Why Lye?

Their weight is so lightly balanced that if a bumble bee stood on the ball at the top they would dip a bit, and the more honey he carried the more it would dip.

So, I'm back in new Plymouth, working at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery on a Len Lye website and staying at the Sunflower Lodge, bang in the centre of town. The cloud shifts and stretches, and you can see Taranaki from time to time. The town hasn't grown much since I was last here, and Devon Street still runs East and West containing pretty much everything of interest except the Pak'n'Save where fat and tattooed women buy their groceries and I get my pick'n'mix chocolate raisins. The boy racers are still here, keeping everyone up at night shouting abuse and banging their hands on each others' bonnets, circling round on Saturday night in their improbably souped-up and jacked-up vehicles. Some are alone, some have girls in the passenger seats, some even have riders in the boot (who can't have been able to stump up enough petrol money for a seat) which they pop so the occupants can wave to the car behind. It's a laugh a minute down here in the Naki.

And is it all worth it for Len Lye? Um, yes. Because of…

Films you can dance to… Lye alone among pioneers of abstract film understood that motion is rhythm and rhythm is dancing. If you've ever sat through a film by the Themersons you'll know just how dull the marriage of abstract film and classical music is. And however intellectually fascinating the correspondence between synthetic image and synthetic sound is, you just can't dance to Synchromy. Lye used jazz, blues, and African drumming as soundtracks, and it's not just the music that that shakes its booty, it's the images too. From the dancing lines of paint in A Colour Box to pure light articulated through scratches in black leader in Free Radicals, this is the abstract expressionism that's just too funky to qualify for CIA funding.

Sculptures to scare you… The gallery has Trilogy, also known as 'A Flip and Two Twisters' installed in its current exhibition, playing three times a day. Five-metre belts of sprung stainless steel whirl round at frightening velocities, collecting extra bends as they accelerate, then shudder to a halt with a clattering that lets you know throughout the gallery that it's 11am. I'm told that if the steel broke loose the spin would send it hurtling into the floor rather than decapitating the audience, but I'm also told that in a previous installation, one of the gallery's curators would stand on constant alert during the performance, ready to tell visitors to throw themselves to the floor the moment anything started to snap…

Ideas to perplex you… Lots of Lye's 'philosophy' is a bit bonkers. The idea of 'Individual Happiness Now' doesn't attract much sympathy, even in its context of a goal for the allies to fight for during the second world war, though the idea of little bald Lye riding his bicycle round the English countryside like an organically-deranged Albert Hoffman (Len knew the real Happiness Acid was DNA) shouting 'Individuality! Happiness! Now!' is amusing. But some of his ideas continue to be intriguing — he understood our sense of motion to be intrinsic to our mental sense of our physical bodies, and the composition of motion was as important as the composition of music — and a necessary humanising antidote to some of the more clinical and inhumane ideas common to the avant-garde.

Sheer bloody ambition… In the bowels of the gallery there's a packing crate (unfortunately packed inaccessibly behind many other packing crates) containing a disassembled maquette of Universe Walk, Lye's plan for enormous versions of his gallery sculptures in Death Valley. A travelator takes you in through a 60ft version of Universe, along an avenue of shuddering twisters, and out through a 40ft flip. You feel sorry for the Foundation faced with the prospect of finding a way to engineer these visions, let alone finding the money for them.

There are a few problems with Len. New Zealand, and not least his adopted home (Lye never lived in New Plymouth; the gallery was interested in his work before his death and he arranged the formation of the Len Lye Foundation there to look after his work and legacy) cleave unto Lye quite seriously. He's a quiet national icon: you won't find too much Lye filed under 'kiwiana', but despite the gallery's general cutting-edge contemporary ethos (they like to think of themselves as the best medium-sized gallery in Australasia, and they're not far off) I'm not sure if they can entirely save Lye from a particularly New Zealandish kind of parochiality.

Unpopular at first, the Wind Wand soon became a folk icon for the town, with hundreds of imitations springing up in backyards and on vehicles. Now that Wellington has stolen New Plymouth's thunder with the Water Whirler, there are rumblings that New Plymouth must realise an even bigger project (Len not being short of a few big ideas). There's no lack of blueprints, and Lye himself declared that his sculpture was for the twenty-first century, when the science of materials would catch up with his ambition. The Foundation is careful to say that these aren't 'Lye' sculptures but recreations or realisations of his ideas. But how long can you go on making the work of a dead sculptor?

