Len Lye: Motion Composer
In 1966 Len Lye and the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely were included in Directions in Kinetic Sculpture at Berkeley Art Museum, an exhibition that signalled that the medium of kinetic art was beyond its halcyon days of the early 1960s. Artforum editor Philip Leider dismissed the Eurocentric movement, noting ‘the measure of our technological age is more accurately taken in a Warhol soup can than in all the kinetic sculpture from here to Dusseldorf’.1 Leider singled out Lye as the single artist ‘who seems to transcend all the confusion . . . utterly beyond the petty limitations of the other artists in the exhibition’.2 A similar point would be stressed the following year by the critic Clement Greenberg dismissing pop art, land art, op art and kinetic art as ‘Novelty art’.3 The Berkeley exhibition closed a period during which Lye and Tinguely’s work intersected regularly on their very different approaches to kinetic art.
Both featured together in a number of exhibitions, starting even before Lye’s 1958 turn to sculpture with Parisian gallerist Denise René including Lye’s experimental films. The seminal () curated by Pontus Hultén in 1961 included Lye’s as part of a large survey of kinetic art travelling from the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, to Stockholm’s Moderna Museet and Copenhagen’s Louisiana Museum of Modern Art.
