LEN LYE AND ROGER HORROCKS
Strange coincidences (or evolutionary fate): two years ago, we drove from Auckland to New Plymouth, for the first time, for a garden show. With accommodation in the city centre, we had ample time to explore the city, and perhaps not surprisingly, we came across the Len Lye Centre, a totally surprising building clad in gleaming steel. Inside we marvelled at the kinetic and film displays, like something from a different planet. We might vaguely have heard about Len Lye before, but we certainly did not know anything about this Len Lye centre, nor did we really associate the wind wand on the coastal city walk with Len Lye. So much for our poor education. Sadly, on our return to Auckland we more or less forgot about Len Lye and his art, as it had not left a truly memorable impression (we did take pictures of the building).
Move forward to July 2026, when at our Titirangi Poets meeting we were treated to a talk by Roger Horrocks, introducing his re-publication of Len Lye’s Happy Moments, explaining that it had been previously published as an expensive art booklet in 2002 by Holloway Press, i.e. now wanting to make it available to the general public for $30.- a copy. I duly bought one and talked to Roger about Len Lye and the Len Lye Centre in New Plymouth. Only knowing that Roger was a film studies academic at Auckland University, I was quickly brought up to date on Roger’s connection with Len Lye, including the fact that he worked for Lye as an assistant in New York and that he is now intimately involved in the Len Lye Foundation.
Flicking through the Happy Moments booklet, my interest was aroused. Then reading through it in more detail, including Roger’s introduction, and looking at the photographs and Len Lye’s illustrations (his doodles) I was convinced enough that here was an extraordinary combination between two artists (the term used in its wider sense). So, next, I got Roger Horrocks’ 2001 biography of Len Lye, which proved to be a most fascinating read. Having read many a biography (see various reviews on my blog) and having dabbled in this genre myself (with a short 2006 biography of Noam Chomsky) I can now say that this biography is definitely the best I have ever read. The scholarship is impeccable, what with the author remaining at a respectful distance, letting the many voices speak that knew Len Lye intimately and not so intimately. Art critics have their say as much as children’s voices when they see one of Len Lye’s kinetic installations. Along the way one receives an education in modern art, especially film, kinetic sculpture, painting and batik screen printing, and not forgetting writing – in other words, an extraordinarily wide field of artistic endeavours that Len Lye encompassed in his life.
Yet another dimension, as pointed in many a chapter, is Len Lye’s embodiment of an artist per se, the way he dresses, the way he speaks, the way he uses his body and mind to generate art, including his theories of art as an embodiment of the ‘old brain’ that reaches back to the beginnings of evolutionary life forms. Roger Horrocks provides excellent, insightful summaries of Ley’s writings that otherwise might be difficult to comprehend.
The life and times of Len Lye are illuminated with an understated passion and crips precision, so the reader becomes deeply immersed in the subject but always keeping a cool eye on the realities of an artist who is uncompromising in his quest for art for art’s sake, eschewing commercial success or rewards. While Lye does achieve a high measure of critical success, it is never translated into the sort of riches showered on modernist like Picasso, Rothko or Pollock. While Lye is reported to have left no stone unturned in finding sponsors or commissions for his projects, he was always spectacularly unsuccessful. Amazingly he was never daunted by such lack of financial success, maintaining a positive if not always sunny outlook that surprised all his many friends and supporters. Depressive artists are legend, but Len Lye was not one of them. Roger Horrocks evokes a man whose joie de vivre is undiminished until his death that he proclaimed to be ‘sleepy time down south’. Equally there could never have been a more touching note left to his wife Ann: ‘ … No one has had a better life and it was had with your love and unselfish help’.
How did such a man emerge from down-under in New Zealand? Roger Horrocks’ vivid descriptions of Len being brought up in dire straits, what with his father dying when he was only three years old, sending his mother into servitude and having to periodically farm out her children to relatives and friends of the family. Even so Len’s first memory is told us by Len Lye himself in his Happy Moments, a short tale called ‘Flash’. Horrocks reminds us of this foundational story as well, i.e. the uncanny knack to see the ‘light’ in the most unlikely things, like an old kerosene can that he kicks around in a rage as he has been kicked out of the house where his father was dying. As the can is momentarily caught by the sunlight, creating a ‘flash’, little Len ‘stood stock still at it. Lye concludes this first ‘happy memory’ with:
We’re all stopped short by wonder sometime and that’s when it first stopped me in my tracks.
