Len Lye's Proposals for Architecturally Scaled "Tangible Motion Sculpture" : a movement into depth

Abstract

The kinetic sculptures of expatriate New Zealand artist, Len Lye (1901-1980), offer a way to approach embodied experience of space relevant to architecture and its place among arts. Lye's practice attended primarily to embodied, or tactile, experience of that is fundamental to architecture as a discipline. This dissertation focuses on this issue by examining architecturally scaled works proposed by Lye between 1958 and 1970. Lye produced works in a range of media throughout his life. Biographer, Roger Horrocks, has argued that across this breadth a consistent investigation of that moves is apparent. The dissertation argues that within the that moves is a reordering of definition of art-as-image (static and essential) into art-as-imagining (dynamic and ambivalent). In this way Lye puts into a fundamental condition in traditional systems of arts, dismantling convention of atemporality of plastic, spatial arts. He was not alone in doing this, however his approach using embodied empathy theory casts a unique light upon change. In particular, way it answers a question Brett Guy raised in relation to kinetic in 1968, [w]hat kind of space is it which can't be detached from time in which it has been revealed? The dissertation argues, through Lye's that moves an idea of real space is defined by human body, or as Lye would put it: dimension and space are dragged out of organism's own sense of its neuromuscular and spatially motor functioning body, none other. The definition of an of real space leads, logically, toward architecture. However to be (great) art, Lye argued in 1964, architecture could only be made by artists working with architects 50:50 raising question what it is that Art does that Architecture cannot? For Lye, was defined by its potential to provide transformative experience. This can be traced to two literary origins, Friedrich Schiller's aesthetic education and P.B. Shelley's definition of poetry. For these theorists experience of art, particularly poetry, is an act through which significance is creatively imagined. The dissertation argues that Adolf Hildebrand's description of perception of form and space within painting, via an imaginative movement into depth, is a plastic equivalent of such transformation. By interpreting this as an embodied Lye explored as imagining because, as he put it, any physical action, such as concentrating, reading, talking, walking, etc., has a physical spatial association in our minds through our bodily senses. With deconstruction of transcendental definitions of beauty and truth in Modernism, as transformative experience becomes ambivalent. Through proposals of the1960s Lye sought to counteract this ambivalence by defining a great art which he interpreted simultaneously as physical and metaphorical. In these works, particularly his greatest monument Sun, Land and Sea (c.1965), Lye's that moves celebrates very possibility of in creative imagination. The dissertation discusses Lye's proposals according to four spatial categories: city, monument, utopia and temple or museum. In each category conflict between conditions of actual spaces and real space of that moves are explored. In city this includes discussion of Lye's engagement with community activism in Save West Village campaign alongside Jane Jacobs. Through tangible motion monument Alois Riegl's definition of modern monuments juxtaposes carnivalesque, kinetic space of Coney Island. In utopia Lye's definition of art-as-utopia is compared to Lucy Lippard's suggestion that dematerialised, post-aesthetic art would like most Utopias... [have] no concrete expression. In temple or museum a comparison between Lye's Temple of Lightning and Experiments in Art and Technology's Pepsi Pavilion argues that real (embodied) space of has scope for diversity. In conclusion dissertation explores how Lye's that moves might be applied to an architecture that moves. On-going work by Len Lye Foundation to realise Lye's utopian schemes, including Len Lye Centre by Patterson Associates, are discussed.