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Len Lye: A biography 

(2001) 

by Roger Horrock tells for the first time the story of an extraordinary New Zealander, a brilliant artist with an international career.

Len Lye: A biography, *****, 1st generation

This book tells for the first time the story of an extraordinary New Zealander, a brilliant artist with an international career who never lost the informality, the energy, the independence of spirit of his South Pacific origins.

 

Len Lye began as an unsettled working-class kid with limited prospects and became a leading modernist artist in London and New York. Roger Horrocks's exhaustive study of Len Lye has taken many years and is based on interviews with many of those close to the artist as well as on voluminous documentary sources. In recounting a fascinating life he conveys at every turn Len Lye's vitality, charm, originality and enormous talent. The book explores Len Lye's activity in film, sculpture, painting, music and writing and his engagement with the leading movements of twentieth-century art. It will unquestionably place Len Lye alongside Mansfield and Hodgkins as a great New Zealand expatriate artist. Generous illustrations give striking examples of Len Lye's art and a vivid sense of the man and his world.

 

Roger Horrocks is the Head of the Department of Film, Television and Media Studies at the University of Auckland and was Lye's assistant late in his life. He has been very actively involved in New Zealand's growing film and television industries, serving on NZ on Air and other funding agencies.

 

Source: Govett-Brewster Art Gallery

 

 

ISBN-10: 1869402472

ISBN-13: 978-1869402471

 

 

Len Lye: A biography, *****, 1st generationLen Lye: A biography, *****, 1st generation

Reading

Len Lye (2009) co-edited by the curator Tyler Cann and the writer, critic and poet Prof. Wystan Curnow is a tribute to one of New Zealand’s most internationally acclaimed artists is the most comprehensive visual presentation of Len Lye’s art to date.

Over 1,000 new photographs were created and hundreds of them selected for this image-rich publication, presenting the full range of Len Lye’s work, from drawings and paintings right through to his photograms and kinetic experimentations. (Govett-Brewster)

Art That Moves: The Work of Len Lye (2009) by Roger Horrocks, author of the best-selling and critically acclaimed 2001 Len Lye: A biography, shifts the focus from Len Lye's life to his art practice and innovative aesthetic theories about "the art of motion," which continue to be relevant today. Going beyond a general introduction to Len Lye and his artistic importance, this in-depth book offers a detailed study of his aesthetics of motion, analyzing how these theories were embodied in his sculptures and films. (Amazon)

Sons et Lumières (2004) – A History of Sound in the Art of the 20th Century (in French) by Marcella Lista and Sophie Duplaix published by the Centre Pompidou for the excellent Paris exhibition in September 2004 until January 2005.


Curated by the Pompidou’s Sophie Duplaix with the Louvre’s Marcella Lista, the show required a good three or four hours to absorb, with its bombardment of sensory and intellectual input, including painting, sound sculpture, sound/light automata, film and video, and room-size installations. (Frieze Magazine)

Links

 

SEE ALSO

VJing (2010) is a reproduction of the Wikipedia article VJing, based upon the revision of July 25th 2010 and was produced as a physical outcome of the wiki-sprint, a collaborative writing workshop that was held 2010 in the frame of Mapping Festival, Geneva. (Greyscale Press)

Ohi Ho Bang Bang (1988) - The music in this video was created from the sounds being played live during filming. The film actually shows what you hear. It is a collaboration between Holger Hiller, Akiko Hada and Karl Bonnie. (Holger Hiller)

Digital Harmony (1980): On the Complementarity of Music and Visual Art – John Whitney, Sr. wanted to create a dialog between "the voices of light and tone." All of his early experiments in film and the development of sound techniques lead toward this end. He felt that music was an integral part of the visual experience; the combination had a long history in man's primitive development and was part of the essence of life. His theories On the complementarity of Music and Visual Art were explained in his book, Digital Harmony, published by McGraw-Hill in 1980. (Paradise 2012)

See this Sound (2009) by Liz Kotz (Author), Cosima Rainer (Editor), Stella Rollig (Editor), Dieter Daniels (Editor), Manuela Ammer (Editor) compiles a huge number of artists, filmmakers, composers and performers, reaching back into the early twentieth century and into the present to survey overlaps between not only sound and art, sound and film, and the metaphor of cinema as rhythm or symphony. Proceeding chronologically, the book takes the early cinematic eye music of Hans Richter as a starting point, noting parallel works by Walter Ruttmann and Oskar Fischinger; moving into the postwar period, the art/cinema/ music experiments of Peter Kubelka, Valie Export and Michael Snow are discussed, establishing precedents to similar work by Rodney Graham, Carsten Nicolai, Jeremy Deller and many others. (Artbook)

Computer Music Journal: Visual Music (2005) - The articles in this issue are all devoted to the topic of Visual Music: audiovisual creations in which the artist strives to endow the video component with formal and abstract qualities that mimic those of musical composition. (Computer Music Journal)