Len Lye: The New Yorker by Govett-Brewster Art Gallery

LEN LYE

THE NEW YORKER

LEN LYE

THE NEW YORKER

Len Lye: The New Yorker Paul Brobbel

Weâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;ll Take Manhattan: Repatriating Len Lye Wystan Curnow

Exhibition installation shots Govett-Brewster Art Gallery

Letter to New York Times Len Lye Images Cover: Wind Wand test 1960. Maurie Logue Inside cover: Still from All Soulsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; Carnival 1957 (2007 reconstruction), 9 min., 16mm, sound Back cover: Lye working on 'scratch films' circa 1966. Ginn Briggs Inside back cover: Fern People 1946, oil on plywood Opposite: Wands erected for 'Save the Village' campaign, 1961, aluminium, 11m (tallest wand), New York, NY

LEN LYE

THE NEW YORKER

Paul Brobbel

Image: Georgia O’Keeffe (black on white) 1947, photogram

Assistant Len Lye Curator, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery

The exhibition Len Lye: The New Yorker considers a very specific period in the life of the experimental filmmaker and kinetic artist Len Lye (1901–1980) between 1944, when he migrated from Britain to the United States, and 1961 the year his kinetic sculpture appeared at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Lye’s career and personal circumstances underwent a number of upheavals through these years, principally his abandoning of a war weary Britain for the newly thriving centre of the art world in New York and, thereafter, his striking mid-career shift of artistic focus from experimental cinema to kinetic sculpture. Looking at Lye’s career chronologically can be problematic. His work is increasingly coming under more holistic scrutiny and the sheer variety of media explored, coupled with the interconnected web of aesthetics, technology, science and mythology in his practice, make it difficult to consider almost any aspect of Lye’s career in isolation. However, the importance of this period makes it worthy of particular attention, marked by some of Lye’s most difficult and challenging years as an artist, alongside many of his greatest artistic triumphs. By 1944 Lye’s reputation was built upon his filmmaking. Since leaving his native New Zealand in his early 20s, Lye had established a career in the British film industry through the 1930s directing some of the most

Auckland and Oxford University Presses, 1984, p. 39.

Concurrent with the development of Individual Happiness Now was Lye’s work for the Realist Film Unit (an offshoot of a previous sponsor, the G.P.O. Film Unit), responsible for producing short films for the Ministry of Information. While Lye’s films of the 1930s were typically colourful abstract vehicles for commercial or governmental messages, the war years necessarily imposed restrictions on Lye’s filmmaking. Reliant on his more workman-like skills as a filmmaker, Lye undertook more prescriptive commissions such as When the Pie Was Opened (1941), Newspaper Train (1942) and Kill or Be Killed (1942). While the spirit of Lye’s earlier films is largely missing from this period’s

Len Lye and Laura Riding, ‘Film-Making’ in Wystan Curnow and Roger Horrocks (eds.), Figures of Motion: Len Lye, Selected Writings,

Lye was particularly interested in notions of identity and particularly the concept of individuality. When World War II broke out Lye’s interest in such ideas became politicised. Inspired by the novelist J. B. Priestley’s questioning of Western values, Lye found himself mulling over the question of what ‘freedom’ was being protected by the war. Beginning in 1940 Lye developed a theory that he was to title Individual Happiness Now, wherein the realisation of the ‘individual’ was to be pursued as an alternative to religion or patriotism. Lye’s friend and poet, Robert Graves, co-authored initial drafts of Individual Happiness Now and Lye continued work on the theory, looking for support to adapt it for film. He would ultimately pin his hopes on the American politician Wendell Willkie, a recent presidential candidate whose politics appealed to Lye’s own.

celebrated short films ever produced in Britain. Lye’s particular success was as an innovator in the direct method of filmmaking; applying imagery directly to film rather than relying on photographic imagery produced by a camera. The results of Lye’s experiments, most notably A Colour Box (1935), are cinematic landmarks; energetic, colourful and abstract. Lye’s career in film grew out of an idea he developed as a young man attending Wellington Technical College. Hoping to find a particular theory of art he could call his own he absorbed himself with the idea of ‘movement’, what Lye would later describe as “unpremeditated being” and the “uncritical expression of life”.1 After experimenting with various media, Lye found cinema was the best means to demonstrate his theories.

