Len Lye: Four Fountains From 25 Jul 2015 Unknown photographer, Len Lye and Fountain II, New York, circa 1970s Len Lye Foundation Collection, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/ Len Lye Centre P/2 Govett-Brewster Art Gallery Len Lye: Four Fountains P/3 Unknown photographer, Lye on the set of Fountain of Hope, New York, 1959 Len Lye Foundation Collection, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/ Len Lye Centre P/4 Unknown photographer, Fountain I in Len Lye’s studio, New York, circa 1960s Len Lye Foundation Collection, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/ Len Lye Centre P/6 Govett-Brewster Art Gallery Len Lye: Four Fountains P/7 The fluttering butterfly in the pleasant garden, the swaying branch emphasising the still trunk of the parent tree are complementary elements in our empathy with both stillness and motion. In like manner, the unexpectedly vibrating metal sculpture will enhance, through its motion, the serenity of an architectural space.1 1. Press release for Tangible Motion Sculpture by Len Lye, Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1961. 2. Cahiers du Cinema 60 (June 1956), 51. 3. Len Lye, Is Film Art?, 1959. In Wynstan Curnow and Roger Horrocks, eds., Figures of Motion: Len Lye Selected Writings (Auckland: Auckland University Press/ Oxford University Press, 1984), 52. 4. Gallery Notes: Movement in Art, Howard Wise Gallery, New York, 1961. In 1956 the influential French journal of film, Cahiers du Cinema, posed a question to its readers. In mock-Western style, they declared, ‘Wanted: Len Lye […] Any information on this filmmaker is welcome’.2 It had indeed been some years since Lye, the filmmaker, had made international waves. He had left his career in the UK behind for more reliable documentary work in New York in 1944. Readers of Cahiers du Cinema may have fondly recalled Lye’s work with the GPO Film Unit and acclaimed films such as A Colour Box (1935) and Trade Tattoo (1937). Some 20 years on from these cinematic milestones, Lye’s visibility as a filmmaker had faded. Lye’s first decade in the United States was given to a variety of projects. He painted routinely, produced some notable photography, and worked as a director for the March of Time newsreels. By the early 1950s Lye was getting back into the swing of things with his own filmmaking, returning to his thrilling abstract film compositions with Color Cry (1952-3). By 1956 anyone wondering where Lye had been would soon be answered with several films marking a high-point of Lye’s career. Both Rhythm (1957) and Free Radicals (1958) brought Lye significant attention, each award-winning films. By 1959 however, he would appear to disappear once again. Lye put his filmmaking on hold, proclaiming a ‘strike’ in protest at the poor status of experimental cinema. He dubbed cinema ‘the Cinderella of the fine arts’3 and turned to the burgeoning kinetic art movement to continue his career ‘composing with motion’. The division between film and sculpture has profoundly marked Lye’s career, audiences often only familiar with Lye as a master filmmaker or alternatively through his thrilling kinetic sculpture. The Len Lye Centre presents both facets to Lye’s practice with the Large Works gallery and the Len Lye Centre Cinema, each honouring Lye’s relationship to a particular medium. In the Large Works gallery we launch with Len Lye: Four Fountains, an exhibition centred on one of Lye’s most enduring creations, presented through various scales and in homage to his Tangible Motion Sculpture performance at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1961. Among Lye’s ‘tangibles’, Fountain remains one of the most well-known and loved. ‘Tangible’ is the term that Lye coined for his kinetic sculpture, explaining that ‘in these sculptures, motion itself becomes ‘tangible’.’4 We can readily observe Lye’s intentions in the Wind Wand (2000) on the New Plymouth waterfront where its performance renders the image of an invisible nature. We can trace Lye’s intentions here back many decades to his early days as an art Govett-Brewster Art Gallery Len Lye: Four Fountains P/9 5. Ibid. 6. Len Lye, Some Principles and Techniques of Tangible Motion Sculpture: Fountain I, 1960, unpublished manuscript. Len Lye Foundation Archive, GovettBrewster Art Gallery/ Len Lye Centre, New Plymouth, New Zealand. 7. Gallery Notes: Movement in Art, Howard Wise Gallery, New York, 1961. 8. Len Lye in Art of the Sixties: The Walls Come Tumbling Down, CBS, 1968. Engineering notes for Fountain II, circa 1960s Len Lye Foundation Collection, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/ Len Lye Centre P / 10 Govett-Brewster Art Gallery student, sitting on a Wellington hillside and contemplating how to convey the motion of clouds, rolling waves and birds in flight. Lye was struck with the idea of ‘composing with motion’ in the same manner as music may be composed. By the close of the 1950s, Lye realised this could be extended into the realm of sculpture through controlled motorised action. Lye’s Fountains are among the most delicate of his sculptural works, described by the artist as if the work ‘dissolve[s] into light’.5 A bundle of stainless steel rods are held from below and flare out into a symmetrical fan shape. The rods – numbering more than 100 – sway with just the slightest of breezes, catching and reflecting light from surrounding sources. The motion of the work is a gentle and random swaying, introduced by an automatic but intermittent motor driven action at the base. The rods continue under their own momentum when the motor stops, leaving ‘an almost imperceptible change in the quality of the swaying’.6 The process repeats, giving