The following text was written to accompany one of the four exhibitions on display at the launch of the Len Lye Centre in 2015. The programme included the Four Fountains exhibition in the Large Works Gallery, the first in the Projection Series in the Len Lye Centre cinema and a small exhibition of drawings by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. The main exhibition was Len Lye’s Jam Session which was necessarily an introduction to Len Lye for an audience largely encountering his work for the first time.

Thematically, the three Lye exhibitions all worked around Lye’s interest in music to varying degrees so this text served visitors with a short but unifying picture of Lye’s practice. However, the launch of a major new museum like the Len Lye Centre results in a great deal of writing and a fair portion of that writing goes unused, as is the case here. I’ve fixed a few errors in publishing it here close to 10 years on from drafting it.

For a more detailed look at the jazz within Lye’s films can be found here in Projection Series #9: Len Lye’s Jazz with an accompanying essay by Nicolas Pillai.

All of the films by Lye referenced below can be viewed here.

 

Len Lye’s Jam Session

Len Lye Centre, 25 Jul – 29 Nov 2015

Curated by Paul Brobbel, text by Paul Brobbel (2015, revised 2024)

“Sound crazy people vibrate to sound and this is for them; it’s got some of
the sharpest astringent zings of sound that’s ever cut the air.” [1]

Sound crazy people! That’s Len Lye in a nutshell. An artist behind some of the most inventive films ever made. Creator of frenetic kinetic sculpture on a sublime scale. His theory of “Old Brain” knowledge deep in our D.N.A., Aotearoa New Zealand’s surrealist of the South Seas. (All wrapped up in his unique language, from plumbing the depths of the “Happiness Acid” to the rejoicing “Zizz!”)

The above quote comes from Len Lye in the mid-1960s as he contemplated his kinetic sculpture – in his own terms, “tangible motion sculpture”– as musical instruments. It’s a quote that welcomes you to Len Lye’s Jam Session, a survey of Lye’s practice to launch the Len Lye Centre and showcase the many highlights of the Len Lye Foundation Collection. Alongside the “zings” of his tangibles, Len Lye’s Jam Session offers a glimpse into the wider world of sound and music behind much of Lye’s practice.

Music is hard to separate from Lye’s work, coupled with his artistic beginnings here in Aotearoa New Zealand. Lye tells the story of sitting on a Wellington hill as a young man (around the age of 20) watching clouds roll by, thinking of John Constable’s technique of painting clouds in motion and realising that if you can paint something in motion you can create something with motion. This was Lye’s eureka moment, when “All of a sudden it hit me […] 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?” [2] Lye proclaimed, “as an artist I compose motion”. [3]

Lye left behind very few of his earliest works, works where he was making tentative steps alongside this realisation. His very first efforts at kinetic sculpture from the 1920s can only be imagined; however, Lye describes observing and sketching the “figures of motion” in natural phenomena, waves breaking on
the shore, a seagull in flight and the rhythmic cycles in the sway of pedestrian’s garments on Wellington streets. [4] A series of 14 motion sketches dated to the 1930s offer a glimpse of these efforts in transcribing motion onto paper, in the artist’s words, “systems of scriggles and scraggles”, “crazy to
anyone unless they were given some explanation”. [5] Despite Lye’s reservations, these sketches mark the beginnings of the formal experimentation that would define his film and sculptural work in later decades as Lye composed his “figures of motion”.

If you’ve seen Lye’s tangibles before, you’ll know of Lye’s “figures of motion”. You’ll just as likely remember the sounds. Some are delicate and subtle like the plucked music box melody of Roundhead (1961). Others aren’t just at the other end of the scale; they jump off it. Trilogy or A Flip and Two Twisters (1965/6) crashes, tumbling “icicles down your bare back”. [6] Storm King’s (1969) shaking invocation to the god of thunder echoes the tale in Lye’s memoir, Happy Moments, where a toddler kicks a kerosene can around on the gravelly yard of his childhood home. The violent clattering of that can and the flashing sunlight on its metal surface made a clear impression on the young Lye. About 60 years later, during an exhibition at New York’s Howard Wise Gallery, Lye’s Loop was rechristened as Universe, the artist’s prosaic title bettered by a youngster who heard something special in the ringing of Lye’s “bounding” steel. [7]

Lye intended his films to give audiences a similar sensory experience. His abstract and experimental films allow for a greater experience of motion than a dance captured on film. The kinetic performance of a dancer, unseen or obscured by three-dimensional space, able to be fully presented through Lye’s
visualisation in the two-dimensional film frame. [8] The importance of dance, and consequently music, is clear in Lye’s filmmaking. Lye’s films, the most widely recognised part of his oeuvre, are typically accompanied, or rather built around, vibrant and uplifting music. The early masterpiece of colour cinema, A Colour Box (1935), features brilliant imagery painted directly onto film stock and synchronised to the rhythm of a specially chosen soundtrack, the rolling beguine La Belle Créole by Don Baretto and His Cuban Orchestra.

