By Anna Rigg
Last Thursday evening (20th August, 2015) Victoria University lecturer Raymond Spiteri presented his 2014 paper on Len Lye’s relationship to the surrealist movement in 1930s England.1 Lye himself generally objected to being ‘labelled’; the expatriate New Zealand artist (1901-1980) is often described as a maverick of the art world, not bound by any particular movement or medium.
Yet between 1936 and 1940, Lye regularly exhibited and published in surrealist contexts, such as his 1929 film Tusalava and the three works Lye contributed to the 1936 International Surrealist Exhibition in London (images 1-4). Such works seem to invite comparison to surrealist practice - formally, some of this work recalls the paintings of Miró, while the photograms, in their “experimentation with chance”, recall Man Ray.
Works such as these, which “come closest to a surrealist mode”, date from the late 1920s and early 1930s. By the time they were selected for the Surrealist Exhibition in 1936, Lye had moved on to other things; annoyed at his more recent work being passed over by the exhibition organisers, he wrote: “I nearly got angry with them but why should I educate utter know-all surrealiste [sic] strangers”. Lye did not speak French and his knowledge of French surrealism at this time was limited at best; the parallels between his work c. 1930 and Surrealism “are perhaps more significant in hindsight”.
Lye and the surrealists certainly had interests in common, notably their shared engagement with primitivism. Art historian Tyler Cann, tentatively writing Lye into a history of surrealism (or writing surrealism into a history of Len Lye), described it not as a movement but more broadly “as a set of formal and semiotic operations involving, for example, doubling and fragmentation that challenge the perception of a stable body image”.2 Much of Lye’s work undoubtedly fits this description. But here Spiteri raises a key question: can this “set of formal and semiotic operations” really be said to be specific to surrealism? There is very little to distinguish the purview of surrealism, defined in this way, from that of the modernist avant-garde in general.
In other words, did Lye in the 1930s engage with surrealism specifically or was he simply a modernist? The two are not always easily distinguished; Spiteri leans toward the latter option. Lye moved in modernist circles, exhibiting with the Five and Seven Society and designing book covers for Nancy Cunard’s Hours Press. The image above, showing the front window of the Hours Press, for Spiteri “exemplifies the question of Lye’s relation to surrealism”. Displayed in the left-hand window are two book covers designed by Lye (Graves’s Ten Poems More and Riding’s Four Unpublished Letters to Catherine). In the right-hand window are three surrealist publications (the Dec 1929 issue of La révolution surréaliste, a surrealist political pamphlet titled Au Grand Jour, and Louis Aragon’s French translation of The Hunting of the Snark). The curtain dividing the two displays is amaro bark cloth from Oceania, an object of desire for Cunard, Lye and the surrealists alike.
In its juxtaposition of Lye’s work with that of the surrealists, the photograph suggests both their “close proximity” and the “distance” between the two. Though moving in related circles, neither party was particularly aware of the other’s significance, or interested in the finer points of each other’s practice. The parallels between Lye’s practice and surrealist practice are interesting to trace; but ultimately they remain parallels rather than a traceable set of influences.
1 Originally presented at Geocritical: Art Association of Australia and New Zealand 2014 Annual Conference, University of Tasmania, 5-7 December 2014.
2 Tyler Cann, 'Surreal sight seer? Len Lye, mind, self and time’, in Len Lye, ed. Tyler Cann and Wystan Curnow, New Plymouth: Govett-Brewster Art Gallery; Len Lye Foundation, 2009, p. 64.
Image 1. Len Lye, Self Planting at Night (1930), photogram. Photo: Len Lye Foundation Collection and Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
Image 2. Eileen Tweedy, International Surrealist Exhibition (June 1936), view of the main gallery showing Lye’s Self Planting at Night (bottom left). Photo: artnet.com
Image 3. Len Lye, Snowbirds Making Snow (1936), oil on hardboard. Photo: Len Lye Foundation Collection and Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
Image 4. Len Lye, Marks and Spencer in a Japanese Garden (Pond People) (1930), photogram. Photo: Len Lye Foundation Collection and Govett-Brewster Art Gallery
Image 5. Anonymous photographer, front window of the Hours Press (c. 1929). Photo: Harry Ransom Center
No comments:
Post a Comment