Published by Bouncy Castle and Govett-Brewster Art Gallery|Len Lye Centre, with generous support from the Len Lye Foundation, Pollen Contemporary Art Foundation, and Grant Kerr.  

For five decades, Wystan Curnow has been an advocate for—and authority on—the works of filmmaker and sculptor Len Lye. Alongside his friend and sometime collaborator Roger Horrocks, Curnow has championed the Aotearoa New Zealand–born artist’s work and driven its growing popular and critical recognition. Stopped Short gathers Curnow’s key writings on Lye. The first half centres on his discovery of Lye’s work in New York; the second explores its repatriation to Lye’s homeland where the establishment of the Len Lye Foundation and a dedicated Len Lye Centre in Ngāmotu New Plymouth has cemented Lye’s significance within Aotearoa New Zealand art history.  Each half is introduced by Curnow, reflecting back on his earlier writings. In addition to offering a wealth of insights into Lye’s work, Stopped Short is also a study in reception, meditating on Lye’s place in world art, his place in Aotearoa New Zealand art, and the shifting relationship between them.

Len Lye (1901–80) is known for his dazzling experimental films and kinetic sculptures—parallel expressions of his desire to create an art of motion. He also made paintings and photograms (cameraless photographs)—and wrote. Born in Ōtautahi Christchurch, Lye spent time in Australia and Sāmoa in the early 1920s, before working his passage to London in 1926. There he became part of the modern-art scene, exhibiting with the Seven and Five Society and in the 1936 Internationalist Surrealist Exhibition.

He made his first film, Tusalava, in 1929 and went on to make films for the GPO Film Unit and Crown Film Unit utilising a variety of experimental techniques, often painting directly on film. In 1944 Lye moved to New York to work for the newsreel The March of Time. In the 1950s he began making films by scratching directly into black-leader film stock, and, in the late 1950s and 1960s, he developed motorised kinetic works he coined tangible motion sculptures. Examples are held in US collections such as the Whitney Museum of Americal Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Buffalo AKG Art Museum; and Berkeley Art Museum.

Shortly before his death in 1980, Lye and his supporters established the Len Lye Foundation, based at the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery, Ngāmotu New Plymouth, which continues to promote Lye’s work and to realise his kinetic sculptures. The new century has seen a growing international interest in Lye with solo shows at the Pompidou Centre, Paris, in 2000; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, in 2001; Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, in 2009; Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, in 2010; The Drawing Centre, New York, in 2014; and Museum Tinguely, Basel, in 2019. The Govett-Brewster opened its dedicated Len Lye Centre in 2015.

Wystan Curnow is Aotearoa New Zealand’s most eminent contemporary art critic. His internationalist perspective was shaped by living in the United States in the 1960s, where he was exposed to modernist painting and conceptual art. In the 1970s he became the house critic for the burgeoning post-object art scene centred on Jim Allen’s Sculpture Department at the Elam School of Fine Arts at the University of Auckland, and began writing extensively on Colin McCahon, Billy Apple and Len Lye. Through his writing and curating, Curnow has raised the global profile of New Zealand artists and local awareness of and interest in expatriate artists, creating a more porous, complex idea of New Zealand art. In addition to being a regular contributor to journals and catalogues, he has written books on Immants Tillers (1998) and Stephen Bambury (2000), and has co-edited several books on Lye, including Figures of Motion (1984), Len Lye (2009), and The Long Dream of Waking (2018). A collection of his writings, The Critic’s Part, was published in 2014, and another of his writings on Billy Apple, Sold on Apple, in 2015. Curnow received the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement in non-fiction in 2018. He has been a trustee of the Len Lye Foundation since 2003. He lives in Tāmaki Makaurau Auckland.

Praise for Wystan Curnow Stopped Short: Writings on Len Lye 1977-2017

It is always a pleasure to delve into an art writer’s sustained engagement with a single subject. As readers we can share their journey of discovery, their deepening focus and new insights. Such is Stopped Short, Wystan Curnow’s collected writings – essays, interviews and letters – on artist Len Lye. In Curnow, Lye has found an eloquent exegete, a writer who can both tune in to the ‘zing’ and ‘pop’ of Lye’s scratch films, kinetic sculptures and eccentric speech, and keenly map the trajectories of a practice that has travelled from New Zealand to New York and back again. This compilation benefits enormously from Curnow’s reflections on his output, creating a vivid context for his thoughts and making sense of the flow and shifts that take place in his writing. Together with Lye’s biographer, Roger Horrocks, Curnow has secured Len Lye’s lasting legacy. An artist who could well have been lost to our art history, he now holds a place as one of the world’s most inventive practitioners of the modern era.          —Christina Barton, art historian

This captivating and landmark collection is a must have for both veteran followers of Lye and those new to the astonishing range of the artist’s work. While brimming with biographical detail, the anthology’s driving force is Curnow’s six-decade long reading of Lye’s practice and its singular international significance. Insights abound, but it is the deft elegance of his writings that sets this compendium apart. With poetic precision Curnow renders an intricate and exacting analysis of Lye’s work in copy that is deceptively simple and a joy to read, and, like Lye, he knows how to pack a punch.            —Gregory Burke, curator, writer, and former director of the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery. Co-curator with Tyler Cann of Len Lye: Motion Sketch at The Drawing Center, New York, 2013.

Lye’s inventiveness and verve continue to astonish more than forty years after his death. His originality and personability animate these collected texts, which shine a light on a life’s work that is still criminally under-represented in global art histories. Lye was, in his own words, a “maverick’s maverick,” and it is to Curnow’s credit that he has maintained steadfast interest in work that would otherwise be doomed to modernism’s marginalia. Curnow brings to bear his literary background by aligning Lye’s art of motion with modernist poetry; so too he brings a critic’s acumen to discussions of Lye’s ongoing influence in artistic practice in Aotearoa New Zealand and beyond. Curnow’s erudite prose is studded with poetic flourishes, enacting rather than merely describing the embodied materiality of Lye’s works, making tangible their joyous imperatives while inviting serious critical attention. If Lye’s art is, as the artist himself said, an art for the 21st Century, then Curnow has laid solid foundations for the next generation of Lye enthusiasts and scholars to create new critical and aesthetic interpretations of such an astoundingly prophetic oeuvre. —Dr Tessa Laird, Senior Lecturer in Critical and Theoretical Studies, VCA Art, Victorian College of the Arts, University of Melbourne

Govett-Brewster Art Gallery | Len Lye Centre

The Govett-Brewster Art Gallery opened in Ngāmotu New Plymouth, in Aotearoa New Zealand, in 1970. Its name comes from its founding donor, Monica Brewster (née Govett). Since then, it has presented dynamic exhibitions by local, national, and international artists that stimulate ideas, prompt conversations, and enrich the imagination. In 1977, it held expatriate Kiwi artist Len Lye’s first exhibition in his homeland. This led to the establishment of the Len Lye Foundation, which saw Lye leaving his work and archive to the people of New Zealand following his death in 1980. This gift resulted in the creation of the Len Lye Centre, which opened within the Govett-Brewster to critical acclaim in 2015.