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
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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
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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
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