Roger Horrocks, Len Lye: A Biography, Auckland University Press, 2001, p. 213.

work, Lye had established a reputation as a reliable and versatile filmmaker. In 1941 the United States based newsreel producer March of Time commissioned Lye to direct footage in the United Kingdom for various assignments. Lye had been eager to find a way to visit the United States to advance discussions on Individual Happiness Now with Willkie and his connection with March of Time paved the way; in 1944 Lye was invited to New York to direct a series of educational films for the company. Lye accepted the invitation, settling in Manhattan to undertake the six months' work on Basic English while his wife, Jane Lye, and their children remained in England. Lye quickly confirmed a meeting with Willkie to discuss a film treatment for Individual Happiness Now. The premise involved interviews with world leaders – notably Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin – to discuss their beliefs of what precisely the Allies were fighting for. Willkie would appear as host of the film, leading the conversation towards the ideals shared by Lye and himself.2 Unfortunately for Lye, Willkie’s death only months later put an end to this promising opportunity. While this was a severe blow to Lye’s ambitions, he would continue to develop the principles behind Individual Happiness Now, that was in some ways an unrealised work, yet in others remained influential to much of Lye’s subsequent work. After completing his Basic English assignment Lye took the opportunity to continue working with March of Time on a permanent basis, necessitating the settling of his family in New York. Lye gained permanent residency status and after some delay was joined by his family in 1946; however, his marriage to Jane immediately faltered, largely owing to Lye’s infidelity. By the end of the year the couple had separated and on 4 June 1948, after obtaining a divorce, Lye married Ann Hindle. Lye settled into New York’s West Village with Ann Lye while he continued his work with March of Time. During a rare period of consistent employment, Lye had limited time to continue making experimental films yet continued writing, particularly poetry. Several of Lye’s poems were accepted for publication in The Tiger’s Eye, a locally published arts and literature

magazine featuring the work of established avant-garde artists such as Lye and emerging American artists who would dominate the post-war art world. Lye’s new life in New York occurred at a time when many Modernists like Lye had left Europe for the United States, collectively elevating New York to an artistic preeminence previously enjoyed by Paris. The post-war art world would be dominated by the distinctly New York-centric Abstract-Expressionist movement, heavily indebted to the subconscious and automatic modes of Surrealism, traits familiar to Lye’s particular style. Although Lye preferred to work without stylistic labels defining his practice, he would find he would have an inclination towards much of what was emerging in the New York art world.

In 1947 Lye undertook a brief but fascinating project, a series of photograms (called ‘shadowgraphs’ by Lye), cameraless photographs whereby objects are placed directly onto photographic paper, the resulting image recording the silhouette of the object. Lye had made photograms in the past, however, where his earlier efforts employed abstract shapes more akin to his painted works, Lye’s New York photograms were each a portrait, the sitter’s head in profile, occasionally with the addition of other objects or even written poetry. Photogram portraiture was a surprisingly novel mode for the medium (at the time enjoying a resurgence), but what makes Lye’s portraits so interesting – in retrospect – is the choice of sitters. Several were friends of the Lyes or simply visitors to the studio. Alfred Bishop, Lye’s plumber is represented in two compositions, each with Bishop’s silhouette surrounded by an array of objects and tools suggestive of his profession. Others, however, are identities well known to history: filmmaker Hans Richter, the architect and designer Le Corbusier, the jazz drummer Warren ‘Baby’ Dodds, the actor Tony Moreno and the painters Joan Miró and Georgia O’Keeffe. There is no evidence to suggest Lye’s shadowgraphs were exhibited in his own lifetime and for an artist who wrote a great deal about his work he had very little to say about them; they are however a fascinating glimpse at Lye’s social circle in his first years in New York.

Alfred H. Barr Jr., Cubism and Abstract Art, Museum of Modern Art, 1936 (republished 1975), p.19.

Alongside his shadowgraphs and poetry was a return to painting, a part of Lye’s practice often lost in the shadow of his film and sculptural works but one holding significance in the exegesis of his artistic thought. In particular, Lye’s theory of the ‘Old Brain’ and the ‘New Brain’ – a dichotomy of ancient knowledge resident in our biology and the modern 20th century intellect – is often best observed in Lye’s paintings where the quasi-surrealistic tapping into the ‘Old Brain’ are at their most vivid. Sky Cave (1946) is typical of Lye’s paintings with a mythical narrative delivered in semiabstraction. As a counterpart to the visuals in his paintings Lye would often partner it with a poem such as that handwritten on the reverse of Sky Cave:

A cave in the sky & the thunder things are leaving. The blue Goddess is there & when the Sky turns all blue she will not be seen. But thunder will come back again & she will be seen again by the cave in a sky of water.

