Len Lye and me

Note: This essay appears with images in the print edition of Vol 68/2

We stood on the balcony and our Sunday clothes dripped onto the gallery floor. In front of us was a room two storeys high. The back wall was shrouded in black curtains. In front of the curtains three shiny metal things hung from the roof. There were two twenty-foot-long tongues of steel and in the middle there was a big loop, also made of steel. Turn it on! Now!

A curator flicked the switch. The shapes started to move. First the blades began to spin. They picked up speed fast, swish-swish-swishaaa, round and round and round until the steel rulers became snakes and then the snakes became sickles and then the sickles burst and turned into a swarm of silver bees. A swift, buzzing, zizzing, thousand-winged, silver, flashing noise rushed out at us. Then the blades suddenly stopped spinning and went straight. Crash!

Between the two quivering blades the loop began to struggle and vibrate. Triangles of silver and black travelled up and down the thirty-foot strip and great streaks and smudges of light flickered over the curtains. The loop made a noise that was lower and slower than the blades. It was a long creak that turned into a shudder and the shudder was like the energy of an earthquake cracking in the ground under our house and then the loop turned itself inside out and the earthquake happened and the sound was so loud that we heard it from the inside out and our small, wet bodies hummed and our screams mixed with the long echo of Flip and Two Twists so we didn’t know if it was us or the art that was making the noise.

It was March 1977. I was at the Govett-Brewster, a contemporary art gallery that opened in 1970 inside an old picture theatre in New Plymouth, a small, isolated city on the West Coast of New Zealand’s North Island.[1]

I was nine years old and my life so far had just been summed up by the kinetic sculptures of Len Lye, a 77-year-old avant-garde artist who was born in New Zealand but had spent most of his adult life overseas making experimental films, taking photograms of friends or collaborators such as Georgia O’Keefe, Le Corbusier, Hans Richter and Joan Miró, lunching with Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas in Mallorca, testing crazy forty-foot-high wind wands in a vacant lot in New York’s West Village lot with helpers such as writer Robert Graves or touring New York State universities with composer John Cage, dancer Merce Cunningham, poet Robert Kreeley and other members of EAT (Experiments in Art and Technology).[2]

I didn’t know any of these things then and I wouldn’t have cared anyway. I was just a child. I lived in the middle of nowhere. I was uneducated, religious and provincial, a freckly dot with knotty hair and stubbed toes and four little brothers and sisters and one mother (who was pregnant) and one father (who was at work) and one 14-year-old foster sister (who had gone for a run). I couldn’t even draw properly.

The recent controversy over the work of photographer Bill Henson has generated a lot of noise about children as the subjects of art but what about children as consumers of art, people whose own newness in the world makes them, perhaps, far more comfortable with radical, confronting, wild new works of contemporary art than the adults who might accompany them?[3]

I did not come from an artistic family but I did spend a lot of time with art as a child because the Govett-Brewster was one of the few places that opened on the weekends in New Plymouth then and entry was free. The gallery was very relaxed. We were never told to be quiet but a curator did tick us off once for using the gallery’s emergency exit staircase as the final leg in a running race.

In the 1970s and early 1980s we saw Don Driver’s Ritual, a ghastly installation of plastic dollies with goat-skull heads; Colin McCahon’s blackboard black and white paintings; Michael Smither’s Taranaki landscapes and a show that involved gigantic smoking terracotta pots and Indonesian gamelan music. All this was interesting but Len Lye was the best of the lot. Paintings were silent and still but everything that Lye did moved. ‘If there is such a thing as composing music, then there should be such a thing as composing motion,’ Lye said.[4]

The energy in his films and sculptures mirrored the energy I felt in myself at that time. There was so much inside me that I couldn’t get it all out. My breath got stuck in my chest. I was asthmatic. It was hard to exhale. But even though I wheezed a lot and had to carry a puffer around in my pocket, I wasn’t a weakling. I rode bikes, skateboards and go-carts, I climbed trees, mountains and rocks, I swam in the river and the sea, I played softball, netball and cricket. At nine, that fierceness was at its peak. By the time I was twelve, the torpor of early adolescence had set in and I hardly wanted to move at all.

