AUCKLAND LETTER Kinetic Sculptor Returns Home

Press, Volume CVIII, Issue 31864, 17 December 1968, Page 18

AUCKLAND LETTER Kinetic Sculptor Returns Home

(By

DAVID ARMITAGE

■ At home for a brief visit at Christmas is the pioneer filmmaker, painter, and kinetic sculptor, Len Lye. Lye arrived in New Zealand ■last week and spent yesterday in Picton. Without doubt Lye is the most important New Zealander in international contemporary art. In Auckland' on December 23 he will lecture, sponsored by the Dun-' hill Cultural Foundation, on! his special province—“ The art! that moves.”

Regarded as a major kinetic sculptor in America, Lye can claim to be among the first to extend its possibilities. Born in Christchurch in 1901, he studied there and in Wellington before leaving the country for Samoa. As a 15-year-old “art-crazy”! student he decided that if John Constable had tried to show the movement of clouds in his oil sketches he could make his own shapes and compose his own motion. He began to make manually operated constructions with fruit crates, cranks and pulleys. . After working at his kinetic constructions in the Islands he moved to Sydney in 1921 and experimented with film animation, evolving the technique of inscribing designs directly on the film emulsion. In 1926 he went to London; to continue his experiments!

both with kinetic constructions and film. His first direct film (made without a camera), was “Colour Box,” commissioned by the British Post Office. It became an international award winner. In 1944, after working mainly for advertising agencies, he left England for the United States and in 1958, with his film “Free Radicals,” he won the major award for experimental films at the Brussels World's Fair. Lye describes his work as “tangible motion sculptures.”! Examples were first shown at i the Museum of Modern Art, 1 New York, in 1961 (for one performance only, because Lye himself had to be at the controls). He has exhibited since then in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum and at Stockholm. A major one-man exhibition was featured at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, in 1965. The elements of Lye’s sculpture have been described as supremely simple. In one work, hanging strips of stainless steel six or seven feet long are set spinning at very high speeds. "The whiplash strain on the steel produces a series of frightening, unearthly sounds in perfect accord with the mood of barbaric energy that seems to have been released.”

Technology and money allowing, Lye intends to build a temple to his beloved “Muse of Motion.” As a site he has in mind Arizona’s Death Valley. Perhaps after his visit home he may move this to the North Island’s pumice, plateau.