Lye’s particular style of painting, semi-abstract and semi-automatic, had much in common with the preferences emerging in 1940s New York, a turn towards the biological shapes of Joan Miró, Henry Moore and Jean Arp rather than the strict geometric abstractions of Piet Mondrian; what the first director of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Alfred Barr, described as the “shape of the square” confronting “the silhouette of the amoeba”.3 Lye’s paintings are full of such amoebic shapes, biological forms teetering between primordial myth and science; the anthropomorphic plant forms of Fern People (1946) a prime example, inspired by the flora of Lye’s native New Zealand and continuing his interest in life cycles and systems of growth. Intriguingly, the influential American critic Clement Greenberg was one of the few to comment on Lye’s paintings, appraising them as some of the best paintings being made in New York at the time. Greenberg also noted Lye’s apparent lack of interest in self-

While Lye’s filmmaking in the 1950s was as innovative and successful as his pioneering work during the 1930s, it came with certain frustrations. Lye’s films are often characterised by their joyful and rhythmic qualities but Lye’s approach to filmmaking, particularly his experimental nature, was serious. Lye’s hopes for corporations to support his experimental ideas were often sympathetically received but failed to secure the finances required. The matter would come to a head with his next film, arguably Lye’s greatest contribution to cinema.

Lye’s first major film produced in the United States was Color Cry (1953), developed through a new direct method experimenting with the photogram technique. Rather than applying paint to clear celluloid, Lye worked in a dark room exposing colour film stock to objects and stencils through coloured gels. Lye’s choice of soundtrack for Color Cry was a performance of a blues song called Fox Chase by Sonny Terry, whose ‘yelped’ vocals gave the film an intensity unlike Lye’s previous films. In 1957 Lye collaborated with the American composer Henry Brant on All Souls’ Carnival, an experiment that went beyond the sychronisation typical of Lye’s previous films, working instead with a looser but still compelling relationship between sound and Lye’s abstract visuals. In the same year Lye made Rhythm, a one minute television piece for the Chrysler Corporation compiled from pre-existing footage. Lye edited this down, producing hundreds of rapid jump cuts synchronised to a soundtrack of African drums. The film was considered a landmark by Lye’s peers for its use of montage.

quoted in Roger Horrocks, Len Lye: A Biography, Auckland University Press, 2001, p. 232.

promotion, a criticism that could not be applied to Lye’s film work. 4 Lye’s filmmaking had thus far been on hiatus while he devoted his energies to March of Time, a commitment that would end with the series in 1951. By this time Lye was presenting his abstract films to audiences in New York; notably at The Club, a popular hangout for artists associated with AbstractExpressionism. After a handful of collaborative projects (including Ian Hugo’s Bells of Atlantis) Lye returned to experimental cinema in earnest from the early 1950s.

quoted in Roger Horrocks, Len Lye: A Biography, Auckland University Press, 2001, p. 374.

Ann Temkin, Abstract Expressionism at The Museum of Modern Art: Selections from the Collection, Museum of Modern Art, 2011, p. 17. 8

Writings, Auckland and Oxford University Presses, 1984, p. 94.

Harold Rosenberg, ‘American Action Painters’ in Art News 51/8, December 1952.

Len Lye, ‘Why I Scratch, or How I Got to Particles —’ in Wystan Curnow and Roger Horrocks (eds.), Figures of Motion: Len Lye, Selected

Free Radicals (1958) was a return to one of Lye’s earliest experiments; scratching directly into black film leader. Removing the black surface of the film with scribers, saws and dental tools, Lye exposed the clear celluloid beneath. When projected, the designs appeared as white zigzag flashes. As with Rhythm their jerky movements were synchronised to African drumming. The results distilled the film medium down to its most basic elements of light and movement, after decades of experimentation providing Lye the means to render movement. Intriguingly, despite Lye treading his own path and often having an indifferent attitude towards the artistic trends surrounding him, Free Radicals demonstrated an affinity with Abstract Expressionism, the movement that had been dominating the New York art scene since the end of the war. Ever since A Colour Box, Lye’s abstract films often displayed a painterly quality, each tiny 16mm or 35mm frame equivalent to the painter’s canvas. With All Souls’ Carnival Lye took this painterly aspect further than any of his previous films. Free Radicals, however, would approach what critic Harold Rosenberg had termed “action painting”; identifying the canvas as a place to act rather than depict. 5 Lye described his scratch film technique as trying to “pin down a kinetic figure on film to make a feeling I feel at the back of my head”. 6 The performative aspect of Free Radicals, the frame by frame capturing of the artist’s gesture, was corroborated by Steve Jones, Lye’s assistant on subsequent scratch films: “... if you practise enough you can learn to squiggle your hand and make images that are a direct extension of the movement in your arm, your hand, your shoulder. It’s like learning to dance”. 7 In the catalogue accompanying a recent exhibition of Abstract Expressionist works from the collection of New York’s Museum of Modern Art, the curator, Ann Temkin, identified the quality shared among the artists associated with the movement: “a very American dedication to self-reliant individuality, they all pursued resolutely separate routes to a personal idiom”. 8 In Free Radicals Lye had found ‘his’ way to capture the individuality of the artist. When the New York Time’s critic John Canaday advocated for the

