Len Lye: Motion Sketch (2014)

“Len Lye’s career was marked by a lifelong fascination with movement and an aspiration to compose motion; the movement of the drawing hand was an important touchstone for his works in various media. In the 1920s, however, Lye began to make what he termed “motion sketches”; abstract drawings that attempted to render the movement of his subjects, rather than their appearance.

Motion Sketch reintroduces Lye’s multidimensional practice specifically in relation to drawing. Describing his drawing practice in his own carefree prose, Lye said that doodling “cultivates a vacuous seaweed-pod state of kelp as a skull which is attached to a pencil betwixt the arm and the fingers held doodling in turn ‘twixt you and the paper in a rather bemused, empty, harmonious state of an attitude, eyes periphering said paper.”

Lye’s kinesthetic approach to drawing—related to Surrealist automatism and anticipating aspects of Abstract Expressionism—also informed his practice in painting, photography, film and sculpture. Not limited to works on paper; the catalogue reveals how Lye’s concept of “doodling” underpinned his approach to much of his work. ”

Featuring a foreword by Brett Littman and essays by Gregory Burke, Tyler Cann, and Len Lye.

Publisher Drawing Center, New York, 2014
Drawing Papers series, 115
ISBN 9780942324853, 0942324854
97 pages
via publisher

Exhibition
Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (low res, 9 MB)
Issuu

Henry M. Sayre: The Object of Performance: The American Avant-Garde since 1970 (1989)

Looks at the development of American avant-garde art. Considers feminist performance, particularly by Laurie Anderson, Eleanor Antin, and Carolee Schneemann; dance and collaboration as a new form of Gesamtkunstwerk; poets of the vernacular landscape and the postmodern sublime; and the application of Roland Barthes’s theories to Sayre’s own concepts of the relationship between photography and live art (ch 7).

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 1989
ISBN 0226735575, 9780226735573
xvi+308 pages

Reviews: Roger F. Malina (Leonardo, 1992), George J. Leonard (LA Times, 1989).

Publisher
WorldCat

PDF (93 MB, no OCR)

Thurston Moore, Byron Coley: No Wave: Post-Punk, Underground, New York, 1976-1980 (2008)

“A visual chronicle of the collision of art and punk in the New York underground of 1976 to 1980. This look at punk rock, new wave, experimental music, and the avant-garde art movement of the 1970s and 1980s focuses on the architects of No Wave from James Chance to Lydia Lunch to Glenn Branca, as well as the luminaries that intersected the scene, such as David Byrne, Debbie Harry, Brian Eno, Iggy Pop, and Richard Hell.

This rarely documented scene was the creative stomping ground of young artists and filmmakers from Jean-Michel Basquiat to Jim Jarmusch as well as the musical genesis for the post-punk explosions of Sonic Youth. Thurston Moore and Byron Coley have selected 150 images and compiled personal interviews to create an oral history of the movement.”

Publisher Abrams Image, New York, 2008
ISBN 9780810995437, 0810995433
143 pages

WorldCat

PDF (65 MB, no OCR)