Screen Machine

Feature: From Len Lye’s experimental art to iPod advertisements

Remember the first time you saw the now ubiquitous (and roundly loathed) iPod ad?

Remember how sharp, how snapped together the image and sound seemed, how simple and obvious, and yet totally new and now it was? The irony being that the building blocks which enabled motion graphics designers to put that together on their iMacs in the noughties, were first laid over 70 years ago by a New Zealand film maker working on an ad for the British Post Office.

Sometimes what begins life as an unusual strategy, eventually becomes de rigeur pratice. The shock of the new soon enough becomes old hat. That said, it’s also true that when it comes to experimental art, a lot of people will never “get it”, like it or want to spend any time looking at it. Often, the “experiment” part is a misnomer representing gesture and aesthetic rather than innovation. Uninitiated audiences, unused to the lack of narrative hook and occasionally aggressive dissonance can be, shall we say, less than generous about it all.

The lovely thing about “An Artist in Perpetual Motion”, the Len Lye retrospective currently on at ACMI, is that it is just begging to disabuse the unsympathetic of their preconceived notions about experimental art. This is experimentation in the most joyful, playful, rigorous and true sense of the word. An Artist in Perpetual Motion is a wonderful argument both for experimentation, and for the important communication that occurs between commercial and experimental screen-based practice- typically seen as in opposition to each other.

How, you might well ask?

Well, one of the many strengths of this show is its sheer breadth. Far from noodling away in the obscurity of a niche scene, Lye worked across a range of emerging and established mediums including direct film (painting and scratching on the film itself), stop-motion animation, kinetic sculpture, painting, drawing and mixed media. He also, pragmatically, worked in both contemporary arts and commercial practice, and many of the films here are actually advertisements.

The overarching story of the show is, of course, about movement – Lye’s extensive investigations into its particular qualities and our response to them. The most obvious manifestations of this investigation (and its conceptual climax) are the kinetic sculptures- vast, quirky, full of personality and humour- which were initially made as models for much larger public works that he envisioned occupying a kind of kinetic sculpture theme park (which, incidentally, would be totally awesome).

The use of movement, pattern, repetition, persistence of vision, colour and sound- in combination and independently- reveal his curiosity about the relatively new medium of film, whose conventions were still in flux and up for grabs. Films like “Colour Flight” rip apart the various elements that make up a cinematic experience and push each one to its limit- an effect that feels somewhat like deconstructed Hollywood: like watching The Wizard of Oz while squinting, so the details of character and narrative are stripped away and the effects of pure music, light and movement may be tested.

And when I say music- I mean music. Lye’s moving images are supported mostly by soundtracks whose rhythm and energy match that of the visuals, including jazz and African tribal music. While many will find this absence of brutalist, fuzzy sound art refreshing and delightful, it can also serve to remind the experimental detractors that one era’s raucous cacophony is another’s pleasant jazz ditty.

For me, the apex of the film work shown is represented in the suite of works which include the much celebrated “Free Radicals” (1958), jazzy, synaesthetic “Tal Farlow” (1980) and “Particles in Space” (1957-1979). These three films, shown in a comfy, inky black screening room right at the end of the show, span multiple decades and eras of Lye’s work, achieving a nice balance between many of his competing concerns. As with his early, maximalist, hand coloured Postal films, there is a sense of play, looseness and asymmetry, a hand-drawn delicacy and an intuitive rythm. However, the aesthetic is decidely more refined- black and white, and stripped back to lines, dots and scratches. These scratchy markings fluctuate between abstraction and representation- spinning around, shaking, drifting in and out of the frame- now a handful of disparate lines, now a star, now lines again. The relationship between sound and image similarly sways between absolute synchronicity and a more syncopated rythm.

These ambiguous elements draw on another fascinating part of Lye’s work that was concerned with human marking and its most essential meanings. His investigations into Polynesian, Australian, Balinese and African art may seem slightly gauche these days: the notion of trying to achieve a purity of expression via the appropriation of indigenous art is at best a simplistic modernism, at worst, kind of off. But what his obsession with cave paintings, and “tribal” art speak of to me is not paternalism, but a dedication to and faith in the potential of every human mark to mean something. It’s such a lovely, simple thought, you can’t really hold it against him. This faith is shown clearly in the dozens of telephone pad doodles that he meticulously collected and archived- shown here en masse in a horizontal glass display case. Looking at these prosaic, unexceptional scribbles will not yield revelations of Lye’s genius- they look like my scribbles, or your scribbles- that being exactly the point. What they say is that we are all creative beings, and draw an imaginary line (scratchy, lopsided) between these scraps of paper and the 6 ft steel sculptures that are their apotheosis, suggesting we might all be artists if we all investigated the detritus of our minds to the degree that Lye did.

In terms of the exhibition of the work, ACMI have done a beautiful job- this is by far the most coherent and balanced showing in that space since “Eyes, Lies and Illusion”. Installations are well spaced, paced and sensitively lit, with shadow becoming another dimension of the work. There were limited sound bleeds, with the “performed” sculptures being staggered over the course of an hour so at any one time only one will be in action. This care taken may well be due to the fact that the installation team were able to work with the Len Lye Foundation from NZ, who have cared for and showcased the whole Len Lye archive and collection for the last 29 years, since he bequeathed it to them at his passing in 1980.

My greatest concern is that it is clearly too late in the game for Australia to claim Lye as our own. It is artists like Lye who have helped build the palette of cinema and its myriad possibilities. Without experimentation like his (and that of contemporary video and animation artists), we limit the possibilities of the medium, and the artistic potential of all film. An Artist in Perpetual Motion reminds us that what attracts an artist to the idea of experimentation in the first place, is exactly the same thing that attracts scientists and academics- the eureka moment- when you emerge from the quagmire of ambiguity and obscurity and a new way forward is found. (Even if that new way occasionally leads to iPod ads…)

Len Lye: An Artist in Perpetual Motion is on exhibition at ACMI until October 11. More info here.

Jessie Scott is a video artist, producer and a founding member of temporal art collective Tape Projects.

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