Lye, ‘Why I Scratch, or How I Got to Particles –’, in Wystan Curnow and Roger Horrocks (eds.), Figures of Motion: Len Lye, Selected

Writings, Auckland University Press, 1984, p. 95.

Oxford University Presses, 1984, p. 52.

Lye to New York Times, September 1960, Len Lye Foundation Archives.

John Canaday, ‘In the Gloaming’, New York Times, September 11th 1960.

12 Len

Lye’s tangibles developed from his longtime practice of doodling, a search for a way around the conscience and his own particular type of automatism that brought him in touch with Surrealism. Free Radicals was the ultimate expression of Lye’s doodling, capturing both the kinaesthetic identity of the artist in the medium and Lye’s ‘Old Brain’ reading genetic information.12 While Lye had been developing his scratch-film technique he had broadened his approach to doodling in three dimensions by manipulating objects such as steel bands or rods to isolate particular properties of movement. When manipulated by mechanical means such figures of motion could be controlled by the artist,

Lye did produce further experimental films; however, he was on the crest of a new wave, shifting mediums to work in the field of kinetic sculpture. As always Lye was happy to tread his own path, preferring his own term for his new endeavour; ‘Tangible Motion Sculpture’, or ‘tangibles’. Despite the shift in medium Lye was continuing an undertaking that had dominated his career from its earliest days, in essence visualising movement.

10 Len 11 Len

If Lye’s realisation of ‘individuality’ with Free Radicals had mitigated some of the frustrations he had experienced with Individual Happiness Now, it was also accompanied by its own disappointments. Like A Colour Box and Rhythm before it, Free Radicals was an award winning film, claiming second prize in the Brussels International Experimental Film Competition in 1958. By this point, however, Lye had had enough of the frustrations of finding support for his films. The prize money from Brussels failed to recompense Lye’s production of Free Radicals. Moreover, Lye felt there was such meagre interest in experimental cinema that it was fruitless to pursue further support for his filmmaking. Lamenting cinema as the “Cinderella of the arts”, Lye publically went on strike, asserting he would not make another film without support.11

Lye, ‘Is Film Art?' in Wystan Curnow and Roger Horrocks (eds.), Figures of Motion: Len Lye, Selected Writings, Auckland and

passing of Abstract Expressionism, 9 Lye rose to its defence: “Those of us who have previously conditioned objections to abstract painting might try again, remembering that, when it comes to ‘subject matter’, the subject of all human values, including artistic values, is Individuality”.10

Lye, ‘Considering a Temple’ in Wystan Curnow and Roger Horrocks (eds.), Figures of Motion: Len Lye, Selected Writings, Auckland and

One of the first tangibles Lye produced was Roundhead (1960), consisting of four concentric steel rings, the outer ring gently spun by a motorised base with the remaining rings hanging inside each other on thread, spinning by energy transferred from the outer ring. Inside the centremost ring Lye suspended Ann Lye’s gold wedding band. A music box incorporated into the base played a sporadic tune to the ring’s motions. Another of the early developments was Fountain, a bundle of steel rods held together at a motorised base before pluming out like jets of water caught in mid-movemment. Lye would develop variations of Fountain over subsequent years, including a more kinetically vigorous version called Firebush. Fountain would also be a work where Lye explored variations in scale, feeling that the greater the size, the greater the viewer’s empathetic relationship to the work:

It’s mostly the bigger the better; for example when the three-foot shrub falls, so what? Where’s the tie-in of bodily empathy? But when it’s the accelerating rush of the three-hundred foot redwood, Kurrrrash — empathy, I’m with thee.14

Oxford University Presses, 1984, p. 88.

14 Len

Lye, ‘Tangible Motion Sculpture’ in Wystan Curnow and Roger Horrocks (eds.), Figures of Motion: Len Lye, Selected Writings,

Auckland and Oxford University Presses, 1984, p. 75.

