Liliane Lijn RCM Galerie Liliane Lijn Early Work 1961 - 69 RCM Galerie 4th June - 20th July 2015 Wavering Line of Light Far from declining, Paris gained a new cosmopolitanism Guy Brett in the late 1950s and early 1960s with the influx of young artists from Latin America, drawn by the desire to see With this exhibition, Liliane Lijn returns to Paris after an first-hand the work of artists like Mondrian, Brancusi, absence of some twenty years. Self taught as an artist, Vantongerloo and Klein. All this was no doubt below the she originally arrived in this city in the autumn of 1958 radar of the French art establishment of the time, since from Geneva and immediately plunged into the world of the encounters between artists of different nationalities experiment and innovation of the Parisian avant-garde. and cultural backgrounds were of a new and subtle kind, In the first year she was in Paris, Yves Klein staged his and they took place at levels which had been in no way epoch-making exhibition Le Vide (the Void) in the Galerie institutionalised. Iris Clert, and, in the following year, Takis made his first Telemagnetic sculpture. Two years later, Liliane Lijn was One way to look at the diverse nature of experiment making sculptures by drilling into blocks of Perspex, in Paris at that time would be to see it as a multitude producing empty spaces which paradoxically behaved of different kinds of transformation of the traditional like solids in the transparent blocks, causing the light formats of painting and sculpture. Liliane Lijn’s early falling on them to liquefy in the viewer’s gaze. works of around 1961 would exemplify this category, especially her Double Drilling and Inner Space (both 1961), Lijn embraced the Paris of artistic thinking and also the transparent Perspex blocks into which she has drilled to Paris of wild and orgiastic “happenings”, organised (if that create bubbles and cavities in the inaccessible interior. is the right word) by Jean-Jacques Lebel at the end of the These works testify to a fascination with materials, their 1950s, perhaps acting as a psychological release after the properties, and the possibility of a transformation that privations of the war. goes beyond a representation. It has often been assumed that when the ‘grand narrative While prominent North American artists continued to of modern art’ began to coalesce around the ‘New York adhere to the formats of painting and sculpture as the School’ in the 1950s, Paris lost its pre-eminence as the vehicles of their vanguard movements, European artists international centre of modern art. Younger artists in inherited a legacy of experimentation and the use of Britain, for example, became increasingly fixated on new materials from outside the sphere of art. This can be art movements in the USA, encompassing Abstract traced back to artists like Lazlo Moholy-Nagy and Georges Expressionism, Pop Art, Minimalism and Conceptual Vantongerloo – to Moholy’s Light-Space-Modulator (1922- Art, and gave little credence to events in Paris. But 1930) investigating the possibility of light and movement this judgment was crude and simplistic. For one thing as a medium of expression, and to Vantonterloo’s use Paris and New York were not polarised worlds. Robert of a newly invented transparent material, Perspex or Rauschenberg and John Cage had close contacts with Plexiglass (1949-1965). Vantongerloo imported it from Europe. Cage was associated with Fluxus, a transatlantic the USA to France and welcomed it in ecstatic terms: movement with its roots in Dada. North American writers “Plastic material!!!! What a marvel! It is both physics and James Baldwin, Brion Gysin, William Burroughs, Allen chemistry. It’s creation itself” (letter to Lillian Florsheim). Liquid Reflections Multiple, 1969 Ginsberg and Gregory Corso lived for periods in Paris. Lijn was inspired by Gysin’s and Burroughs’s ‘cut-ups’ Liliane Lijn has always been identified with the tendency as a liberating literary technique. (On seeing Lijn’s first known as Kinetic Art. It is of course a very broad term, exhibition, Echolights and Vibrographes at the Librairie encompassing expressions ranging from the exuberance Anglaise (1962), Burroughs suggested she use his cut-up of Jean Tinguely’s machines to the austerity of, for text in her Poem Machines). example, the reliefs of identical small tabs in motion 2 3 by Gerhard von Graevenitz. What they do share is the “All material is made of light which has been spent, and invention of a ‘language of movement’, something that the crumpled mass called material casts a shadow, and can only be experienced directly and in real time. the shadow belongs to light”. This leads to a further distinction: the difference between merely setting in motion an established formal structure such as geometric abstraction, and inventing a new kind of object which had not existed before. Lijn