Lye’s idiosyncratic use of language is ‘wonderful’ to behold. A peculiar mix of colloquial, working class New Zealand English and profound expression makes this what Horrocks calls ‘poetic prose’. While Lyse did not write much poetry himself, he was clearly enchanted by poems or epigrams that supported his ideas about happiness being rooted in individuality. Lye, one of the greatest autodidacts known to mankind – although strangely enough not having much talent in learning languages – must have come across an epigram by Goethe which he ‘loosely translated’ into English and included it in his own introduction to his Happy Moments:
Kings and commoners,
Rich and poor,
Beggarman, thief,
Will all agree
Happiness is Individuality
While Lye did not identify Goethe’s ‘poem’ in German, it can be identified as
Volk und Knecht und Überwinder
Sie gestehen, zu jeder Zeit,
Höchstes Glück der Erdenkinder
Sei nur die Persönlichkeit.
The interesting question is how Lye came across this epigram in German – and not known to know German – and translate it inro English. The mind boggles, unless his polyglot friends like Robert Graves pointed it out for him.
In any case, Lye’s philosophical axiom of Individual Happiness Now (IHN) – as the title of a book published with his friend Robert Graves in 1941 – sounds like an unlikely battle cry in the age of leftwing youth politics that championed theoretical collectivism, à la Marx if not Mao Zedong. The hippie movement of the 60s did of course reinsert a type of individualism that at times did not seem to align with purist, Marxist-Leninist politics, e.g. drugs, spiritualism and the like. Lye’s conception of happiness was however more directed towards being in harmony with nature, to be moved by and with it, and finally to be consumed by it. While he may have been somewhat seduced by the American ‘pursuit of happiness’ – as guaranteed in the constitution - he never seems to have subscribed to the American capitalist notion that happiness equates to money, indeed he rejected such gross manifestations. The episode, as described by Horrocks, when Lye got close to the seat of American power by making the acquaintance of a Republican presidential candidate, Wendell Willkie, seems out of character in the somewhat mistaken belief that such a political grandee might share his particular notion of the ‘pursuit of happiness’. More likely he thought more about the prospect of securing a government commission. However, neither does iit look like that Lye hereby subscribed to the Marxist-Leninist notion that art for the people is to be commissioned solely, first by a dictatorship of the proletariat, and then by participatory democracy as envisaged by Rosa Luxemburg. Art and patronage in the capitalist West have always been difficult subjects for leftwing artists, and while some unashamedly embraced the corporate art market, Lye’s many efforts to get financial support for his projects in the main ran into no-thank-you rejections, mainly to do with the art market’s realisation that Lye’s art is not very marketable, i.e. not profitable. While this was a fate for many a modernist, Lye’s uncompromising stance towards commercialisation added another layer of rejection, especially from the academic art sector that in America – and less so in Europe – equated marketable art as an academic exercise that filtered out non-academic art as dilettantism or as mere craft. Since Ley’s kinetic art has many engineering aspects, it was relatively easy to dismiss his art as craft. While in later life Lye was given the opportunity to enter academia in New York, he did not live up to the academic rigors expected. His freewheeling approach to art as doing and discovering it by yourself – and not learning it from a teacher – left both colleagues and students bewildered. Only the truly dedicated followed his path. Ultimately one might say that the socialist model of art as a domain of the common people – if not the workers – has, to some degree, rescued Lye’s art in the form of a Lye Art Centre in New Plymouth, one that is operated by the New Plymouth City Council, even though, like many an Art Museum in the West, being heavily dependent on private and corporate sponsors. Still, as Roger Horrocks notes, the Lye Art Centre is the only exhibition place in New Zealand dedicated to a single artist. That Len Lye never saw this to come to fruition is perhaps a sad indictment of the Western Art Establishment during his lifetime, i.e. always keeping him on the sidelines. Only his perpetual sunny disposition saved him from getting depressed about such an uncomprehending state of affairs.