13 Len

choreographed to emphasise, in Lye’s words, “the beauty of motion per se”.13

Lye’s experiments with Wind Wands were an early demonstration of the grand sense of scale he had in mind. The first Wand was tested in New York in 1960, on the corner of Horatio and Hudson Streets. A long, hollow aluminium rod stood in the air, harnessing the power of wind rather than the motorised control of Lye’s other sculptures. Fixed atop the approximately 13 metre Wand was a plastic ball, designed to set it off balance when under motion. Lye set up a variety of Wind Wands in the early 1960s including a group of eight Wands as part of the Save the West Village exhibition in 1961. After Lye’s dismay in not finding support for his filmmaking in the US, he was buoyed by the interest in his new kinetic works. In 1959 the United Nations commissioned Lye to direct a film commemorating United Nations Day. Making a brief return to filmmaking,

Lye directed Fountain of Hope (also known as Peace) featuring several of his tangibles alongside a choral score by Henry Brant. By 1960 Lye’s work had featured in Time and Newsweek magazines and quickly attracted attention from New York art dealers, with Leo Castelli and Howard Wise the first to exhibit and support Lye’s work. On the evening of 5 April 1961 Lye’s kinetic sculpture was to face its most critical audience so far; a performance at the Museum of Modern Art. Presented as Tangible Motion Sculpture by Len Lye the evening entertained close to 500 members of the New York art world. Lye opened the evening with a screening of Free Radicals followed by the performance of ten of his sculptures, including Roundhead and Fountain. Lye’s evening of Tangible Motion Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art would cement Lye’s shift from filmmaking to sculpture, marking not only the emergence of Lye as a leading figure of the 1960s Kinetic Art movement but, more importantly, signifying the resolution of Lye’s career-long devotion to his own theories of kineticism. Over the next half-decade Lye would continue to produce kinetic sculpture that would thrill international art audiences with their beauty and, at times, their ferocity. As the short-lived Kinetic Art movement fizzled out, dominated by the other 1960s movements of Pop, Minimalism and Conceptual Art, Lye would be considered among kinetic artists much as he was among filmmakers; as a visionary whose work transcended the medium.

Image opposite: Baby Dodds 1947, photogram

WE’LL TAKE MANHATTAN

REPATRIATING LEN LYE

Wystan Curnow

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom For trying to change the system from within I’m coming now, I’m coming to reward them First we take Manhattan, then we take Berlin.

Gwyne Dyer reckons Cohen’s song to be about the “naivety and narcissism of the West-German Red Army Faction, designer terrorism by celebrity terrorists, as much about radical chic as about real politics”.2 Both titles inevitably trade on Rodgers’ and Hart’s 1925 show tune, Manhattan (“I’ll take Manhattan, and Staten Island too,…I’ll go to Greenwich, where modern men itch to be free…” etc.).

Andrew Anthony, ‘Rewind TV’, The Observer, January 19, 2012.

My title is from the recent BBC docu-drama about David Bailey’s New York fashion shoot for Vogue magazine featuring model and girlfriend Jean Shrimpton. The Observer commented: “The credit sequence announced that in 1962 no one had heard of the Beatles, no one untitled or unwealthy expected to be famous, and there was no such thing as youth culture. But then David Bailey and Jean Shrimpton went to New York. And, well, the history of the universe was re-written”.1 Yeah, yeah. But I also have in mind Leonard Cohen’s First we take Manhattan (1988).

1 2

Gwynne Dyer, War, Random House, 2005, p. 6.

Professor of English (Emeritus), University of Auckland

Nineteen-Forties Greenwich Village was still a good place for modern men like Len Lye, and it was there he settled as the war came to an end and, there some years later, that he produced the footage for All Souls’ Carnival – “We’ll make Manhattan” as the song has it, “an isle of joy” or carnival? – the film towards which this essay will make its way.

For three decades or more, following the end of World War II, global developments in the visual arts were dominated by New York and its artists. Not all those developments were the work of native New Yorkers, or come to that, Americans. In those same decades, New Zealand art ‘came of age’, but not all that art was the work of resident New Zealanders; for artists such as Lye, Billy Apple, and Max Gimblett, were drawn to the centre, expatriating themselves first to London then to New York. Lye, arrived in London in 1926, crossed the Atlantic in 1944, became a United States citizen in 1950, and died there in 1980. Apple arrived from ‘Swinging London’ two years after David Bailey, and he too became a citizen, although he has been resident in Auckland since the late 1980s. After time in London in the late fifties, Toronto in the sixties, Gimblett moved to New York in 1973 and has resided there ever since. In recent decades, however, they and/or their work have begun to return to or arrive in New Zealand; New York’s hegemony has eased, and now New Zealand is where most of their work is housed. And seen and talked and written about. This is to say a process of repatriation has set in, of ‘taking Manhattan’ back. A process which is also discursive. New Zealand-based critical understanding of this work has preceded, accompanied its physical homecoming and underpinned the enhancement of its global profile, post-repatriation. To that degree, is it becoming, has already become, New Zealand art? With this question I don’t intend to downplay the thrilling centre-periphery pathologies (Dyer’s “naiveté and narcissism” ) energising my title, so much as to