Among the highlights in the Len Lye Foundation archives at the Govett-Brewster / Len Lye Centre is Lye’s synchronisation plan for the film Swinging the Lambeth Walk (1939), a guide to the sequencing of Lye’s visuals intended to accompany the instrumentation (for example, “low sax”, “downward sprinkle”, and “piano chords behind”). The extent to which Lye could marry the relationship between his hand-painted imagery and a piece of popular music is clear in Lye’s approach to Swinging the Lambeth Walk. In this film, the tune Lambeth Walk from the 1937 musical Me and My Girl is accompanied by vibrating lines, varying in size, and paired with the appropriate solo instruments, guitar, bass and violin (the recording featuring the jazz greats Django Reinhardt and Stéphane Grapelli). Similarly, a splash of falling circles
match a descending run on the piano.

By the 1930s, Lye was recognised as the “English Walt Disney”, his experimental films even inspired the avant-garde elements in the American animation master’s Fantasia (1940). [9] Looking at many of Lye’s films we also see the historical beginnings of an idea that we might recognise in the modern music video. You can certainly see Lye’s work as a precursor to MTV with coloured silhouettes in Rainbow Dance (1936), an effect that still feels like a new idea in today’s world of music videos and iPod commercials.

During the 1950s, after Lye migrated from London to New York, he developed his own theories about short films and their application to popular music. It was also during the 1950s that Lye developed his well-known scratch technique, scraping into the film and removing the black emulsion on the film leader for the projector’s light to shine through. The 1958 film experiment Tal Farlow (edited into a final form in 1980 following Lye’s death) synchronised Lye’s geometric scratches with renowned jazz guitarist Tal Farlow’s Rock n’ Rye (1954), like Swinging the Lambeth Walk, a masterful experiment in visualising music.

Lye’s years in America (from 1944 until he died in 1980) were a period where his interest in music and its role in his work expanded significantly, bringing him into direct contact and collaboration with the musical avant-garde and figures such as the composers Henry Brant, John Cage, and Morton Subotnik.
The extent to which music was integral to Lye’s practice, and now particularly to his work in the field of kinetic sculpture, is clear when we consider his performance of Tangible Motion Sculpture at New York’s Museum of Modern Art on the evening of 5 April 1961. Lye presented a performance of his kinetic
sculptures (and his film Free Radicals). Lye’s preparatory notes for the evening indicate the degree to which we ought to not think of these works as objects but as performers – like dancers in a ballet – with details recording what musical accompaniment Lye had in mind for certain works. Lye’s choice for the
now well-known Fountain was an experimental composition by the French composer Pierre Boulez, Le marteau sans maître (The hammer without a master, 1955). [10] For the gentle swaying Grass (1965), Lye nominated a Miles Davis performance of the jazz standard, My Funny Valentine.

We can see Lye’s love of jazz became a defining characteristic in his work, from early works made in England and inspired recordings of international stars like Red Nichols and his Five Pennies and Django Reinhardt’s Quintet of the Hot Club of France through to his days in New York at the heart of the mid-century jazz scene. It has often been pointed out that jazz was the most distinctly American contribution to global culture and fittingly Lye established himself in the cultural capital of the US during this ascendency. It was a time when many artists and intellectuals left a war-torn Europe for the other side of the Atlantic.

A snapshot of this period is captured by Lye in a series of photogram (or cameraless photograph) portraits he made during 1947. Friends and acquaintances posed for a portrait, Lye capturing it in silhouette as they lay their heads down on unexposed photographic paper. Many of these portraits were friends unknown to us, others are now identities many will recognise: the filmmaker Hans Richter, architect Le Corbusier, and painter Joan Miró, a few of the leading European figures that convened in the world’s new art capital. Included in this series of portraits was Baby Dodds, a famed pioneer of early 20th-century jazz drumming.

