Len Lye – motion composer

Len Lye (1901–1980) is one of the most important experimental filmmakers of the period 1930–1960. He created a fascinating body of work, encompassing not just film but all artistic disciplines, much of which has yet to be discovered. In the exhibition at Museum Tinguely, the full breadth of Lye’s oeuvre will be shown in Europe for the first time.

Museum Tinguely presents the interweaving of many different media in the New Zealand artist’s oeuvre in themed sections, in roughly chronological order. The first section is devoted to his early work, especially that related to Tusalava, his first film, shown in London in 1929. Lye had already been in Wellington (New Zealand), where he discovered the composition of movement as the basic theme of his art, in Samoa, where he lived with the indigenous people, and in Sydney, where he made the marble sculpture Unit (1925) and produced his Totem-and-Taboo-Sketchbook (1922-1926) that juxtaposes Sigmund Freud’s text with drawings of ornaments and indigenous artefacts. In London, from 1926, he processed the impressions from his many voyages in drawings, batiks, paintings and in his first film.

"Direct Film" and films in wartime
In London, from 1935, as well as paintings and batiks, Lye made “direct films” in which he painted straight onto transparent 35mm film stock. In their overwhelming colourfulness, these films must have been both a pleasure and a challenge to the cinema audiences of the 1930s. Made as advertising films, A Color Box (1935) and Kaleidoscope (1935) are works in which brightly coloured, rapidly changing abstract forms pick up and amplify the rhythms of the accompanying music. Lye is rightly seen as the (grand)father of the music video, anticipating both the close linking of film and music and the popular dissemination of the video clips that revolutionized our perception of music on the television channels of the 1980s and beyond.

During World War II, Lye made propaganda for the British, creating films dealing with important topics such as secrecy and the provision of food, or giving soldiers a striking impression of actual combat, as in the exciting Kill or Be Killed (1942).

Photograms
In 1947, now living in New York, Lye made a series of photograms: portraits of writers, musicians, artists, architects—and of his family and his plumber. Their silhouettes are playfully supplemented by objects, pieces of lace, necklaces, leaves, flowers, tools.

Scratch films and other film works
In New York, Lye developed the technique of “scratch films”—short works made by scratching into the emulsion of black leader strips, giving the films a raw directness. In Free Radicals (1958, rev. 1979) the scratches dance across the screen, accompanied and amplified by African drums, in a hectic, abstract image of the city. He also made “direct films”, this time on strips of 16mm stock, always with an eye for the emerging medium of television.

Sculpture: Tangibles and Temple
From the end of the 1950s, Lye created a series of kinetic sculptures, the Tangibles, whose movements he developed and programmed in collaboration with engineers. The movements are mostly simple: a thick cable set in motion, for example, a bunch of wires moving wildly back and forth, a steel strip that shakes and vibrates, or a hanging chain made to rotate. The movement is always programmed, obeying the artist’s concept in terms of form and speed.

Lye conceived many of his sculptures on a monumental scale. In the 1960s, this gave rise to projects, drawings and models for a Universe Walk (1965) that was to lead to a 30-metre-high stainless-steel loop which—like the smaller version in the show—was to be set in a soft, rocking motion by magnets.

The exhibition Len Lye – motion composer in Basel is curated by Andres Pardey.

Len Lye—a symposium on motion composing
October 23 and 24, an international symposium organized in collaboration with the Seminar for Media Studies of the University of Basel will examine Len Lye’s œuvre, which includes experimental, documentary and advertising films as well as kinetic sculptures and will discuss Lye’s impact on 20th century avantgardes.

Len Lye film programme at Stadtkino Basel
The exhibition will be complemented with a film programme at the Stadtkino Basel presenting films by and about Len Lye.