recognise the therapeutic opportunity that internalising Manhattan in our art history presents. This exercise might proceed by detailing and comparing the circumstances of each artist’s expatriation, making a history of that. It’s true the Big Apple in 1944 was not yet the art capital it was shortly to become and that Clement Greenberg considered Lye not ambitious enough to really succeed as an artist there – he was too happy to hustle, said Clem. But let’s recall exactly what brought him to New York in the first place: Lye had concocted a blueprint of his own for world peace. He took A Definition of Common Purpose/ Individual Happiness Now there aiming to sell it to likely presidential candidate and author of the bestselling One World, Wendell Willkie. Moreover Lye had devised a role for himself in the media campaign his plan would require. Neither Apple nor Gimblett can claim anything as crazily quixotic, if not naïve and narcissist – as that! And one should say that Lye, in his art to this day, keeps on, in Cohen’s word, rewarding, that is paying back, taking revenge on those who sentenced him (and sentence us) to years of boredom, to the boredom of trying to change the system from within, that is, by means of endless unsuccessful grant applications, supplications to sponsors, politicians, petitions, peace plans… First he took Manhattan, then he took New Plymouth, and then… 16

The exercise can continue by detailing the local circumstances of specific works, checking out the excess baggage that best be brought back with them. Lye’s repatriated oeuvre includes two films completed by others posthumously: Tal Farlow and All Souls’ Carnival, which are especially useful, in establishing the Manhattan we are after. The first of these, a two minute film, edited in New York from extant footage and synchronised to the music of jazz guitarist, Tal Farlow, with the help of Steve Jones, is dated 1980. The second, an 11 minute reconstruction, rather than a completion, by Roger Horrocks and the New Zealand Film Archive, of a collaboration between Lye and the contemporary classical composer, Henry Brant, was released in 2007. Although, some

These four mid-fifties films, now that we can see them together, constitute a high point, and a fulfilment of Lye’s promise as the definitive abstract expressionist film-maker. And yet 1958, the same year as MoMA’s The New American Painting was taking Europe by storm, and Free Radicals won a grand prize at the Brussels World Fair International Experimental Film Competition, was also a low if not an end point. 4 New York’s new art world preeminence did not stretch to art films; it wouldn’t support the making, distribution and presentation of his work, so he was, he declared (in 1959) “going on strike” as a film-maker. 5 Lye turned his hand to a legit art form: sculpture, and soon enough had dealers like Leo Castelli and Howard Wise aknocking on his door.

University Presses, 1984, pp. 52-54.

of his painting.

Len Lye, ‘Is Film Art?’ in Wystan Curnow and Roger Horrocks (eds.), Figures of Motion: Len Lye, Selected Writings, Auckland and Oxford 5

The soundtrack for Tal Farlow, Rock ‘n Rye, was recorded on April 11, 1954.

Colin McCahon’s visit to the United States, funded by the Carnegie Corporation that same year, was to have a major impact on the direction 4

twenty-five years separate these two, the footage on which they are based is more or less contemporaneous. Lye dated the can containing the Tal Farlow material 1956 – and All Souls’ Carnival was performed at Carnegie Hall on March 3, 1957.3 The one film Lye did complete in this year was a one minute TV commercial for the Chrysler Corporation, Rhythm which was in 1958 to be followed by his first completed scratch film, Free Radicals.

Among the works-in-progress shelved by Lye’s strike and later completed by him or others, All Souls’ Carnival is the real surprise, astonishing both in itself and in how it changes how we feel about his oeuvre. Going back to the hand-painting techniques of A Colour Box (1935), and Swinging the Lambeth Walk (1939), it outstrips them in its virtuoso demonstrations of the quick and the agile, the fluid and volatile. And just as Color Cry’s more intense and darker colours replaced the feel good sensations of those earlier works with a deeper and wider emotional palette, so the heightened transparency of All Souls’ colours and the liquidity of its textures offset the growing gravitas of the scratch films and the steely austerity of the kinetic sculptures and opened up a new range of resonances.

Kyle Gann and Kurt Stone, ‘Brant, Henry’ in Oxford Music Online, Oxford University Press. 9

Alan Baker, An interview with Henry Brant, American Public Media, Santa Barbara, June 2002.

