eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781775580188 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Auckland University Press |
| Publication date: | 11/01/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 257 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Art that Moves
The Work of Len Lye
By Roger Horrocks
Auckland University Press
Copyright © 2009 Roger HorrocksAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-77558-018-8
CHAPTER 1
precedents
CHANGES IN HOW WE THINK ABOUT MOVEMENT HAVE FAR-REACHING implications, transforming the way we understand nature and the way we represent it in art. In the 60 years before Lye began his career as an artist, movement was an important and controversial theme, in science and philosophy as well as in painting and sculpture. To consider the theme from this broad perspective matches the spirit of Lye's own approach – he was always looking for connections between those fields. I shall focus not only on the work that directly influenced him but – at least briefly – also consider the general environment of ideas. The chapter starts with some innovative Victorian thinkers, then traces the development of photography, film and other new technologies, ending with the wave of radical thinking associated with art movements such as Futurism and Constructivism. Lye would be born into a society still dominated by Victorian assumptions but his art would be energised by new ideas about movement.
PHILOSOPHERS OF CHANGE
Charles Darwin's book On the Origin of Species (1859) had a huge, continuing influence on artists and philosophers as well as on scientists, and henceforth an interest in motion was often linked with the theory of evolution. Lye was no exception, and one of his favourite themes was 'the beginnings of organic life up to [the] development of an anxiety all human' (as he summed up the subject of his film Tusalava). Darwin's theory stimulated widespread debate about the nature of the life-force that propelled evolution, and in the case of some philosophers and scientists this led to a general interest in energy and movement – from the workings of the human body to the secrets of 'heat, electricity, magnetism, light'. Such speculations spread beyond the scope of Darwin's thinking, but the success of his work encouraged the search for other large theories that might reveal the overall patterns of nature.
One such attempt was Herbert Spencer's First Principles, first published in 1862. The author was 'lionised' and his book was read by 'most serious-minded Victorians'. To Spencer, the world was full of 'motions, visible and invisible, of masses and of molecules'. His chapter on 'The Rhythm of Motions' is full of vivid observation as he seeks to demonstrate that 'vibration' and 'rhythm' are fundamental to nature:
When the pennant of a vessel lying becalmed shows the coming breeze, it does so by gentle undulations which travel from its fixed to its free end. Presently the sails begin to flap; and their blows against the mast increase in rapidity as the breeze rises. Even when, being fully bellied out, they are in great part steadied by the strain of the yards and cordage, their free edges tremble with each stronger gust. And should there come a gale, the jar that is felt on laying hold of the shrouds shows that the rigging vibrates. ... Ashore the conflict between the current of air and the things it meets results in a like rhythmical action. The leaves all shiver in the blast; each branch oscillates; and every exposed tree sways to and fro. The blades of grass ..., and still better the stalks in the neighbouring cornfields, exhibit the same rising and falling movement ...
Spencer's description continues for sixteen pages, describing and analysing a multitude of other rhythmic movements – the patterns of movement in rivers, the quiver of violin strings, the vibration of a tuning fork, the sway of a railway train, the beating of the human heart, the rhythms of poetry, the pulsation of the Aurora Borealis, the rise and fall of the tides, the orbit of the moon, the rotation of spiral nebulae. 'Life, as it exists in every member of [every] species, is an extremely complex kind of movement....' For Spencer, 'all motion is rhythmical', and, 'Rhythm is very generally not simple but compound. There are usually at work various forces, causing undulations differing in rapidity; and hence beside the primary rhythms there arise secondary rhythms ... double, triple, and even quadruple rhythms....'
Spencer's account is reminiscent of the work of many ancient writers who assumed that nature displayed an order and symmetry comparable to a work of art, and who took pleasure in revealing those underlying rhythms and patterns. For example, the early Greeks saw the workings of nature as a kind of universal dance in harmony with the music of the spheres; and Elizabethan writers such as Sir John Davies in Orchestra catalogued the rhythmic movements of flowers, stars and human beings. Victorian readers of Spencer were reassured that despite the scientific discovery of evolution, they still lived in a universe that was 'meaningful and benign' as shown by the existence of rhythmic patterns that were 'as soothing as harmonics in music'.
Lye may not have read Spencer, but, if he had, he would have enjoyed the exactness of his descriptions, particularly his interest in oscillation, a shapely form of movement that would play an important part in Lye's art. Spencer saw himself as a scientist rather than an artist, and inevitably he moved on from such small-scale observations to large hypotheses about nature and evolution. Had he been content to remain at the micro level, one could imagine his love of rhythmic patterns eventually giving birth to the idea of an art of motion.
