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Len Lye Trilogy Len Lye Trilogy (A Flip and Two Twisters) Cover: ‘Trilogy (A Flip Opposite: and Two Twisters)’, 1977/2016 A Flip and Two performing at Twisters, Berkeley Govett-Brewster Art Museum, 1965 Trilogy (A Flip Art Gallery/Len Len Lye Foundation and Two Twisters) Lye Centre, 2016 Collection, 1977 Collection Govett-Brewster Len Lye Foundation Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/ Collection, Art Gallery Len Lye Centre Govett-Brewster Photo: Leith Photographer Art Gallery/ Robertson unknown Len Lye Centre P / 2 John Matthews Len Lye in studio in studio with with ‘Flip’, ‘Twister’, New New York, c. 1974 York, c. 1974 Len Lye Foundation Len Lye Foundation Collection, Collection, Govett-Brewster Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/ Art Gallery/ Len Lye Centre Len Lye Centre Photographer Photographer unknown unknown P / 4 Govett-Brewster Art Gallery Len Lye Trilogy (A Flip and Two Twisters) P / 5 Len Lye in studio with ‘Flip’, New York, 1970s Len Lye Foundation Collection, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/ Len Lye Centre Photographer unknown P / 6 Govett-Brewster Art Gallery Len Lye Trilogy (A Flip and Two Twisters) P / 7 Trilogy (A Flip and Two Twisters) Paul Brobbel Len Lye Curator, Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre Intense, frightening and beautiful, the expertly engineered Trilogy is one of Len Lye’s most captivating works. Suspended from the ceiling, a large loop (Flip) and two long strips of stainless steel (Twisters) are spun and contorted into a motorised dance. Tension builds in the flexing steel, followed by sudden whiplash stops. The thunderous crash of Trilogy reverberates around the gallery, a sound described by Lye as like ‘icicles tumbling down your back’. It is a masterpiece in the field of kinetic art and a testament to Lye’s vision of composing with motion. Trilogy holds a special place in the heart of the Govett-Brewster, built for the 1977 exhibition Kinetic Works – the first exhibition of Lye’s work in his homeland – and a historic part of the Govett-Brewster Collection ever since. This publication celebrates four decades of Trilogy at the Govett-Brewster with a revision of curator Tyler Cann’s 2003 essay Trilogy, Tantra and Terror, alongside a newly commissioned essay from Karen Wrigglesworth exploring the engineering challenges behind one of the world’s most compelling sculptures. Govett-Brewster Art Gallery Len Lye Trilogy (A Flip and Two Twisters) P / 9 Trilogy, Tantra and Terror Tyler Cann Curator of Contemporary Art, Columbus Museum of Art To see Len Lye’s 1977 Trilogy (A Flip and Two Twisters) at what he once called the ‘The swingiest art gallery of the Antipodes, the Govett-Brewster in New Plymouth, New Zealand’ is to make a sort of pilgrimage.1 The work is the culmination of Lye’s programmed steel sculpture and the only one realised during his lifetime on the massive scale he envisioned. The difficulty of installing and maintaining Trilogy means it does not often travel. Even at the Govett- Brewster, it only performs at timed intervals and due to the stress the work exerts upon itself, exhibitions of Trilogy tend to have short runs. All of this lends the experience a somewhat ritualistic character and one that is very much in keeping with the artist’s conception of the work. Len Lye did not design Trilogy to be a polite object of aesthetic contemplation. Rather, the work was meant to harness the sublime in the service of art, to short-circuit conscious thought with a jolt of awe and wonder. With the work at rest, we see two long strips of steel hanging still and silent from the gallery ceiling. They flank a third that is suspended at both ends to form a twisted loop. Perched above, with its symmetry and grandeur, the work already makes a powerful sculptural statement. Then Trilogy’s potential energy kicks into gear and the two hanging strips begin a loping whirl. Stand close enough and you can feel the rush of air as it’s cut by the steel blades. Just as they seem to gain their rhythm, the shimmering ribbons crash to a halt with a resounding clang that echoes through the gallery. Reflected spotlights dance around the room and then slow to a gentle shiver (an effect that is like stepping into one of Lye’s black and white scratch films). The bands jump to life again, faster, then crash, before the central loop begins a slow twist. The torqued Len Lye in studio 1. Unpublished and ribbon flips itself inside out with another ringing blast. This dance instensifies, with ‘Flip’, New unsent letter to York, 1970s Philip Leider, as the twisters spin furiously to reach double, and then triple