Some of Lye’s films were shown as part of the 1977 show and even on a small screen they burst with speed and colour. He made adverts and documentaries too but we saw fourteen films, ‘of an experimental type’, that were between one and nine minutes long.[5]

He couldn’t afford a camera so he often did without one and scratched or painted images directly onto the celluloid. To make Free Radicals (1958), Lye spent eight months scratching doodles, zigzags, dots, dashes, lightning bolts and asterisks onto thousands of feet of scrounged black leader. Watching the resulting five-minute film still makes me feel all puffed out.

Lye also used his own or others’ scraps and leftovers to make his pictures. Rhythm (1956), black and white footage of workers in a factory accompanied by samples of traditional African drumming, was made from the offcuts of a Chrysler car commercial. Colour Cry (1953), incredible flutters and blobs of intense pinks, oranges and blues, was made from edited shadowgraph test strips left over from a TV commercial and set to the blues music of Sonny Terry.[6]

The films zinged with energy but it was defused and indirect and foreign (African drums, American factories). The sculptures, though, they moved too and they all made some sort of noise and those noises were the sounds of my childhood. The State Library of Victoria holds a copy of Composing Motion: The Sound of Tangible Motion Sculpture, a 13-track recording of Lye’s sculptures. Thirty-one years after I’d first heard some of these works, I sat in the Arts Reading Room and listened to my past.[7]

The 1977 exhibition included three motorised sculptures. A five-foot version of Blade came from Lye’s New York workshop and local engineer John Matthews made Flip and Fountain, exactly to scale for the Govett-Brewster space, at his New Plymouth factory. (You can read about what an amazing engineering feat this was and the story of how Lye’s work came to New Plymouth in the first place in Roger Horrocks’ excellent biography.)

Fountain was a bunch of silver pick-up sticks that made a little fuzzy tinkle as it waved, so slowly, on top of its wooden base. Lye called it ‘euphoric and lazy’, a work that was ‘a polarity to the wild stuff’.

This was the sound of five-cent coins moving around in the bottom of an empty glass milk-bottle on a sunny night in the Christmas holidays, just before tea-time, when I walked down the dark path with the six bottles in my left hand and put them on the footpath for the milkman to collect the next morning.

Fountain was the sound of the wind through the pine trees, the wings of a wood pigeon, a Mr Whippy truck at the bottom of the hill. It was the splash of my feet entering the diving pool at the Kawaroa Baths.

Blade, a dancing, upright metal strip that was struck by a stick, was louder and faster. It was the school bell on the steps of St Joseph’s, the carillon on Marsland Hill, the horn on the orange Kingswood blaring under the weight of four children’s fists.

Since Lye’s death, the Len Lye Foundation has made three big-scale versions of his sculptures.[8] A red 147-foot wind wand with a winking fibre-optic eye was put up on the New Plymouth waterfront in 2000 and a Water Whirler began to perform on the Wellington waterfront in 2006.

A first manifestation of this rather controversial posthumous sculpting work was Big Blade, a work nineteen-foot high that sits in New Plymouth’s Pukekura Park in summer. The CD records this work too. The linear notes say: ‘Here, recorded after dawn, Blade shares the sonic environment with native birds, some children, the 7 am flight from Auckland and millions of cicadas.’

The ringing of the sculpture and the insect din was the sound of the heat on that summer day when my sister got so badly sunburnt that she had blisters from her neck down to her bum.

And then there was Flip and Two Twisters (also called Trilogy). The energy of the work was so immense that the gallery’s main roof beam cracked and had to be braced to support it. The sound of this sculpture was like the metal taste of blood in your mouth. It was just brutal.

The engineer, John Matthews, said of the thing: ‘People were at times quite frightened about the energy, and sometimes I was too. You start to wonder what might happen with this whole raging piece. I remember a child crying, and I asked Len about this, and he said: ‘Oh, that’s quite normal. They cry when they’re born and they’re crying now.’[9]

Lye’s reply sounded flip but he valued children as critics. In 1965, Lye had his first two solo exhibitions in the United States. One was in Manhattan, the other in Buffalo. One of the seven kinetic pieces he showed in Buffalo was Loop, a twenty-two-foot loop of polished steel that wobbles, lurches and bounces on a wooden base, striking a ball suspended above it at random moments. Horrocks relates how Neddy, a six-year-old, watched Loop, turned to his mother and ‘asked “What is it mum, the universe?” Asked why he had suggested this, the boy replied: “I think it’s the sound”.’ Lye found this funny. After reading about the big bang theory about the origin of the universe, he changed the sculpture’s name from Loop to Universe.[10]

Flip and Two Twisters, Shirley Horrocks’ 1995 documentary about Lye, opens with the artist himself, a beatnik with a goatee, a face as smooth as a white egg, brimming eyes and gangly arms and legs. He is fiddling with a bit of metal. In his appealing, Rat-Pack voice, he says: ‘I get the grip of an idea of art from the movement.’

