Liliane Lijn
Published in issue 23 of State magazine, winter 2016/17
Showing posts with label kinetic art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label kinetic art. Show all posts
Monday, 5 December 2016
Friday, 4 November 2016
Review of Jean Tinguely: Machine Spectacle at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
04/11/16
Jean Tinguely:
Machine Spectacle
Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
1 October 2016 – 5 March 2017
“I wanted something ephemeral, that
would pass like a falling star and, most importantly, that would be impossible
for museums to reabsorb,” said Swiss artist Jean Tinguely (1925-91), best known
for his kinetic sculptures or metamechanics, of his equally famous
self-destructing installations. “I didn’t want it to be
‘museumised’.” It is a moot point then, that, to mark the 25th anniversary of
his death, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, where Tinguely co-curated two
seminal exhibitions in the early 60s, should (a) be hosting such a
comprehensive retrospective and (b) be showing 166 works, 62 of which are
machine sculptures, and only 42 of which are, intermittently, functioning. Would
an artist who so railed against the white cube walls of formal galleries – “The
more immaculate the gallery was and the larger and whiter the museum, the more
repulsive were some of the machines I turned up with” – really have wanted his
life presenting in such a documented manner, with drawings, photographs,
letters, newspaper cuttings, film clips, patent applications, and all sorts of
extensive archival material? What could be a more textbook example of being
“museumised”?
Read this review here
Friday, 14 March 2014
Interview with Liliane Lijn
When Liliane Lijn (b1939) invites
us to her studio in Haringey, east London, on one of the wettest and windiest
days of the year, we come bundled up in jumpers, expecting a large, cold, warehouse-type
setting, but, instead, we are met by an assistant and ushered in for tea and
biscuits in a beautifully spacious, well-lit, and, more importantly, well-heated
studio-cum-gallery space.
After initial introductions and the
removal of our soggy outer garments, Lijn conducts a thorough studio tour,
turning on each of the amazing and sometimes ominously towering works from
across her long career, creating a gentle background whirr, and beginning with some
early koans (imperial white rotating
cones with slivers of colour slicing through them at angles) and a collection
of Poemcons (cones with text carved
into them, lit from within, similarly rotating), she progresses via
fragmentations of the self (for example, My
Body, My Self, 1996) and tales of singing to looming feminine creations
(her Cosmic Dramas series from the 80s), to fragmentations of her Aerogel
pieces, resulting from a residency with NASA in 2005. With all this talk of stardust
and lines of light interacting in four dimensions (the fourth being time), it
is hard to believe that Lijn’s scientific knowledge is all self-taught. She
shrugs this off nonchalantly, however: “That’s all science is, really,
observation. I’m just interested in it and so I read.” It seems that a lot of
Lijn’s success comes from “just being interested”. Over more biscuits and more
tea, we continue to chat.
To read the interview and watch a video tour of Lijn's studio, please go to: http://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/liliane-lijn-interview
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