Art that Moves: The Work of Len Lye

by Roger Horrocks Auckland University Press, 258 pages.

As a first year student at the School of Fine Arts at Canterbury University in the early 1970s my lecturer Don Peebles would sometimes start a class with a film on international contemporary art. During a screening of The Walls Came Tumbling Down a bald-headed, eccentric artist with a goatee manipulated strips of steel into animated sculptures. For a brief moment Peebles turned down the sound and said, "He is from New Zealand".

For most students, the artist Len Lye didn't feature in our limited understanding of "New Zealand" artists. Here was someone who thought outside our restricted experiences of art, where industrial materials could be transformed into outstanding art works.

In Art that Moves: the Work of Len Lye, Roger Horrocks introduces Lye as an artist who started with a big idea which became his lifelong preoccupation; to aesthetically develop motion in the visual arts as a contemporary composer would use sounds to create music.

This is a smartly designed book with good quality illustrations. Starting with modernist theories of representing movement in European photography, painting and film Horrocks examines Lye's ideas and then studies his sculptures and films. Art that Moves is an accessible survey of Lye's kinetic work as well as a valuable companion to Horrocks's earlier book, Len Lye: a biography.

As cultural environments, Sydney, London and New York attracted Lye. These centres allowed him to pursue his art, but it was his childhood experiences in early 20th Century New Zealand that shaped his imagination. As a young artist he would observe and draw the flow of moving lines in a woman's dress as she walked down the street. In the evening the sketches were reviewed and contemplated as abstract marks of implied movement.

Motion expressed the artist's "most poetical sense of being" and his life's vision involved manipulating different materials into kinetic sculptures and experimental films. A real bonus of the book is the inclusion of a DVD which presents five films of Lye's elegant sculptures in motion.

The DVD also features four films where the artist painted on, or scratched into 35mm film. When screened the celluloid is transformed into dynamic and compelling art works. The transfer of Lye's 1958 film Free Radicals to DVD is excellent and the frenetic scratched lines dance throughout a field of dense blackness. This is the work of a kinetic artist responding to the music of the Bagirmi tribe of Africa with the sensibilities of a New York jazz musician and an abstract expressionist painter.

Starting with different philosophies of motion in the visual arts, Horrocks locates Lye significance in an international context. But more than this Len Lye stands out as a highly inquisitive and inventive artist whose potent art works continue to engage audiences today.

• Errol Shaw is an artist and art writer.

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