Len Lye’s Jazz

Today is the last day in the office this year (all things going to plan). Last week we opened our summer Len Lye exhibition, Big Bang Theory. This one’s quite special as Lye’s ‘myth’ paintings from the late 1970s are shown together for the first time in nearly 40 years. It’s been quite a while since  Andrew Bogle at Auckland Art Gallery curated Len Lye: A Personal Mythology, introducing this important series of works. More info on this exhibition is here and in 2018 following the exhibition we will be launching a new book concerning these works.

Another project seeing us through the summer holidays is the ninth in our Projection Series Programme. This is our (roughly) quarterly film programme concerned with short format cinema, based around the experimental films of Lye and his peers as well as that of contemporary filmmakers. Each Projection Series is accompanied with a brochure and short essay and we’ve just made all of these available digitally on the Gallery’s website. Grab them at the following links for some holiday reading:

Projection Series #8: The Long Dream of Waking
Projection Series #7: First as fiction, then as myth
Projection Series #6: A Little Faith
Projection Series #5: Once more – but different
Projection Series #4: Man Without a Camera
Projection Series #3: Syncopated Cinema
Projection Series #2: Six Artists Respond to the Poetry of Joanna Margaret Paul
Projection Series #1: Len Lye’s Colour Box

The programmes above featured: Jordan Belson, Luis Buñuel, Katherine Berger, Jordana Bragg, Mary Ellen Bute, Steve Carr, Bruce Conner, Maya Deren, Oscar Enberg, Oskar Fischinger, Rico Gatson, Christoph Girardet, Ane Hjort Guttu, Nate Harrison, Murray Hewitt, Karin Hofko, Ian Hugo, William E. Jones, Daisuke Kosugi, Kutiman, Sonya Lacey, Len Lye, Evelyn Lambart, Norman McLaren, Tracey Moffatt, Ursula Mayer, Matthias Müller, Peter Roehr, Nova Paul, Miranda Parkes, Martin Rumsby, Rachel Shearer, Barry Spinello, Martine Syms, Shannon Te Ao, Popular Productions and Peter Wareing.

Curators included Marc Glöde, Sophie O’Brien, Tendai John Mutumbu, Solomon Nagler, Frank Stark, Sarah Wall, Mark Williams and myself.

Projection Series #9: Len Lye’s Jazz begins screening daily on 30 December 2017. This programme is a quick survey of Lye’s association with jazz through his filmmaking. I invited Dr. Nicolas Pillai to write the essay accompanying this one which you can grab at the previous link. Pillai is the author of the recent book Jazz as Visual Language: Film, Television and the Dissonant Image.

One of the films featured in Projection Series #9 is Lye’s N. or N.W. (1938), produced for the G.P.O. Film Unit and presented here by the British Film Institute. Although not Lye’s typical abstract animation, N. or N.W. includes a very Lye-esque soundtrack featuring pieces by Fats Waller and Benny Goodman.