BABY DODDS

Lye’s photogram portraits are a unique body of work in the history of photography and, within Lye’s work, quite a diversion from the film and sculptural practice for which he is usually identified. Yet they take us back to several photograms made by Lye early in his career, particularly two that placed Lye close to the surrealist movement, an important early 20th-century movement that sought expression through the
unconscious mind. Yet they take us back to several photograms made by Lye early in his career, particularly two that placed Lye close to the surrealist movement, an important early 20th-century movement that sought expression through the unconscious mind. Lye’s photograms, Self-Planting at Night (or Night Tree, 1930), and Pond People (or Marks and Spencer in a Japanese Garden, 1930), with their fantastic titles both featured in London’s 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition alongside a further
work, the painting Snowbirds Making Snow (exhibited under the alternative title Jam Session, 1936).

SNOW BIRDS

Lye’s use of the “Old Brain”—the parts of the mind he identified as free from the constraints of the modern intellect—shared some common ground with the wider group of surrealists. The “old brain” also placed Lye’s work into another affinity with jazz, a clear bedfellow with surrealism with its improvisational
and individualistic qualities. The relationship is particularly clear when we consider Lye’s “scriggles and scraggles” and his approach to composing with motion:

I, myself, eventually came to look at the way things moved mainly to try to feel movement, and only feel it. This is what dancers do; but instead, I wanted to put the feeling of a figure of motion outside myself to see what I’d got. [11]

 When Lye got the figure of motion, he put it on paper, on film, or into sculpture. Captured on celluloid in films such as Free Radicals (1958), revised 1979 and Particles in Space (1979), Lye’s figures of motion transcended the two-dimensional medium, twisting into a three-dimensional world similar to the dance of his tangibles. It was important that the figures of motion were not just observations or transpositions, but feelings, as Lye would say, like a musician, “his identity stamped on his piece of music”. [12]

 Lye spoke of “keeping up with the muses” and his career can be considered the chasing down of the muse of motion, Lye’s Kinaesthesia. She was the motivation when he tried to “pin down a kinetic figure on film to make a feeling I feel at the back of my head”. [13] There was, however, another muse to Lye’s art, Euterpe, the traditional muse of music, of rejoicing, and of delight:

“And it’s Old Brain, at the height of creativity. It’s got – but over and above it all, why I was finding rationales for being crazy about jazz was simply because it had so much to do with happiness, the expression of intensely felt verve. Which was just a joy”. [14]

 

FOOTNOTES

1. Len Lye, Introduction to “Sounds of Len Lye Sculpture”, circa 1965, unpublished manuscript. Len Lye Foundation Archive,bGovett-Brewster Art Gallery / Len Lye Centre, New Plymouth, New Zealand.

2. ‘Ray Thorburn Interviews Len Lye,’ Art International, 19:4 (1975), 64.

3. Len Lye, ‘The Art that Moves,’ in Wystan Curnow and Roger Horrocks, eds., Figures of Motion: Len Lye Selected Writings (Auckland: Auckland University Press / Oxford University Press, 1984), 81.

4. Roger Horrocks, Len Lye: A Biography (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 2001), 28.

5. Len Lye, ‘My Model,’ circa 1960. In Roger Horrocks, ed., Happy Moments (Auckland: Holloway Press, 2002), 31. Also republished in Gregory Burke and Tyler Cann, Len Lye: Motion Sketch (New York: The Drawing Center, 2014).

6. Len Lye, Introduction to “Sounds of Len Lye Sculpture”, circa 1965, unpublished manuscript. Len Lye Foundation Archive, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery / Len Lye Centre, New Plymouth, New Zealand.

7. Roger Horrocks, Len Lye: A Biography, 309.

8. Len Lye, Music and Movement, unpublished manuscript. Len Lye Foundation Archive, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery / Len Lye Centre, New Plymouth, New Zealand.

9. “Len Lye –The English Disney,” Sunday Referee, 10 November 1935.

10. Recent research (as of 2023) indicates Lye also thought of a piece by Béla Bartók in association with Fountain.

11. Len Lye, “The Art that Moves,” 1964. In Wystan Curnow and Roger Horrocks, eds., Figures of Motion: Len Lye Selected Writings, 82.

12. Wystan Curnow, “An Interview with Len Lye,” Art New Zealand 17 (1980), 57.

13. Len Lye, “Why I Scratch, or How I Got to Particles,” 1979. In Wystan Curnow and Roger Horrocks, eds., Figures of Motion: Len Lye Selected Writings, 94.

14. Wystan Curnow, “An Interview with Len Lye,” Art New Zealand 17 (1980), 57.