excited by the paintings and lifestyle of Gauguin. Between 1923 and 1924 he settled in Western Samoa, perfectly content to absorb the myths and legends of the culture of the local people with whom he lived. Although these were not particularly productive years they were nevertheless a very important interlude - reinforcing his intuitions of 'oneness with nature' and honing his already sharpened senses and his drive to express feelings about light, sound, motion and energy.
In the Islands, however, life was too perfect. The ideal environment tended to drain his creative energy, and he tried unsuccessfully to get a job aboard a ship that would get him to Russia to join forces with the experimental theatre group at the Meierhold Moscow Art Theatre. He was firstly put aboard a ship for Australia by the Chief Administrator of the British Colony, who considered it in bad taste for a European to live with the local people! After working in the outback of New South Wales for a year he eventually got a job as a ship's stoker, and arrived in England in 1926.
Within a year of his arrival he was exhibiting with the 7 and 5 Group, which consisted of seven painters and five sculptors, including Ben Nicholson, Frances Hodgkins, Henry Moore, Ivon Hitchens and other established figures. This annual exhibition was considered to be by the most advanced group of artists in London. Collectively, they represented the avant-garde of British art. It was a major achievement for a recently-arrived and unknown artist from the colonies to be exhibiting with them.
Although young in years Lye was already aesthetically mature. He was bursting with ideas and a desire to find the means to realise them. His creative energy was quickly realised and he was given a small Thames river barge to live on rent-free. At the same time he was offered a job as a 'fly man' at the nearby Kennington Film Studios.
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| Len Lye with Universe, 1966 |
Obsessed with the idea of composing motion he produced over 8,000 separate sequential drawings which after two years resulted in his first film, Tusalava (1929), a ten-minutes black and white film using established animated cartoon technique. By this time he had given up all pretence at rendering form in a traditional sense, and his drawings were graphic 'doodles' that had a strong resemblance to microscopic amoeba shapes performing a visual mating dance. They were the first manifestations of what the artist is convinced are the deepest origins of art. Len Lye sees the creative drive of the artist as stemming from an evolutionary cycle which has its roots in the genetic make up of man.
Another factor not widely known is Len Lye's reputation in the 'thirties as a writer. In 1930 a limited edition of his writing entitled No Trouble, consisting mainly of letters to friends, was published by the Seizin Press in Majorca.
In 1935 Len Lye produced Colour Box (his first 'direct' film without using a camera) for John Grierson, head of the British Government's General Post Office Film Unit. He went on to perfect this technique, and Rainbow Dance (1936) and Trade Tattoo (1937) are today considered to be classic examples of how advertising films can on rare occasions be works of art. Lye's real interest in making these films was to gain insight and experience in film technique so that each film would be a new and unique film event, and a work of kinetic art'. His reputation as a highly creative film-maker was firmly established: he was described as 'the English Disney'.
When World War II came Lye was mobilised to make a series of propaganda films for the British Government. In 1943 he was engaged by Richard de Rochemont head of The March of Time, as a film director; and the following year he was sent on assignment to America where he settled permanently. Altogether he made "seven documentary films for The March of Time before he left in 1951.
After leaving March of Time he continued to experiment and develop his personal technique. In 1957 he produced Rhythm, which won the New York TV Art Directors' Award; in 1958 he made Free Radicals, which won a grand prize at the Brussels World Fair International Experimental Films Competition. By this time financial hardship resulting from lack of sponsorship forced him to find alternative ways to compose motion. Norman McLaren, the renowned film maker of the National Film Board of Canada has said: 'Len Lye has shown the way and shown it in masterly fashion. I felt sure that I would follow this way in the future as soon as I had the opportunity'. Since 1936 the Museum of Modern Art in New York City has had an annual showing of Len Lye films.
By the nineteen-fifties Len Lye's fascination with kinetic energy had made him return to the kinetic constructions which, due to technical limitations, he had abandoned in the nineteen-twenties in favour of film. One day in 1959 he picked up a bunch of thin steel rods and they flared out, swaying to and fro. Everything came together. . . his childhood fascination with the play of light shimmering on surfaces, together with many other remembered experiences... and Steel Fountain, his first tangible motion sculpture, was created. A seven-foot version of Fountain was exhibited in 1961 in Art in Motion, a major international exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, and at the Museum of Modern Art, Stockholm. The art critic for Newsweek wrote that the work 'makes one of the show's loveliest images' (March 31, 1961).
That showing was almost immediately followed by a one-man performance at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, that captivated the select audience and left them spellbound. John Canaday in the New York Times considered Lye's work to have revolutionary potential 'without parallel in the history of art' (April 6, 1961). Other important exhibitions followed. Len Lye was singled out as the highlight of the prestigious Buffalo Festival of the Arts Today (1965) where his work drew record crowds of 7,000 per day; and likewise his work was the highlight at the definitive international exhibition, Directions in Kinetic Sculpture, at the University of California, Berkeley. 'The single artist in Dr Selz's exhibition who seems to transcend all the confusion - aesthetic, mechanical, rhetorical - of kinetic sculpture is Len Lye who manages to compress so ferocious an energy that the viewer stands paralysed. . . the effect is beautiful, frightening, utterly beyond the petty limitations of the other artists in the exhibition' (Philip Leider, Art Forum, May 1966).
Wherever Lye went and whenever he exhibited, the effect was the same. . . he left people transfixed by his kinetic magic. And yet he felt that he had not been successful, for he considered his works not as permanent art objects but merely as working models for giant art temples where people could go on an art pilgrimage to feel the expressive power of energy (one of his cherished ideas is for a giant kinetic temple he would like to have built in California's Death Valley - a temple to the Muse of Motion).
Len believes that what the artist is doing is every bit as exciting as the scientist and that kinetic art is the only new art since pre-history. He believes that art is directly linked to genetic replication and that the essence of individuality and art lies in the genes.
The artist seeks truth as definitely as a scientist. The new brain (intellect) of a scientist is often factual truth he can verify; the old brain (the genetic link to nature and man's earliest origins) of the artist is later the emotional truth he can feel.
Len Lye's life has been devoted to sharpening his senses so that he could feel a total empathy with motion and express his deepest inner feelings about motion in art.
Since 1966 Len Lye has given over all his energies to documenting evidence of his genetic theory. He has assembled over 5,000 slides and produced many tapes supporting his theory that the source of art is deeply rooted in the subconscious. His intuitive ideas have been largely supported by many eminent scientists. In 1968 he was invited by Professor C.H. Waddington to address the Animal Institute of Genetics at the University of Edinburgh. As well, he gave a major tape/slide presentation of his theories titled The Absolute Truth of the Happiness Acid at the Cambridge Animation Festival at Cambridge University in 1968. Scientists accepted the logic of Lye's theories. In the future Len Lye and his intuitive 'old brain' thinking could be given credit for opening one of the doors that might lead to a new coming together of science, philosophy and art.
Ray Thorburn, now with the Education Department's curriculum development for art, met Len Lye in New York when on an Art Council travel grant in connection with his representing New Zealand at the Sao Paulo Bienal: in 1947 on a Fulbright Scholarship he documented Len Lye's works. Ray Thorburn's Interview with Len Lye (at his studio, New York, September 1974) was published in Art International, April 1975.
Originally published in Art New Zealand 5 April/May 1977