Thanks for being a Friend of Len! We hope you will enjoy the second issue of our newsletter offering information about Len Lye and Len Lye events around the world.

You'll find:
Current exhibitions that include Len Lye's work
Upcoming events
Recent events
Len Lye projects
Publication highlight
Collection focus
Did you know?

Tate Modern Collection

The Tate Modern in London is currently screening Len Lye's film A colour box 1935 as part of its collection display. The film is showing in a dedicated room in the Idea and Object wing of the museum.

Len Lye at the Taranaki Festival of the Arts

This year's Taranaki Festival of the Arts features a special reference to the work of Len Lye. Under the title Recognising Len, this programme will open and close the festival with two special events:

Len songs (6.00pm Thursday 26 July) places Len Lye's magical film-making alongside live contemporary music. Several of Lye's films – including his breathtaking and rarely seen 1953 work All souls carnival – will be featured along with the dynamic jazz-infused composition Len songs by Eve de Castro-Robinson. Len songs will be performed by singer Helen Medlyn, violinist Justine Cormack, pianist Sarah Watkins and clarinettist Peter Scholes. Sarah Watkins returns with Emma Sayers to perform Eugene Goossens' vibrant Rhythmic dance for two pianos to Lye's first film Tusalava (1929). This programme is presented with the assistance of the New Zealand Film Archive.

Premiering at the Taranaki Festival is Zig zag (8.30pm Sunday 12 August) an explosion of music and motion in true Len Lye style. Musicians David Donaldson, Steve Roche, Janet Roddick, David Long, Jeff Henderson and Chris O'Connor offer us a refreshing and eclectic musical mix, while Tim Gruchy digs deep into the Len Lye Collection with a video camera to bring you a live mix of dazzling visuals from Lye's kinetic sculptures, many of which have never been exhibited in New Zealand. Catch a glimpse of the treat which lies in store.

An invitation to Friends of Len
The Friends of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery would like to invite all Friends of Len and their partners to join them for a drink prior to Zig zag.

7.30pm Sunday 12 August
Monica Lounge
TSB Showplace New Plymouth
RSVP by Monday 6 August to janeyj@govettbrewster.com or ph 06 759 0854

Len Lye talk
Te Papa
Thursday 26 July 6.30pm

This Friends of Te Papa event takes place at the Angus Meeting Room, Level 3, Te Papa. Tyler Cann, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery's Len Lye Curator, will discuss recent exhibitions of Len Lye's work, the project to build the Len Lye Centre in Taranaki and Te Papa's own painting by the artist Untitled (Life Under the Sea) c1930. Entry: Friends of Te Papa $12, Guests $18

Len Lye T-Shirts

Make a stand for Individual happiness now (IHN), Len Lye's home-grown philosophy of art, politics and life. Conceived during World War II, the three words that make up IHN represent positive, interconnected values that Lye believed could form the basis of a humane society, transcending nationalism, political ideology and religious difference. Or in Lye's words:

Individuality is the rock of happiness.
Happiness is the vehicle of individuality.
Now is the bump of both.

Of course, every utopian philosophy needs a t-shirt, and now you can get yours. With text scanned directly from the title page of Lye's 1941 manuscript, it says it all with style and comfort... Individual happiness now.

In store now at the Govett-Brewster Art and Design Shop.
NZ$45 ($41.50 for Friends of Len)
E-mail: artanddesign@govettbrewster.com

Lye at cinemas across the UK

As in the 1930s, Len Lye's film A colour box 1935 returned to dazzle cinema-goers across the United Kingdom. Throughout May and June, Lye's innovative film showed prior to Patrice Leconte's My best friend. The screenings came as part of the British Film Institute's archival shorts initiative, which aims to bring the Britain's film heritage to a broader film audience.

The first direct film screened to a general public, A colour box was produced by the General Post Office Film Unit to announce cheaper parcel rates. The 2007 screening was a collaboration between the British Film Institute and the British Postal Museum & Archive.

