Keep It Moving

I’m very pleased to be able to provide links to my text (with Simon Rees) published in the Getty Conservation Institute’s new collection of essays concerning the conservation of kinetic art. You can order a hard copy of Keep It Moving? – Conserving Kinetic Art (eds. Rachel Rivenc and Reinhard Bek) direct from the Getty store (shipping in April 2018) or otherwise access various digital versions of the whole publication here.

The collection covers issues of conserving kinetic art through the proceedings from the meeting organized by the Getty Conservation Institute, the ICOM-CC Modern Materials and Contemporary Art Working Group, and Museo del Novecento Palazzo Reale, Milan, Italy, June 30–July 2, 2016. Artists under discussion included Jonathan Borofsky, Chris Burden, Gianni Colombo, Joost Conijn, Len Lye, Heinz Mack, Aleksandar Srnec, Nicolas Schöffer, Ray Staakman, Jean Tinguely, and Thomas Wilfred.  One of the charms of this collection is numerous videos of works under discussion (indexed here).

Here is the abstract of the piece followed by one of the videos included, Len Lye’s Loop in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. Read the text itself here.

The New Zealand–born American artist Len Lye (1901–1980) is recognized as a pioneer for his experimental films and his “Tangible Motion Sculpture.” More than thirty-five years after his death, Lye’s artistic legacy is increasingly dependent upon the Len Lye Foundation to reconstruct and realize his sculptural works, particularly the engineering of larger-scale iterations of extant models. In this paper, curators Paul Brobbel and Simon Rees discuss the making of Lye’s sculpture in the twenty-first century and the exhibition of Lye’s work at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery/Len Lye Centre in New Plymouth, New Zealand.