Brant’s first spatial composition was performed in 1953. 8

University Press, 2009, pp. 164-65 and 208-9. Horrocks aptly compares this collaboration with those of Merce Cunningham and John Cage.

Brant, like Lye, was a resolute avant-gardist, whose wide experience in the mainstream media – his twenty years working in the system, as music copyist, orchestrator, conductor and performer in radio, for the Broadway stage and for Hollywood films nevertheless gave him an insider’s knowledge of the workings of the American mass culture industry. Both were jazz aficionados, especially alert to its mainstream uses

For a description of the collaboration and Horrocks’ ‘reconstruction’ of it see his Art That Moves: The Work of Len Lye, Auckland

Those resonances are also, perhaps crucially, effected by what is All Souls’ most marked difference, the musical accompaniment. To start with it is contemporary classical music, what sometimes gets called ‘serious’ music; Henry Brant’s All Souls’ Carnival, a six-part suite, scored for piano, flute, violin, cello, and accordion, accompanies the film in live performance but not as a soundtrack on it. Brant was another ‘modern man’, a Greenwich Village neighbour and friend, a composer best known for his idea of ‘spatial music’. According to Roger Horrocks, Lye and Brant decided not to attempt to synchronise their works but to “allow the images and the music to proceed side by side, similar in spirit but independent of each other”. Viewers would be left to “enjoy the ever-changing parallels and contrasts (which continued to change from one live performance to the next)”. 6 In a 2002 interview, Brant described spatial music as “the idea that by separating the performing forces, instead of having them all in one place, you can have much more going on and have it intelligible, and also that you can use the shortcomings of separating them as an advantage. …If what you want is to have different kinds of music played at once, well, that's the way to do it so you'll hear them all”. 7 While Brant’s suite was not composed to be performed spatially, his collaboration with Lye certainly worked that way. 8 In the process it also literalised or rendered performative his composition’s high speed hybridities. Brant’s astringent and parodic musical allsorts do combine well with Lye’s ocular gymnastics to both evoke and master what he describes as the “new stresses, layered insanities, and multidirectional assaults of contemporary life on the spirit”. 9

Attributed to Lee Krasner cited in Francine Du Plessix and Cleve Gray, ‘Who Was Jackson Pollock?’, Art in America, May-June 1967, p. 51.

Quoted in Elizabeth Frank, Jackson Pollock, New York, 1983, p. 68.

Roger Horrocks, Len Lye: A Biography, Auckland University Press, 2001, p. 260.

Len Lye, ‘A note on Dance and Film’ in Wystan Curnow and Roger Horrocks (eds.), Figures of Motion: Len Lye, Selected Writings, Auckland and

It was because jazz was “a way of playing music grounded in improvisation” 10 that Jackson Pollock thought it was, outside of painting “the only other really creative thing happening in this country”. 11 What he meant when he said, “When I am in my painting, I am not aware of what I am doing”, 12 was that he was improvising. Jack Kerouac called his jazz inspired spontaneous prose composition, ‘sketching’. Henry Brant said, “I want the jazz figurations, [in my music] the way jazz musicians would improvise”, while Lye described his method of painting or scratching celluloid as a kind of ‘doodling’. This convergence is then a distinctive feature of the Manhattan local colour which accompanies Lye’s work as it finds its place in New Zealand art history. According to Horrocks, Lye liked the All Souls’ project partly “because he had collaborated in a similar way with jazz groups at the Five Spot, a run-down Bowery saloon at 5 Cooper Square…”. 13 Lye wrote:

Oxford University Presses, 1984, p. 56.

Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux, Jazz, W. W. Norton, 2009, p. 146. 10

and abuses. From the 1920s all the major changes in jazz took place in New York, and it was there, during the 1950s, and really for the first time, jazz and the avant-garde began to converge. Partly by coincidence, partly by mutual influence, and for the first time because it occurred at the level of compositional method.

I have, of course experimented with my abstract colour films in relation to mixing media – projected colour abstract films over a large black and white blow-up of Charlie Parker playing his music, trying out abstracts as accompaniment to vocalized poetry… 14

Opening in 1955, the Five Spot soon attracted the late night overflow art crowd from the Cedar Bar in University Place (including David Smith, Helen Frankenthaler, Willem de Kooning, Grace Hartigan, Frank O’Hara) but it was the six month residency of the Thelonious Monk quartet, with John Coltrane, in 1957 which really put it on the map. As Gary Giddins notes, it “had lasting influence on both men, who spent most of their careers leading quartets that built on Monk’s

his work at the College.