harmonic curves. April 1978, Len Len Lye Foundation Lye Foundation The work is open to a bit of chaos, not every performance is the same, but Collection, Archive, Box 14, Govett-Brewster Govett-Brewster typically, the central loop has the final act; its tumbling inversion resonates Art Gallery/ Art Gallery/ Len Lye Centre Len Lye Centre, through the museum as visitors stand transfixed, exhilarated, sometimes Photographer New Plymouth, unknown New Zealand. applauding, or laughing out loud. P / 10 Govett-Brewster Art Gallery Len Lye Trilogy (A Flip and Two Twisters) P / 11 At less than half the size, with blades scarcely 2.4 metres long, the 1965 sculpture addresses. As with Lye’s 1965 Blade, one can feel the gallery shake version of Trilogy, called Flip and Two Twisters, seems to have evoked primal in the work’s more violent episodes. As the Twisters spin into double and triple fear during its presentation at the Berkeley Art Museum’s 1966 exhibition harmonic curves, we might feel the hair on the back of the neck stand up, or a Directions in Kinetic Sculpture. Philip Leider, Artforum editor and critic, no friend vertiginous tingling at the base of the spine. In the gallery, jaws drop and smiles of kinetic art generally, wrote in Artforum that the work ‘manages to compress crack; some catch their breath and hold it, others sigh. These effects come so ferocious an energy that the viewer stands paralysed, gripped by an emotion at the nexus between eye, mind, and body, at the point where the boundaries almost of terror’. He continues: between them blur. Vision here becomes more like taste, hearing or smell. Its stimuli physically enter the body, act upon it and react with it. Just as Flip turns The whiplash strain on the steel produces a series of frightening, in on itself, there ceases to be a distinct outside or inside to the spectator’s unearthly sounds in perfect accord with the mood of barbaric energy body. Trilogy reveals our porous relation to the external world. that seems to have been released. Installed by itself in a black-painted Lye never tired of reminding his listeners that the viewer needed to room, the viewer comes upon Lye’s ‘Trilogy’ as he would come upon a feel empathy with his work as you ‘unconsciously feel yourself into another’s volcano. The effect is beautiful, frightening, utterly beyond the petty shoes’. It seems that Lye himself could hardly do otherwise when confronted limitations of the other artists in the exhibition.2 with a pattern of motion. From age ten he practiced such compassion until he ‘could levitate with the curling smoke, scud with the wind-blown leaf, sashay Trilogy’s spinning helices hover on the edge of control, releasing an with the reflection of masts on water, shimmy with the flapping flag, glide with almost obscene amount of raw power even if they do form graceful harmonic the snake. ...There isn’t a motion that one cannot isolate and feel in relation to curves. Flip is not so free to whiplash, but along with its pent-up tension, one’s own solid body’.9 Lye sought to cultivate this kinaesthetic sensitivity in it unleashes ‘a kind of cascading avalanche of sound’ as Lye put it.3 The his viewers, explaining his penchant for scaling up his work by saying, ‘A three magnitude of Trilogy’s energetic pulse goes beyond our usual expectations for foot shrub falls over and it’s a lot of “so what”. But when it’s a 300 foot redwood works of art, summoning the awestruck sensation we typically associate with tree, then you stay and your mouth opens with a little bit of awe about energy, the vastness and power of nature. weight, gravity, and that’s the stuff we’re made of, and that’s something’.10 Given Trilogy’s furious drama of tension and release, it is no wonder Lye’s The heroic scale of Lye’s work may rely on a certain rhetoric of power but ‘The wife Ann called Trilogy ‘the sexiest work Len ever made’.4 The sexual analogy motto is, never make the size of the figure so great it shrivels the anatomical is common among the work’s reviewers. The critic Dore Ashton remarked that stance of the beholder down to the size of a peanut’.11 Viewers are not meant to 5 2. ‘Kinetic Sculpture Flip’s ‘erotic undulations’ were reminiscent of a belly dance. Echoing Lye’s own cower in front of Lye’s work, but to feel more alive. at Berkeley’, 6 Artforum, May 1966, loose iconography for the Twisters as ‘spermatozoa’ and the Flip as ‘womb’, art To get the scale Lye desired for Trilogy requires a great deal of technical pp. 40-42. historian and critic Barbara Rose related them to the ancient Hindu lingam and expertise, and Lye was no engineer. He couldn’t even drive a car.
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