belongs to this latter tendency within Kinetic Art, when one thinks of the originality of her Poem Machines, her illuminated Koans, her columnar lines of light. The Poem Machines are a brilliant contribution to the movement of concrete, or visual poetry, where letters alternate with abstract pulses as the cylinder revolves. All have a fluid, fresh quality of going beyond a rigid adherence to a formal stylistic system. And yet the strange and fascinating thing about these works is that the geometric forms are not lost or superseded but retained in Lijn’s personal and poetic treatments of the cylinder, the cube, the cone, the circle, the sphere. Plus the triangle and the prism which entered her work in 1963. One has only to think of the beautiful inter-relationship between circle and sphere in Liquid Reflections (1964-66) to appreciate the creativity of this inventiveness. The Light Columns (beginning 1964) are another example, a wonderful re-invention of industrial materials, taking them from practical usages to create a new, poetic object. As the cylinder is tightly bound with fine copper wire and light is directed upon it, any imperfection or irregularity of the cylinder’s surface is translated into a wavering line of light, ‘real’ although it has no material existence. It’s a ‘vibration’, an energy, which one can discover in the works of many of the artists of the 20th century, who have been interested in cosmic speculation: such as the ‘vibration paintings’ of Jesus Rafael Soto, the vibrating wire in Takis’s telemagnetic constructions, Hélio Oiticica’s Bolides (energy-centres), Liliane Lijn’s ‘words accelerated’ in the Above: Poems Machines, or Sergio Camargo’s white wood reliefs Inner Space, 1961 which respond so subtly to the nuances of ambient light. We reach a position, a confluence, superbly articulated Opposite: by the architect Louis Kahn: Liquid Reflections, 1967-68 4 5 6 7 Above: Red Cylinder, 1964-5 Gold Cylinder, 1964 Preceding pages: Linear Light Column, 1969 8 9 Saturn Two Line Drum, 1965 10 La Lumiere Retourne à sa Source points of spectral light. This has included placing specially Bronaċ Ferran designed heliostats on the two towers of the Golden Gate Bridge. In this exhibition, the works of light and language by Liliane Lijn bring us face to face with her long-held She also met Dr Andrew Westphal, a leading scientist preoccupation with aspects of the physics of light and working on the Stardust mission, which sent probes phenomenology of space. beyond Mars equipped with a new material called Aerogel, which absorbed and captured remnants of Lijn came to Paris in 1958 to study Art History and interstellar space dust to bring back for analysis. Archaeology at The Sorbonne. After a few months, This material immediately appealed to Lijn as a potential she realised her vocation was to make art. Many of the source of artistic expression and so she began to develop extraordinary works she has made over the last fifty-five her Stardust Ruins series, which led to a major show years are now within collections all over the world. in London in 2008 and considerable press coverage. Having negotiated the transportation of some of this In 2005 Lijn was offered an International Artists fragile material to Europe, she invented a process of Fellowship at the Space Sciences Laboratories, University transforming the Aerogel into intangible lustrous works of California, Berkeley, an opportunity set up by Arts of art that hang in the air like globules from an extra- Council England with the Leonardo Journal of Art and planetary consciousness. Some works from the Stardust Science and NASA. From a competitive shortlist, the Ruins series now reside behind Perspex in her London decision to choose her was very easy; she seemed to studio, radiating a beautiful, unearthly hue. Lijn has have anticipated this residency for decades – with an described how the Aerogel works make manifest physicist engagement with new materials going back to the early David Bohm’s concept of matter as ‘frozen light’. 1960s; many experiments with prisms in the 1970s which led thirty years later to a project outlined below; and her In San Francisco, Lijn visited the City Lights Bookshop proposal in the 1990s to project the word SHE onto the and renewed acquaintance with writers she first met face of the moon. when living in the Latin Quarter of Paris between 1959 and 1966. She was then closely connected to the Lijn has had a long-term engagement with testing new constellations of (often now famous) painters, poets, materials, also an important priority within space science writers, thinkers and wanderers, who gathered around research. As a young woman she had knocked on the the Left Bank of the Seine, as if plugged into European Time Forces Split Poem Machine, 1965 doors of factories in New York to ask for access to Perspex art history’s electromagnetic core.