Getting back to the question where Lye got such a happy disposition despite growing up in relative poverty in the gloomy colonial outback of New Zealand. Roger Horrocks, as a New Zealander, gives us some credible clues. One being the natural environment that even today is a magical concoction of oceans lapping onto rugged lands, still largely uninhabited, and even in the outer suburbs of centres like Auckland and Wellington, the working classes still live in small houses with a bit of garden around it. In Len Lye’s times most everybody lived in houses – however rickety – and like for Len Lye it was easy just to step out and wander up the hill, sit on a rock and take in the vista, watch the sun go down, watch your toes wriggling in the grass, the birds and the bees, the wind whistling, clouds moving fast, in short a rustic splendour for someone who has the eyes and ears for it. Little Len certainly had. At home, wherever that might be, in the evenings, at night what was there to do? Someone had given him a scrapbook and he was happy to draw, to doodle. Pages and pages of it. The artist is born young. To help his mother survive, he and his brother did the paper run in the mornings before school. Money was scarce and sometimes food too. Hard to imagine such a life today. As I was brought up in a little village in Bavaria, us kids too had ‘nature’ all around us, forests, rivers, lakes, hills and mountains, and yet, none of us sat still for a moment to contemplate, to see, to hear, to feel. All we did was to play cowboys and Indians and hang around the village square. On Sundays everyone went to church. I was 18, when to everyone’s great alarm, if not disgust, I filled out a form to say that I officially leave the Catholic Church to become an atheist. Len Lye, to his credit did this much earlier, figuring out that religion did not make any sense, that nature did not need a creator, that nature created itself. In my case, none of us village kids developed any artistic talents, reined in by the credo of the day that making a living meant to make money, and how could you make money with drawing pictures. A ridiculous idea. Once a few select primary school kids, like myself, were shunted off into a Gymnasium (the German version of a select high school) we did have art lessons which some of us quite liked but did not really take seriously. One of my cousins did however enter art school and eventually became an art teacher at a Gymnasium. For some reason he never became a practising artist -maybe because teaching art kills it. However, for some reason, Len Lye did transcend the teachers. To the credit of his art teachers at the Wellington Technical College, they recognised this unusual young man as an artist-to-be even though he seemed to be determined to follow a modernist movement that was as yet unknown in New Zealand, known only via obscure art magazines that Len would find in the odd library. Libraries became his real school, schooling himself, reading assiduously about art theory, art history, art and philosophy, and then later going off to museums and galleries to see what was on offer. Museums held ethnographic art objects from far and wide in those days, and he was particularly impressed by what was then known as ‘primitive’ art, be it from Africa or from closer to home, Oceania (Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia) and even from very close to home: Māori art. Strangely, though, in those days there were few opportunities for a white semi-urban boy to get to know living Māori culture as it was still restricted to rural areas and generally seen as backward, not worthy of serious study. Len Lye therefore was ready to escape this narrow-minded human environment, and off to Sydney he went. Horrocks devotes a whole chapter to this interlude.
Lye was impressed by the Australian landscape, as all people sensitive to landscape are. In those days it was probably only a short journey out of Sydney to go bush. Horrocks mentions that around the same time D H Lawrence was in Sydney, writing his Kangaroo novel, noting that Australians have no ‘inside to them’. While Lye did not necessarily share this point of view – coming from colonial New Zealand – he did however discover the real inside story by reading Freud’s Totem and Taboo – not having heard of Freud before. According to Horrocks, the discovery of the ‘unconscious mind’ was a revelation for Lye, especially via Freud’s contention that ‘primitive man’ projects his ‘inner perceptions’ into the ‘outer world’, what with Māori and Aborigine art at his doorstep.. Lye summarised and annotated (also with drawings) the whole book in a notebook which he carried around with him wherever he went. Ultimately this convinced him that archaic ‘doodles’ arise from the subconscious mind as much as dreams, and that so-called primitive art is in fact a representation of the subconscious mind, as much as much modernist art was to become a true reflection of the inner side of the artist.
Not surprisingly perhaps the next stop is Samoa, having wrangled a job with Burns-Philip as a commercial artist – a line of work that would keep him alive in many of his future adventures. Life in Apia in 1924 must have been a strange experience, what with the NZ-British Administrator Major-General George S. Richardson running the show as a NZ colony, under the League of Nations mandate, having introduced apartheid policies that forbade Europeans close contact with Samoans. Len Lye of course moved into a Samoan village with his Samoan friend and his family, experiencing true Samoan culture that involved a lot of physical labour, gardening, fishing, building and maintenance. He didn’t have much time for his artwork. Still, when he was called to the Major-General to explain himself, he truly stated that he was studying Samoan design. Seen wearing a lavalava the Major-General nevertheless surmised that he was fraternalizing with the natives and thus threatened him with deportation. Len saw an opportunity in the inevitable and thus negotiated a free trip back to Sydney. Nevertheless, Samoa stayed in his conscious and subconscious mind. Samoan tapa cloth designs eventually surfaced in what in my mind is Len Lye’s very best film, namely the aptly named Tusalava which he eventually assembled in London. While he himself evoked Aborigine dreamtime representations, to me it is pure Samoana while at the same time being a universal expression – as indeed the Samoan phrase tusa lava conveys (something like ‘all the same’). Horrocks informs us that the animation film consists of some 4,400 drawings, a staggering feat for a solo artist. The primeval, playful, evolutionary, two-sided flowing motion of peculiar bubbles emanating from some birth-giving form is one of the most amazing animations ever seen. Indeed, I consider most of his other animations a mere variation of the lesser sort even when they turn to more rhythmic line presentations, following African drumbeats or American jazz tunes – Samoan drumbeats are not be disregarded either.
