Editorial

HAMISH KEITH

In August 1967, at the suggestion of Peter Tomory, who had first brought news of the artist back to New Zealand, I rang Len Lye in New York. 'Come on down,' he said. We did. I doubt that many other telephone calls and subway rides in my life will be as richly rewarding. In his studio in Bethune Street, Len was catching up. His theories about Old Brain art had begun to totally absorb him. Like the other great leaps Len's imagination had taken, that one also seemed to require a great deal of ordering of the past. That had a great deal to do with the Old Brain theories, of course, but there was an irrepressible internal archaeology about Len's creativity - he relentlessly mined, dug and fossicked in where he had been: to find a legitimacy in where he was at. For the observer the process was breathtaking.

That night he was putting it all together. He was pursuing the evolution in his art of thunder, and how he had had that knowledge forever. In the African music in Free Radicals in Storm King and Blade, in drawings made a generation before, in notes and newspaper clippings, he rooted it out. The studio buzzed, boomed and roared. It was like being on a roller coaster: but a roller coaster with a destination.

In the middle of all this Len danced. He danced because the thunder was still in him and he and his art were a continuum. (We saw him again by chance, two days later. We were walking and he and Ann were on a cross-town bus. He saw us and leapt off to dance again.) Len has danced through my life ever since. He always will.

Few other artists I have known so perfectly make the point, as Len made it, that art is not about objects or aesthetics. It is about experience and experience translated into creative energy and creative ideas. Len knew that objects and aesthetics were only tools in this process. There is no single point in Len's art where you can catch him - you must take it all in. This special issue of Art New Zealand celebrates his life and art, and his continuing contribution to our experience and energy.