Another famous philosopher of movement was Henri Bergson whose Creative Evolution – first published in French in 1907 and translated into English in 1911 – provided a version of evolution that fired the imagination of artists. Bergson saw movement as central to evolution: 'Life in general is mobility itself.' His thinking gained its remarkable impact from the fact that 19th-century philosophers and scientists (including Spencer) had taken it for granted that the flow of time could be measured – and therefore segmented – in a mechanical or mathematical way. In contrast, reality for Bergson was 'a simple flux, a continuity of flowing' or 'an infinite multiplicity of becomings variously coloured'. He opened up new ways of thinking about form as a process of unfolding, which encouraged new modes of description such as the stream of consciousness in fiction, and a more fluid approach to form in music and painting.
He saw the ideal perspective as 'a mind placed alongside becoming, and adopting its movement'. This could be interpreted as a call for kinetic artists, though that specific concept seems not to have occurred to the philosopher. To tune in to the flux, he saw the need for intuition to complement intellect, because the latter was too strongly attached to stable forms, geometrical shapes and scientific certainties. If we listened properly to intuition, 'it would give up to us the most intimate secrets of life'. Lye would later speak in similar terms of what he called 'the old brain'.
Bergson's ideas were very much in the air during Lye's early years, and while it remains unclear whether the artist encountered them directly or indirectly, he was strongly drawn to the idea of unfolding form. There were, however, two areas in which he saw things differently. There was a characteristic blurring (or Impressionism) in Bergson's descriptions of movement that contrasted with Lye's love of precision. Bergson also had a negative attitude to the new medium of 'cinematography' because he regarded its basic method as the slicing up of time into separate frames – 'a series of snapshots'. Lye saw that while this might apply to the mechanics, it would not be the experience of the viewer.
Although he underestimated the potential of film, Bergson had much to say that was exciting to the artists of his day about the mysteries of time and movement, individuality and intuition. Also evocative were his speculations about consciousness as it developed from the primitive world of the amoeba, to the busy life of plants, to the complexity of the human mind. His ideas were rapidly picked up by avant-garde artists such as the Futurists. In 1935, Lye's first essay on movement would be in some respects a debate with Bergson.
THE CONCEPT OF EMPATHY
A type of thinking that would prove very important to Lye emerged in German art criticism around 1873 when Robert Vischer began talking about Einfühlung or how the viewer can 'feel into' a work of art. This term was translated into English in 1909 as 'empathy'. Lye appears to have been unaware of most of the 19th-century writings on the subject, some of which were not translated into English until recently; but having once encountered the idea in a contemporary context, he was persuaded that 'The whole business with any art is first, empathy' [his italics].
The concept developed originally out of an inter-disciplinary dialogue between art and science, in particular, new developments in psychology and physiology. The aim was to study as closely as possible the way a spectator interacts with a work of art. Writers in this tradition saw the viewing of art as a highly active process involving many aspects of the individual – brain and body, feeling and intellect, the conscious and the unconscious. Since perception was complex and multi-dimensional, criticism had to augment intellectual analysis by exploring the rich spectrum of physical and emotional responses. This tradition anticipated some of Freud's innovations through its insights into the unconscious; but what Lye would find particularly useful was its strong emphasis on the physical dimensions of art.
The body with its 'motor-nerve' system was as important a perceiving mechanism as the eye. To quote Theodor Lipps, 'If I see a tree swaying in the breeze I carry out its movements in imaginative imitative activities.' And for August Schmarsow, while 'the intuited form of three-dimensional space arises through the experiences of our sense of sight', it also 'consists of the residues of sensory experience to which the muscular sensations of our body, the sensitivity of our skin, and the structure of our body all contribute'. When someone looks closely at a painting or sculpture, their body responds, consciously or not, to impressions of balance, mobility, tension, effort and weight. For example, viewers are stirred by the strongly physical feelings of movement, poise and muscular exertion in Michelangelo's sculptures.
The writers in this tradition were no less interested in intellectual aspects (such as symbolism), but they realised that any account of perception that overlooked the visceral and emotional aspects remained incomplete from both an artistic and a scientific viewpoint. While movement was only one of the elements brought into the foreground by this approach, the kinetic or kinesthetic aspects of art had never previously received so much attention. Robert Vischer even proposed that 'The visual artist should enjoy motion for its own sake, completely apart from its motive.' He was not advocating a pure kinetic art, however, but trying to emphasise the need for a painting to work fully as a 'sensory' experience, in addition to any emotional, intellectual or literary appeal it might have.
From 1894, the work of the art critic Bernard Berenson – born in Lithuania but brought up in the United States – popularised the idea of 'tactile values' in art. His work was not directly linked to the German empathy tradition but he introduced similar ideas into Anglo-American art criticism. He wrote:
In our infancy, long before we are conscious of the process, the sense of touch, helped on by muscular sensations of movement, teaches us to appreciate depth, the third dimension, both in objects and in space. ... His [the artist's] first business ... is to rouse the tactile sense, for I must have the illusion of being able to touch a figure, I must have the illusion of varying muscular sensations inside my palm and fingers corresponding to the various projections of this figure, before I shall take it for granted as real....