the appearance of a work in perpetual motion. The series of Fountains presented in Len Lye: Four Fountains express the same idea in varying scales. At the smaller end, Fountain I (1960) takes us back to the first generation of Lye’s tangibles while Fountain II (1960, 1995 reconstruction) represents a slightly later and larger variation. Much larger, standing four metres tall, Fountain III (1976) has been a highlight of the GovettBrewster’s collection since 1977 when, alongside Trilogy (A Flip and Two Twisters, 1976), it featured in the Govett-Brewster exhibition Kinetic Works — the first exhibition of Lye’s work in his homeland of New Zealand. Like the majority of the ‘tangibles’ developed by Lye from the 1960s onwards, these Fountains can be considered models for a much larger ambition. When presented in the exhibition Movement in Art at Howard Wise’s New York gallery in 1961, Lye was clear to preface his work with the message that it was ‘the prototype for a large outdoor piece’, ‘hypnotic’ with ‘seventeenfeet long rods’.7 With these prototypes, Lye had an eye for the future, boasting during the 1960s that ‘I think my art will be pretty good for the 21st century’.8 His ambitions for grand outdoor ‘tangibles’ have been achieved with the Len Lye Foundation’s engineering of variations on the Wind Wand (2000) and Wellington waterfront’s Water Whirler (2006), works that deliver Lye’s designs using modern engineering. In Len Lye: Four Fountains, the Len Lye Foundation present a new iteration of Lye’s Fountain, the 8 metre tall Fountain VI. Fountain VI takes us a step closer to Lye’s vision for a Fountain in the 40 metre realm, part of his Temple project, an outdoor collection of ‘tangibles’ that would include sublime variations on works such as the Wind Wand and Universe, beside several yet to be realised models. Lye’s interest in scale, and particularly scale on a sublime level, is accounted for by the sensual nature of his interest in motion: Len Lye: Four Fountains P / 11 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. The ‘figure of motion’ Lye transposed into his films or tangibles had a reciprocal physical response in the viewer, an empathetic relationship to the work where the viewer feels compelled into or is physically absorbed into the work. Lye understood this feeling as an empathetic tension or ‘Body English’, a term Lye adapted from snooker or billiards when sidespin is applied to the cue ball. Lye would say that generally, but specifically in the case of Fountain, ‘the motion I am programming will be more vividly empathic when blown up in scale’. If the towering Fountain VI still leaves us some distance off from the Fountain of Lye’s Temple, then it whets our appetite for more. Lye still, after all, has much of the 21st century left. And while Len Lye: Four Fountains recognises Lye’s experimentation in the field of kinetic sculpture, it honours the historicity of Lye’s work. On 5 April 1961, Lye presented Fountain alongside a series of other tangibles at the Museum of Modern Art. Just a year earlier MoMA was host to one of the most infamous moments in the exhibition of modern art. In a dual, cacophonous act of creation and destruction, Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York kinetic sculpture tore itself apart performing in MoMA’s sculpture garden. While Lye’s tangibles were yet to approach the same level of energy – Trilogy (A Flip and Two Twisters) was still a few years away – his Tangible Motion Sculpture was as carefully orchestrated as Tinguely’s performance. Lye’s tangibles performed individually and in groups, some alongside chosen soundtracks. For Fountain Lye selected a piece of contemporary avantgarde music, the French composer Pierre Boulez’s Le Marteau sans Maitre (The Hammer without a Master, 1955). Once again, performing with this accompaniment, Lye’s Fountains welcome you into the new architectural space of the Len Lye Centre. P / 12 9. Len Lye, The Art that Moves, 1964. In Wystan Curnow and Roger Horrocks, eds., Figures of Motion: Len Lye Selected Writings, 82. 10. Len Lye, Notes on Programmed Sculpture, 1965, unpublished manuscript, Len Lye Foundation Archive, GovettBrewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre, New Plymouth, New Zealand. Paul Brobbel Len Lye Curator Len Lye, Snowbirds Making Snow (Jam Session), 1936 Fountain I, 1961 Private Collection P / 14 Len Lye Foundation Collection, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/ Len Lye Centre Unknown photographer, Fountain III at Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, New Plymouth, 1977 Len Lye Foundation Collection, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/ Len Lye Centre Unknown photographer, “Fountain I” at Howard Wise Gallery, New York, 1964 Len Lye Foundation Collection, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/ Len Lye Centre P / 16 Govett-Brewster Art Gallery Len Lye: Four Fountains P / 17 Fountain III, 1977 Collection Govett-Brewster Art Gallery P / 18 Curator: Paul Brobbel Assistant Curator: Sarah Wall Printer: Paperstock: Typeface: ISBN: 978-0908848-79-9 Published in association with the exhibition Len Lye: Four Fountains, 2015. © 2015 Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, the artist, writers and contributors. Apart from any fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism, or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this catalogue may be reproduced without the prior permission of the publisher. Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/ Len Lye Centre Private Bag 2025 New Plymouth 4342 Aotearoa New Zealand govettbrewster.com Organisation Partner Funding Partner govettbrewster.com P / 20