Len 'laughing and leaning' Lye

Len Lye – An Artist In Perpetual Motion
Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI)
Exhibition runs 16 July – 11 October

The event was an exclusive one where even some of the core ACMI staff couldn’t get past the door. But all stops were pulled out by the gallery to impress those who were invited to the opening of Len Lye – An Artist In Perpetual Motion. “Oh they’re all a bit too hard to eat really”, was the response to lavish finger food. Oysters au natural and crumbed chicken topped with fried whitebait may not have grabbed everyone, but where the highbrow food failed, the artwork made up for it.

Velvet-jacketed hipsters gathered in clumps (a ‘Clump of Hipsters’, perhaps? – Ed) among large numbers of catering staff, ACMI officials and curators Alessio Cavallaro and Tyler Cann, looking most proud of their new ‘baby’. Once the mandatory speeches were done with, some folk continued to swill back Vodka Sunrises while others descended the stairs to the gallery space, freshly re-opened for the Len Lye exhibition after some downtime in renovation.

The exhibition is vast, certainly not one to cover in a wee lunch hour, and includes Lye’s short films, sketches, film stencils, photography, kinetic sculptures and Batik prints – indicative of his fascination with indigenous cultures. Letters, articles and copies of ‘wires’ sent back in the day are also on display. Most pieces range in date from the 1920s through to the time of his death in 1980, each shedding a little more light on the man behind the work.

His films, many of which date back to the 1930s, are well represented in the exhibition. The short pieces are peppered with pop-art colour and most of these mesh image, text and moving patterns, supremely satisfying for a short attention span. The kitsch music makes it hard to suppress the urge to break out into salsa.

Hanging on a wall to the rear of the gallery, Lye’s shadow portraits are ghostly. His subjects would sit in front of unexposed photographic paper as he used pulsed light to expose the area around their shadowed profile, rendering an eerie result.

The kinetic sculpture section is impressive. Combining wood, steel and cork, the variously sized pieces undulate, creating a progression of rhythmic noise. ‘Grass’ is operated by a push-button with steel fibres, and gently moves as if long grass were being blown by a steady wind – it’s surprising that such a bland industrial-looking object on first glance can produce a meditative effect in a matter of seconds.

‘Fountain II’, composed of massive flexible pieces of steel, looks much like an old optical-fibre lamp and rotates in the same way. ‘Blade’, complete with a sort of cork gong that hits a sheet of shaking metal, grabs my attention and the sound of it leaves fond memories of Rolf Harris and his wobble board; “I loved the natural harmonics of all of them”, said one art buff.

There were, however, issues with the sculpture section. “You need some serious time to kill between because there’s periods where none of the sculptures are going,” explained one of the guests. The pieces may need some fine tuning in their sequencing, “but it’s worth the wait”.

During an interview early in his career, Lye talks about his vision to create unusual, large pieces of work of “60 to 90 feet”. “I’ve checked with the steel mill and people tell me it’s feasible,” he beams. One thing resonates throughout his work: he was a man who shook off boundaries to create pieces that seem more in place in the current decade. If the hipsters who clumped around ACMI on opening night were any indication, it might be fair to say that if Mr Lye were alive today he’d be easily adopted as one of their own.