Berenson enthused about 'movement values' as well as 'tactile values': 'Turning our attention ... to movement ... we find that we realise it just as we realise objects, by the stimulation of our tactile imagination, only that here touch retires to a second place before the muscular feelings of varying pressure and strain.' Berenson, unlike later artists such as Lye, always brought the discussion back to issues of realism. Concentrating on the art of the Renaissance period, he valued implied movement and tactility in art because of what they contributed to the sense of reality. As modern art developed, his talk of reality and representation came to seem old-fashioned.
The empathy tradition passed out of favour in Germany partly through the impact of Wilhelm Worringer's book Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style. Published in 1910, 'this doctorate thesis of a young and unknown student' was perfectly timed to provide a rationale for the emergence of abstract art. Worringer used 'empathy' as a shorthand term for 'naturalism' which he associated with 'imitation', 'materialism', and the conventional demand that images should be familiar and accessible. He also criticised 'modern experimental psychology', the area of science from which the empathy tradition had drawn, for being confined to the same 'European-Classical' paradigm. The kind of 'abstraction' that Worringer favoured was 'geometrical' or 'pure' abstraction, which he linked with various non-European traditions of art (such as Oriental, Egyptian and 'primitive' art). The book provided an exciting introduction to these alternative artistic traditions.
The idea of empathy ceased to be fashionable during the first half of the 20th century, though it continued to have some currency in architecture, a field that naturally involved the experience of the body moving through space. Heinrich Wölfflin wrote about the ideas of Johannes Volkelt in his 'Prolegomena to a Psychology of Architecture': 'The spatial form is interpreted in terms of movement and the effect of forces. ... To interpret the spatial form aesthetically we have to respond to this movement vicariously through our senses, share it with our body organization.'
There were also a few American critics who kept this type of discussion going, such as Herbert S. Langfeld who wrote in 1920 in The Aesthetic Attitude:
Probably one of the most vivid experiences of empathy that we can have is in perceiving an object that we realize is not well-balanced and may fall at any moment, as for instance, in witnessing one acrobat balancing another at the end of a long pole. As the acrobat in the air sways back and forth on the verge of plunging head first into the orchestra, the audience goes through at low tension all of his contortions.
And when we perceive works of art, 'it is through the muscle sensations that we can, with practice, make the finest discrimination of line and shape, although the clue to such discriminations will appear to come directly through the eye'.
There was also an impressive British art theorist, Violet Paget, who wrote under the pseudonym of 'Vernon Lee'. In books such as The Beautiful: An Introduction to Psychological Aesthetics, she combined the latest discoveries of psychology with an artist's sensitivity to lines as vectors of movement. For example, when she described a natural landscape, she saw it as a field of forces like a Cézanne painting. A mountain was a 'drama of two lines striving (one with more suddenness of energy and purpose than the other) to arrive at a particular imaginary point in the sky, arresting each other's progress as they meet in their endeavour'. (The italics are hers.) Her heightened perception turned the mountain into a kind of kinetic sculpture: 'this simplest empathic action of an irregular but by no means rectilinear triangle goes on repeating itself like the parabola of a steadily spurting fountain: for ever accomplishing itself anew and for ever accompanied by the same effect on the feelings of the beholder'.
Although a few art theorists of this kind kept the idea of empathy in circulation, there were other attacks besides Worringer's. Bertolt Brecht associated empathy with the process of emotional identification demanded by theatre audiences brought up on orthodox forms of realism, and he sought to replace it by the alienation or estrangement effect. Both Worringer and Brecht characterised the empathy tradition too narrowly, but it suited their polemical aims, for modernism was engaged in a battle with conventional realism in all the arts. Discussions of abstract art – particularly those versions associated with pure, neo-Platonic, geometrical forms – had no use for a tradition of criticism that emphasised physicality, touch and movement. Eventually, Lye would revive the tradition of empathy and develop it in new ways. In contrast to Worringer, he would see it as deeply relevant to 'primitive' art, and he would fully develop the hints it contained for a new type of art in which movement became the primary component. From his perspective, abstraction and empathy would be allies rather than rivals.
PHOTOGRAPHY AND MOVEMENT
The discovery of photography around 1839 created great excitement, but while this medium could magically conquer time by freezing a scene, it could not handle movement. By the 1870s, however, exposure time had been greatly reduced thanks to more sensitive plates and lenses, and two innovators became obsessed with the idea of photographing movement – Eadweard Muybridge, born in England in 1830 but working in the United States, and Étienne-Jules Marey, born in the same year in France. By the end of the century, both men would be famous as the pioneers of a new science of movement based on photography's ability to reveal subtleties that eluded the human eye.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Art that Moves by Roger Horrocks. Copyright © 2009 Roger Horrocks. Excerpted by permission of Auckland University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Introduction,one Precedents,
two Len Lye: A Kinetic Biography,
three The Art of Motion,
four The Films,
five The Sculptures,
six Len Lye Today: Conserving, Restoring and Building Kinetic Art,
Acknowledgements,
Notes,
Len Lye Resources,
Index,