David Lehman, The Last Avant-Garde, New York, Anchor Books, 1998, p. 198. 17

between Vincent Van Gogh and Larry Rivers at ‘The Five Spot’ Jazz Club, New York. Bates had met Rivers who the year before had lectured on

Billy Apple’s 1962 Royal College thesis – strictly speaking he was still Barrie Bates then – was titled: Pop Corn, Being a Conversation

Gary Giddins and Scott DeVeaux, p. 381. 15

precepts”. 15 On November 29, eight months after All Souls’ was performed at Carnegie Hall, Monk’s Quartet featured there in a star-studded benefit concert for the Morningside Community Center headlined by ‘Miss Billie Holiday’. Larry Rivers, a painter and himself a jazz musician who had studied at Julliard with Miles Davis, introduced poetry and jazz collaborations, Monday evenings (the resident group’s day off). 16 Lye’s collaboration probably occupied one of these slots – “One Monday, Kenneth Koch came and read from the Manhattan telephone directory while Rivers played saxophone. Afterward Billie Holiday, who had wandered in to greet [Mal] Waldron, told Koch, ‘Man, your poems are weird’. Holiday, whose cabaret card had been revoked because of her heroin use, consented to break the law for one song while Waldron hit the keys. She sang in a husky whisper. [Frank] O’Hara stood leaning against the bathroom door, listening”. 17

The Day Lady Died It is 12:20 in New York a Friday three days after Bastille day, yes it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner and I don’t know the people who will feed me I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun and have a hamburger and a malted and buy an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets in Ghana are doing these days I go on to the bank and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard) doesn’t even look up my balance for once in her life and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or Brendan Behan’s new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres of Genet, but I don’t, I stick with Verlaine after practically going to sleep with quandariness and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega and then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre and casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT while she whispered a song along the keyboard to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing

Image pages 26–27: Still from Fountain of Hope 1959.

Charles Olson, ‘Human Universe,’ in Selected Writings of Charles Olsen, Robert Creeley (ed.), New York, New Directions, 1966, p. 54.

1 min., black and white, sound

If you don’t know that Billie Holiday was known as Lady Day, you will not get the title of O’Hara’s poem, or get what the 5 SPOT is, or understand his poem. O’Hara’s poem, one of his ‘lunch poems’ – the title of his first collection – was literally that, written during the break in his working day at the Museum of Modern Art. Its ending enacts rather than describes O’Hara’s shock at the news of Billie Holiday’s death, stopping the reader in his or her tracks with its memory which memorialises, of the breath-taking… beauty, is it? There’s no word for it. What’s that expression, ‘as I live and breathe’? This is what the poet Charles Olson calls “language as the act of the instant, as opposed to language as the act of thought about the instant”. 18 If you don’t get that, you won’t fully understand the significance of jazz for art making in New York, nor will you get the full reward of the Manhattan that attaches to the works of Len Lye now making their homes back here in New Zealand.

This essay is based in part on two public lectures: one on All Souls’ Carnival for the Monica Brewster Evening at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery on October 25, 2011, and the other at the City Gallery Wellington on August 1, 2012 – one of three organised by the Art History Programme and the Adam Art Gallery, Victoria University of Wellington, under the title We'll Take Manhattan, New Zealand artists in New York, 1957-1972.

Image opposite: Roundhead 1961 (authorised reconstruction). Stainless steel, nylon and gold plated ring on motorised base, music box motorised base, music box, 675 x 255mm diam. Image page 24–25: Still from Free Radicals 1957 (revised 1979). 4 min., 16mm, black and white, sound

Len Lye: The New Yorker Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, Aotearoa New Zealand Published on the occasion of the exhibition Len Lye: The New Yorker 1 December 2012 – 2 April 2013 Copyright ©2012 Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, the artist and writers Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this catalogue may be reproduced without prior permission of the publisher. Fountain I courtesy of Benjamin Lindenhahn and Len Lye Foundation Collection and Archive, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery Color Cry, All Souls’ Carnival, Rhythm and Free Radicals courtesy of Len Lye Foundation from material preserved and made available by the New Zealand Film Archive Nga Kaitiaki O Nga Taonga Whitiahua. A Fountain of Hope courtesy of the United Nations and Len Lye Foundation from material preserved and made available by the New Zealand Film Archive Nga Kaitiaki O Nga Taonga Whitiahua. All other works courtesy of Len Lye Foundation Collection and Archive, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery Collection

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Exhibition Curator: Paul Brobbel

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