Next in line is the escape to London via a stoker’s ticket on an ageing ship, reminiscent on Kafka’s imagined Stoker trip to America. That Len Lye actually did it, is all the more amazing. It must be one of the most physically demanding – and dirty – jobs ever. Shovelling cheap German Braunkohle sounds like a medieval torture. Living in and observing his body must have reinforced his fundamental belief that ‘movement’ lies at the heart of human existence, toiling away day and night for sometimes very questionable ends, like moving huge ships in the water. Machine movement had become a cornerstone of the industrial age and Len Lye, like no other artist, had come to the realisation that kinetic energy has taken over our lives – art included. While first exploring this idea via animation, Lye’s eventual transition into what he called ‘tangibles’ was his major artistic endpoint.
Once in London, he took to artist colonies like a duck to water, literally living on a barge on the Thames. He made many illustrious friends like Robert Graves and Dylan Thomas, all down and out most of the time, doggedly pursuing artistic dreams that did not pay the bills. There were no corporate sponsors but luckily Lye got some work via the Post Office marketing film unit, baffling some with his line animations which in the end spelled a Post Office slogan like ‘post your letters early’. He also did batik prints that won acclaim, not commercially but amongst friends and associated small art galleries. As mentioned above, his Tusalaveanimation was completed in London but found few outlets as few people, even artists, understood the impact. European modernists as well as experimental film makers like the Russian Eisenstein – who had come to London to give a workshop that Len Lye attended – somewhat emerged from the artistic underground but Lye’s work remained at the periphery.
The bohemian lifestyle of this London circle seems quite incredible in terms of today’s conservative norms, what with Lye and his friends engaged in a merry-go-round of sexual encounters. Semi-permanent relationships developed nevertheless and Len’s partner in crime became Jane Thompson. A cause célèbre was the relationship between Robert Graves (married to Nancy Nicholson and having four children) and Laura Riding, resulting in a ménage à trois. Eventually Graves and Riding decamped to Mallorca from where they directed the London and beyond artworld. When Lye, Thompson and some of his friends visited them in Mallorca, they stayed for some four months, and Len collaborated with Laura in writing a book called No Trouble. Laura and Robert also produced books of their own and so the three volumes hand-printed by their Seizin Press, 200 copies each, were sent off to London. Even sympathetic reviewers couldn’t make head or tail of them. Horrocks quotes a number of amusing review clips, one which compares Lye to James Joyce and his style of writing, what with James Joyce being misunderstood as well. No Trouble next to Happy Moments is the only published work, even though Lye was a tireless writer of letters (some of which Laura Riding used for her book about letter writing), proposals for artworks, applications for grants, unpublished essays of sorts and ‘explanations’ of his art.
Jane Thompson, the South-African escapee from South-Africa and her well-to-do family – and from her husband – had an unlikely fascination for Len Lye, and as described by Horrocks, eventually became Lye’s wife by marriage – having divorced her South-African husband – and kind of tried her best to both support and reign Len in. Len’s sexual politics that favoured an open marriage did not sit too well with Jane although she accepted it grudgingly. Len’s unique NZ-idiom extends to sex: in his Happy Moments chapter called Moon-dates, he writes:
I was just four-ish when two older girls played trying to fit my tassle into one or other of their quims, me mostly on top. It was fascinating manipulation. They’d seen it done. I’m pretty sure I tried to do my bit by trying to pee when my tassle got tucked in – Lord knowns, but I have a hunch I did something exotic.
How much more hilariously expressive can you get? Did they have exotic sex parties in London and later in New York?
