Discovering the art of Len Lye has to be one of the most treasured experiences of The Moving Image lectures has passed to me this semester. Lye is a radical creative mind, ahead of his time. His exuberant work stretches across film, sculpture, painting, poetry and more. His Films explode with kaleidoscopic hand applied colour, pulsing to rhythmic beats with the occasional brief plug to the G.P.O or finical benefactor.
Lye is an influential figure in the history of the moving image. In his early twenties, Lye travelled throughout the South Pacific, and lived for extended periods in Australia (at least we can claim some form of enlightening) and Samoa. He was forced out of Samoa for living with Indigenous communities. Moving to London in the 1920s, and then New York (1940s), Len Lye's career unfolded amongst avant garde modernism on the international stage.
Lye experimented with the possibilities of direct film-making. In some films he used a range of dyes, stencils, air-brushes, felt tip pens, stamps, combs and surgical instruments, to create images and textures on celluloid. In A Color Box, he employed the "photogram" method combined with various stencils and fabrics to create abstract patterns. It is a 16mm direct film.
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