More

Govett-Brewster Art Gallery acquiring Towers

Following a warm response in the recent exhibition Double Harmonic: Len Lye & Tony Nicholls, the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery has acquired Nicholls' ambitious work Towers 2006 for its collection. Painstakingly-crafted mechanisms attached to the audio speakers embedded in each of the work's four towers transform their vibrations into a mesmerising and weightless composition in string. The work's "soundtrack" is a layered sequence of audible and inaudible tones. Towers' shifting transformations between the visual and audio, as well as its sheer kinetic impact, make it a valuable addition to the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery's collection.

Clonic mutations
Tate Modern
Friday 20 July

Len Lye's 1929 film Tusalava recently featured in the film programme Clonic mutations at the Tate Modern. Clonic mutations premiered live musical scores accompanying a series of silent experimental films with ties to Surrealism. The new scores were composed by Spanish Composer Sergio Lopez Figueroa for nine strings, piano, percussion, soprano and clockwork toys.

More

Sculptures come out of storage for the first time in decades

In April, a dozen of Lye's small kinetic sculpture "prototypes" were brought out of storage, put together and test run. It was likely the first time some of these works, many with intriguing titles like Moon bead, Sky snake and Storm, have been assembled since the 1960s. As well as an exhilarating experience for everyone involved, the project has now provided the Gallery and the Len Lye Foundation with new information, photographs and video documentation to assist with projects related to the works' conservation, reconstruction, and exhibition. The Taranaki Festival of the Arts' live audiovisual performance Zig zag will feature some of this exciting new footage, taken by Tim Gruchy.

Harmonic   1960

Len Lye's sculpture Harmonic (sometimes called Revolving harmonic) was part of the series of sculptures assembled for testing in April. One of the artist's first “tangible motion sculptures”, it received it's debut at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1960. Lacking electronic or mechanical programmers for his works, Lye controlled their movements himself, accompanied by the music of Pierre Boulez, Miles Davis, as well as African and West Indian percussion.

Harmonic shook to the percussive rhythms of Trinidad. The motor reciprocates in one plane, but at certain speeds the work's four foot nickel plated steel rod appears to revolve. New York Times critic John Canaday described it by saying, “It becomes for the eye a transparent shimmering lozenge struck through with lights that glitter, weave and waver within and around the core.” Canaday also observed that many of Lye's works also generated their own sounds, and that they thus held potential for “an art of light and sound integrated into a whole without parallel in the history of art.” Lye proposed a monumental version of Harmonic with jets of water streaming from each side. Lye called this work Water whirler, and, realised by the Len Lye Foundation based on the artist's concepts and designs, it now stands on the Wellington waterfront.

See images of Water whirler

Lye once created a special effect for Alfred Hitchcock?

Lye's dazzling early experimental films brought him to the attention of Alfred Hitchcock, who asked him to do some hand-painted special effects for his 1936 film Secret agent, starring Peter Lorre and John Gielgud (who Lye had worked with the year before on his first direct-animated film Full fathom five). Lye's task was to create a hand-painted fire for a scene involving a train wreck, but Lye took the job one step further and made it appear that the highly flammable nitrate film stock itself had caught fire in the projector. In Lye's vivid sequence, the “scorched” film appeared to jerk on and off the screen, before melting into blackness.

“My God, the thing's on fire!” shouted the projectionist. It was a special preview screening, and he had not been forewarned. The audience rushed for the exit while he killed the projector, causing it some damage. Neither the projectionist, nor the studio executives were amused.

Hitchcock and his partner Ivor Montagu wanted the sequence to convey the crash's effect on the characters' lives, and were no doubt impressed by its effect. They had a letter written to warn projectionists that the film was not actually on fire, but the production company was less enthusiastic. Concerned about the potential liability, they forced the filmmakers to remove Lye's sequence, and unfortunately it was lost on the cutting room floor. 

Roger Horrocks' Len Lye: a biography is available at the Govett-Brewster Art and Design Shop.
NZ$60
E-mail: artanddesign@govettbrewster.com