So, one might as well jump ahead to New York. The story how he got there – for some time without his wife and two children – is of interest to me as a linguist and teacher of ESOL. Lye was invited to New York by an old friend who now managed the March of Time in New York, which was an American newsreel series sponsored by Time Inc., and shown in movie theatres from 1935 to 1951. This film company now hired Lye to produce short films for Basic English that operated on the I. A. Richards and C K Ogdon principle to introduce basic vocabulary to learners of English. The theory was that even a limited set of basic words would be sufficient to communicate quite efficiently with English speakers, and also amongst speakers of other languages who had learnt English this way. Ogden and Richards unfortunately took this to mean that eventually all languages other than English would become superfluous, getting back to the time before the Tower of Babylon. When I studied for my teaching qualification for English and ESOL at the Auckland College of Education (later part of the University of Auckland, where I also had studied linguistics) in the mid 1980s, Richards and Ogden were still high on the list of compulsory reading, never mind that their basic assumptions had been long discredited. That Lye went along with this scheme is probably not a stain on his intellect, as he was simply desperate for any job in the USA to do with films and art. Lye’s eccentric behaviour was tolerated as his innovative technical film skills were a valuable addition to the humdrum filmic outputs that were typical of the time in the USA. Determined to stay in the US he lobbied for his wife (and by then also two children) to join him from war-torn London. While she was most reluctant to leave London she eventually came to New York, which she duly hated. By that time Len hadn’t seen Jane and the children for nearly two years. He had not been idle in his extra-marital affairs, as could be expected from his open marriage ideas. He had hit the jackpot when meeting the wife of a fellow journalist, Ann Hindle, and she was to become his life-long partner. They married in 1948, both having been divorced from their former partners. Jane however stayed on in New York, dependent on Len for accommodation and alimony, and the everlasting hope that he would make it rich and buy her and the children a mansion in England. Of course, it never happened.
Any extra money Len made was spent on his increasingly more expensive art works that required special stainless-steel materials and motors to set his creations in motion. This period of his work is the culmination of his tangible art. Movement is everything. Connecting the moving picture with moving sculpture becomes a subconscious expression of Lye’s maxim of Individual Happiness Now (IHN), coupled with a life force that demands movement. Having read Freud in detail, it is perhaps no coincidence that in Lye’s Happy Momentswe find a chapter entitled Orgone, obviously in relation to Reich’s Orgone Theories – but not acknowledged as such – that in typical Lye parlance explains his experience of it as a ‘nicely balanced mixture of sex and ozone’. Interestingly Horrocks does not reference Reich in his biography of Lye – possibly a major omission. Lye in his Orgone story goes on to describe a seemingly simple experience of leaping around some boulders on the beach in Wellington:
I’ve never leapt better either before or since – spring-sprang-sprung – spring-sprang-sprong …
Reich’s orgone thus becomes an exhilarating movement, a sort of leaping petite mort – indeed a ‘nicely balanced mixture of sex and ozone’. It may be far-fetched to connect this to Lye’s kinetic sculptures, but an account of a Rorschach Test that Lye did – as detailed by Horrocks – yield a nice psychoanalytic picture of Lye, of his imagery type probably being ‘kinesthetic’. Interestingly Lye was also an enthusiastic – but a bit clumsy - dancer and he loved the vitality of jazz and especially the Blues. The idea that works of art should replicate movement is therefore a logical progression, albeit a very difficult one in its technical realisation. Exhibiting kinetic art requires the artist to install it, maintain it and operate it. Art collectors will not buy it because it needs the perpetual presence of the artist, or so they think. If the work of art is set in motion by natural forces like the wind, it must perforce be installed outside. As the force of the wind changes the work of art must be configured to withstand strong gusts – or must be somehow switched off to prevent malfunction. If installed inside and operated by a motor, the work of art only becomes a work of art when in operation. Lye the eternal tinker spent an inordinate time in his studios trying to figure out the technical requirements to choregraph the movements he envisaged. When it all works, the performance is much like one of his short film clips. Only this performance is also a feat of engineering. Sadly, quite a few of the engineers he worked with were not up to the task. In the end, however, his art works did get the right engineering attention – in New Zealand of all places. In New Plymouth Lye met John Mathews, an engineer who was on the same wavelength and who masterminded an exhibition of some of Lye’s tangible works to perfection. When after Lye’s death the Lye Foundation, based in New Plymouth, built the modernist Len Lye Centre, John Matthew’s involvement was again the key component to its amazing local success. Not that it is a well-known permanent art exhibition even today, seemingly operating under the radar of the wider art world in NZ and possibly in the wider world context where modernist kinetic art has never achieved the corporate prestige like modernist paintings or Tate-like installations. That Lye and his art was repatriated to New Plymouth is one of the more amazing NZ/Aotearoa stories that has come to light only through the effort of modern art aficionados like Roger Horrocks. Republishing Lye’s Happy Moments, while only a slim volume compared to the biography, seems to be an important aspect to unlocking Lye’s life as a work of moving art, arising like a phoenix from the soil of Aotearoa and spreading her wings across the wider world.
