The legacy of Len Lye

The relationship between art and advertising has forever been one of fascination. The manifestation of this relationship has been both plentiful and diverse. The Campbell's Soup can; television advertising from famous directors; and Beck's Futures are just three of a seemingly infinite number of ways that the relationship – and, sometimes, the tension – has been expressed to mass audiences.

Such a relationship clearly stretches across many decades, certainly as far as contemporary media is concerned. A pioneer of ways to bring art and advertising together is Len Lye, a New Zealand-born artist that lived for much of his life in the UK, where many of his more well-known works were commissioned and exhibited.

As a young man in the 1920s, Lye's fascination with the kinetic drove him to explore the possibilities of movement in sculpture and installation. This led to works in the 1950s, which he referred to as tangible motion sculptures, or "Tangibles". Using a simple motor and metal strips, Lye's Tangibles series included Blade, where a two-metre-high strip of steel, vibrated to suggest the swish of a knife; and Fountain III, a visually spectacular work of hundreds of two-metre rods, clasped at the centre by a heavy base.

Throughout Lye's life, the ethos of his art was based on three simple words: Individual Happiness Now. Less a manifesto, more a framework for society, it was based on the belief that democracy was the best outcome against Fascism, and was to be an articulation of what the Allies were fighting for, as opposed to a pre-existing and very clear knowledge of what they were fighting against.

Individual Happiness Now is something that spreads into Lye's film work. Its joie de vivre was captured in a 50-year career of film, although he is best remembered in the UK for his series for the GPO, spanning almost a decade. These films placed an "artist's artist" into a direct relationship with the Government's agenda to advertise particular social messages to the wider public, through the mass medium of film. Whether such opportunities exist in today's COI is a moot point, although as Tyler Cann of the Len Lye Foundation observes, the visual language of the films actually had little to do with the message. It was, in fact, their disjunction that people were attracted to.

Cann considers that the kinetic nature of Lye's work was going to be something that became very important in media. "Lye saw very early on that film, or really, the moving image in general, was going to be an important way to make art. He felt that cinematic conventions had become stiff and entrenched, so every film he made, he tried to make in a different way. A big part of Lye's legacy is this exploratory, experimental approach to art-making, not only in film, but across different media."

Films such as the 1936 work Rainbow Dance invite the viewer into an environment of movement, shape, colour, of celebration; it feels good to be alive, and Lye is encouraging the viewer to celebrate life.

Rainbow Dance, 1936

Rainbow Dance feels totally different and far removed from a world driven by campaign planners and cross-media campaigns from the single idea. The difference is, in fact, rather jarring: the film has around three minutes of jolly music and motion, which conclude with a formal announcement to the viewer to use the GPO savings bank.

The freedom which is visually expressed in Lye's work was clearly complex and time-consuming to create. The extraordinary sophistication of Rainbow Dance was created through painting onto the film itself, which was then synchronised to the soundtrack. Cann acknowledges that this process has resulted in something which still looks and feels fresh in 2011. "If Lye's work has a certain freshness about it, it may be because he never used technology for its own sake. He used things in the wrong way, turned existing industrial materials into creative possibilities, and that has helped keep the work up-to-date. His work also expresses a kind of joy or playfulness that isn't often associated with modernism; it may be that we have just forgotten how 'contemporary' the 1930s were."

Preceding Rainbow Dance is A Colour Box, the first ever film to be exhibited using the "direct" technique of painting directly onto celluloid. It also dispels the myth that a sophisticated approach to visual literacy is a recent phenomenon: the incredible movement and colour changes captured in A Colour Box are synchronised to a juke box of ragtime, jazz, and furious bongoes.

A Colour Box, 1935

The film ends with its message moving around on the screen in a rudimentary, stencilled style: the GPO's parcel post now starts at only 6d for 3lbs, with a final wrap-up of the slogan "Cheaper Parcel Post" being absorbed into a whirligig of colour and movement. Cann retells the story of Lye's technique, and its divisive reception by audiences in 1930s cinemas – making the GPO's commission of Lye seem all the more brave.

"There were some historical precedents for his 'direct' films, going back to about 1911, but Lye was not aware of them. His films were the first of their kind seen by general audiences, and the strength of the reaction to them is surprising to think of now. Sometimes they were hissed and booed, sometimes met with laughter and cheers, sometimes both. They did cause a sensation, with some critics saying Lye was pointing toward completely new territory, and others saying it was drivel and did not qualify as serious."

Cann sees Lye as someone that was not particularly concerned with selling, which seems evident in the way that the film's messages are absolutely not woven into Lye's work. As Cann says about any possibility of Lye as a walk-on character in Mad Men: "I don't think he would have lasted many episodes. He was simply too out there, and I would think that's even more true today. Asked about how Lye fit into the GPO Film Unit, Alberto Cavalcanti once said, 'It's a poor family that can't afford one gentleman.'"

Lye's devotion to capturing the human spirit gave the GPO many films, part of half a century of film and installation work. Commercial work after the GPO included Colour Flight for Imperial Airways, a predecessor of BA and a film whose playfulness extends to the company's "Speedbird" logo spinning around the sky towards the end.

Colour Flight, 1937

He returned to the Government during World War 2, making a number of propaganda films for the Ministry of Information, before moving to the US to further his filmmaking and sculptural work. But, it is this rich body of public information work for the UK Government that he is perhaps most recognised for; and this celebration of the senses is something that Cann considers to be due for re-appraisal. "Perhaps now that digital media have allowed such incredible manipulation of sound and image, people are coming back to the history of the moving image and finding their own roots in Lye's work."

The Body Electric: Len Lye is published by Ikon Gallery Press in March 2011.

Tyler Cann is Curator of the Len Lye Foundation. An extended thanks to Helen Stallard at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham.