Art: Forms in Air

In the greatest periods of art, such as the Classical and the Gothic, artists strove for an agreed-upon ideal, and innovations were few (or, if many, did not survive). But modern art relentlessly stresses the new. The result is mostly confusion, but also a degree of fermentation. Last week in Manhattan’s Greenwich Village a lean, wispy-bearded man with the cheerful energy of a grasshopper was preparing something brand new in sculpture. His suitably improbable name: Len Lye. His sculptures he calls “Tangibles,” but they are not meant to be touched. They vibrate.

Dancing & Crackling. Born 58 years ago in New Zealand, Lye has adventured all over the world, worked at everything from sheepshearing and ship trimming to sitting still on a South Sea island. Sitting still came hardest to Lye, who sees and best understands the world and himself in terms of motion. On nights off, he likes to dance like an egg beater to Dixieland jazz. His conversation crackles like Chinese fireworks. Some 25 years ago Lye hit on the then revolutionary idea of painting abstractions directly on motion-picture films—a process that has since become commonplace in art film circles. One of his recent film abstractions took top honors at last year’s World’s Fair in Brussels, and others are now being readied for distribution by the United Nations.

Alexander Calder’s coat-hanger agglomerations of free forms twist and bob lazily on the breeze, exploit the possibilities for chance movement that reside in lightly balanced equilibriums. Lye’s idea is to exploit instead the resiliences of high-tempered steels and flexible plastics. He raises simple abstract constructions of such materials on pedestals containing silent motor-vibrators. At a taped signal, the motors go into action, moving first slowly, then faster in a carefully calculated cycle, and the sculptures begin taking shape upon the air.

Dissolving & Sounding. The difference in vibration rate creates a variety of shapes, whose momentary and only semivisible quality makes the observer look sharp, as they shift, change, swell to a musiclike crescendo, and subside to quiescence. One Tangible resembles a fencer’s foil set upon its hilt. As it picks up speed, the foil appears to dissolve into a flashing egg-shape. Another Tangible is a tower of aluminum rings suspended at artful intervals on almost invisible wires. Vibration makes the rings spin and lift like a quicksilver ballet. Plinth (see cut) carries sound as well as motion: at a certain point in the vibration cycle, the strip arcs out to strike a metal ball, which makes it resound like a gong.

Lye would like to see story-high versions of his Tangibles in public parks and plazas, timed to go into action at long intervals, and with suitable musical accompaniment. The result would certainly startle the unwary passerby, and the fact that his Tangibles are wholly abstract may count against them in the eyes of most park commissioners. But Lye remains firmly wedded to abstraction. “These are for grace and power of motion,” he explains, “not for imagery. They are not supposed to be like anything.”