Then we see more recent footage of men assembling Universe. The men wear white gloves. They lift a cloth sheath that contains the tongue of steel. They tilt the sheath. ‘Try and keep it low,’ one of them says, ‘otherwise it will jump out.’ The sculpture is alive, a mass of unpredictable, coiled energy, like a wiggling toddler about to be unleashed from a pram.

‘The sense of movement that Len Lye brings to his work is that same exploratory sense you feel as children,’ says sculptor and Len Lye Foundation director Evan Webb in the Horrocks documentary. ‘The sense of discovering the world through interacting with it, through moving through it, through playing with it.’

An hour before I saw Lye’s sculptures for the first time in 1977, I had been running along the Ngamotu breakwater with my little brothers and sisters. The tide was high and the black and green water had pounded into the concrete slabs and sprayed up over us in a thick, salty torrent. The waves swelled. It was raining. The ocean shouted at us and we shouted back. ‘Moan the waves,’ our father yelled. ‘Moan the waves.’

The natural world of my childhood was intense. The places we played in had been the sites of violence and upheaval for Maori and for Pakeha. In the nineteenth century, many settler ships were dashed at Ngamotu, near the breakwater. In 1828 the whaling ship Adventure sunk there. In 1834, the barque Harriet was shipwrecked a bit further south and in 1841 the schooner Regina, a ship carrying freight and luggage for the first boatload of English settlers to New Plymouth, became wedged between two rocks at Ngamotu and deeply embedded in sand. Waves ‘as high as the mast’ broke over her.

In Taranaki, nature is powerful, overwhelming even. In the 1970s, natural gas was discovered off the coast. Earthquakes were common. They happened at night. The house would start to move and crack and we would jump out of our beds and stand under a doorframe until the tremors and aftershocks had passed.

Rain was often torrential. One night our shingle roof nearly collapsed under its weight. The ceiling became a colander and the cold water poured through it into the dozens of pots and pans and empty ice-cream containers below.

I had a thick yellow PVC raincoat. I wore it when we went up the mountain and when I rode my bike to school. Some days it rained so much that my thighs had two red welts on them where the plastic rubbed against my wet skin as I pushed the pedals around.

Lye’s sculptures were like the weather in Taranaki and in other remote parts of New Zealand, such as the Cape Campbell lighthouse on the north-east tip of the South Island, where Lye spent three years of his childhood (from age six to nine). Lye’s step-father was the assistant lighthouse keeper there.

In an essay for a 2002 retrospective of Lye’s work, Sydney photography curator Judy Annear said Lye was an unorthodox, largely self-taught artist who was interested in both the old (tribal and primitive art) and the new and ‘whose interests were firmly anchored in intense experiences in the remote environments of his youth and in his belief in the interconnectedness of humanity and the natural world’.[11]

In ‘Slow but sure’, a scrap of writing completed just before he died, Lye said: ‘My joy was without knowing what in a knotted intensity of whim wham in my New Zealand imprint of Nature and great ever since to savour so happiness reigns supreme my lucky lads and lassies.’[12] When I listened, again, to the sounds of Lye’s work, I was flung back into the ‘knotted intensity’ of my own childhood, the intensity of the natural world outside our house and intensity inside it too. My feelings whirred and clashed, just like the sculptures.

I felt joy, delight and happiness but I also remembered how powerless I was when I was small and my life was ruled by all these things that were so much bigger than me: the rain, the wind, a lightning storm, my parents. Nothing stood still. Nothing was certain. My mother had eight children in fourteen years. Her body would turn inside out, just like Lye’s thirty-foot Flip, and pop, out another baby would come. (In researching this essay, I discovered, of course, that Flip is about sex. Lye described it as two wiggling bits of sperm and ‘in the middle is a great female loop kind of shape, a vulva shape’.)