On the other hand, they've got a rather broader view of Lye in New Zealand than in Britain, where we're mostly just interested in his films, and experience the dull periodising tendency of film history for which the British avant-garde equals the documentary movement and Lye is just another protege of Grierson. Perhaps it's because they have the sculptures and the manuscripts here, or just that continually curating his work (the gallery has a pretty much constant display of his work in one form or another, mostly due to public demand) forces new angles and new interpretations to be found.

There are plans for a Len Lye Centre in New Plymouth, to display more of the work that exists in the collection and give a focus to permanent Lye activities. Somewhere, the best prints of the films are being collected for a DVD (I can't wait too long for that one with my finger on the frame-advance button). There's lots more good stuff to come yet. I'm just doing my bit.

The anvil hits the hammer

After seeing the Water Whirler in Wellington, it’s off to New Plymouth to catch the end of Individual Happiness Now, a show of Len Lye’s kinetic sculptures, writings and films at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, curated by Tyler Cann. Accommodation in Taranaki is hard to find because there’s a Michael Crawford concert on in town on Saturday night, but we manage to find ourselves an empty chalet in the Egmont Eco Lodge, a twenty minute walk along the Huatoki river out of town. I meet up with Tyler and some people who work in and around the gallery on the Friday night; we drink at the Matinee and eat at the Laughing Buddha, and I meet the man who owns half of New Plymouth.

The bfi crew turn up the next day, and we take a stroll round the exhibition. There are four kinetic sculptures working and on display: it’s no mean feat to get some of these back in action. Grass is a gently rocking field of springy stalks; Roundhead mounts a small orrery around Ann Lye’s purloined wedding ring, spinning on the pirated notes of a music box. Most impressive, though are Universe and Blade, both fashioned out of Lye’s trademark sprung steel banging against cork balls, and both lit with coloured gels as they were when first exhibited.

Universe, a large loop of steel with its spherical hammer dangled above it, is manipulated from side to side on its base by electromagnets, producing a juddering but sinuous motion, collisions with the ball, and great boinging clangs which echo around the gallery. Usually, Universe is presented against a wall, making it essentially two dimensional; here it’s presented edge-on as you approach the gallery, and you can walk 360 degrees around it.

Blade is a simple strip of steel, its hammer on a rod alongside it. The motor in the blade’s base is programmed, but every performance differs slightly. The entire sculpture rotates on its base, the blade vibrating gently at first, establishing something like a double sine-wave. When it starts hitting the hammer it goes into a frenzy of bashing, finishing with violent, out of control shudders. As Megan says, it’s utterly filthy.

What’s most striking about both sculptures is that what you see at first: a round cork hammer, hitting a springy steel anvil, is in fact the reverse of what’s going on: the anvil is actually hitting the hammer.

Outside, Lye’s Wind Wand, a 45-metre-tall fibreglass stalk with a single red eye, dominates the seafront. It doesn’t whip back and forth as springily as Grass, but bends gently with the prevailing wind, improbably upright when the air is still. Even its slow movement is quite captivating, and I have to lie on the ground at its very bottom for some time, taking lens-jerk pictures to produce Lyeish wiggles in the frame; nevertheless, a passing local feels the need to tell us how much taxpayers money it cost and ask us to give it a kick for him.

On Sunday afternoon, there are 16mm prints of Lye’s films (the Len Lye Foundation and collection are at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, but the NZ Film Archive looks after the 35mm prints of Lye’s films). The wartime propaganda rarity Newspaper Train is interesting but not very Lyeish, except perhaps in its animations. The rayograms of Color Cry, and the exquisitely-timed scratch dancing of Free Radicals are always a joy… Tyler shows some frame grabs to draw out similarities between the sculptures and the films: the waviness of Blade finds its counterpart in long single lines of paint running down clear leader, which snap and jerk when reconstituted through the lens of a projector; the abstract wiggles of Free Radicals have something in common with the wavy loops of Universe.

It’s all what Lye called ‘composing motion’, a kinetic consciousness of the inside/outside duality of the human body. Or sometimes, just ‘zizz’.