In addition to their large biological brood, my parents also took in other people’s children. My foster sister arrived when I was seven. Suddenly I was not the eldest any more. I idolised Katherine and tried to be just like her but I was also sad to lose my special position as the first-born child. Wasn’t I good enough for my mum and dad?

For five or six months in the mid 1970s, our family cared for the baby of a woman who was too depressed to even care for herself. Dad had met the mother at the Taranaki Base Hospital where he was a paediatrician. One day the child’s mother came to visit her baby daughter. She told me she wanted to leave our house, walk down the road to the sea and throw herself in. My parents weren’t there so I had to stand in front of the door and stop her. As I listened to Flip contort, this memory sharpened: me with my bare feet on the red and gold flocked carpet and my back pressed into the wood behind me and her in front of me, pale and crying and threatening. I am very scared.

Dad worked too hard. Both my parents did. He set up the hospital’s neonatal unit. We used to visit him there and look at the tiny babies inside the incubators. I saw two objects inside the glass boxes: a packet of Beehive matches and a gold wedding ring. They provided scale, a measure of smallness.

Some of these babies survived but many did not. I remember very clearly Dad saying at the dinner table one night that he had had to ‘turn the machine off’ and let a baby die and we all debated the morality of this action. I also remember that Dad, unlike other fathers, would not carve the roast. ‘Only butchers use knives,’ he would say. ‘And I’m not a butcher.’ Or: ‘Only surgeons use knives and I’m not a surgeon.’

Lye’s sculptures were made with doctor’s blade steel. They cut the air. Listening to them again was a swift incision down through decades of adult life and adolescence back to my unusual childhood. I suppose it hurt a little bit.

Beyond the sound of Lye’s work, though, or alongside it, is the motion. After I’d listened to the CD, I watched Shirley Horrocks’ 1995 documentary. It closes with artist and cinematographer Leon Narby’s extraordinary footage of Flip. Narby’s camera catches the strips spinning so fast that they are transformed into light. As I looked at these steely lights flash across a small, dark screen, all noise dropped away. I could see what Lye had achieved. He had got rid not only of the camera but of the stock as well. With this dangerous, loud, frightening, beautiful sculpture, Lye had succeeded in making a film in the air. He had composed memory as well as motion.

Notes

1. The gallery, considered one of New Zealand’s best, was set up as the result of a $100,000 bequest by Monica Brewster to the New Plymouth District Council. Back to article

2. For a thorough exploration of Lye’s life, see Roger Horrocks, Len Lye: A Biography, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2001. Back to article

3. One exception is the work of New Zealand writer Gregory O’Brien. See, especially, Welcome to the South Seas: Contemporary New Zealand Art for Young People, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2004 and Back & Beyond: New Zealand Painting for the Young and Curious, Auckland University Press, Auckland, 2008. Back to article

4. Lye, interviewed in archival footage at the start of Flip and Two Twisters, written and directed by Shirley Horrocks, Point of View Productions, Auckland, 1995. Back to article

5.Roger Horrocks, ‘Len Lye’s Films’, in Len Lye: A Personal Mythology (paintings, steel-motion compositions, films), Auckland City Art Gallery, 1980, pp. 25–30. Back to article

6. These films are collected on Free Radicals, video cassette, Len Lye Foundation, New Plymouth, 1996. Back to article

7. Len Lye, Composing Motion: The Sound of Tangible Motion Sculpture, CD, Atoll, Auckland, 2005. Back to article

8. For a summary of this not uncontroversial activity, see Sally Blundell, ‘Whose Lye is it anyway?’, Listener, 22 July 2006. See also Mark Amery, ‘Romancing the whirler’, Dominion-Post, 19 May 2006. Back to article

9. Horrocks, Lye: A Biography, p. 362. Back to article

10. Horrocks, Lye, p. 309. Back to article

11. Judy Annear, ‘Len Lye: Free Radical’, in Len Lye, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, 2000, p. 16. Back to article

12. Len Lye, ‘Slow but sure’, 28 March 1980, included in Lye: Personal Mythology, p. 90. Back to article