Tate St Ives: Liliane Lijn Arise Alive

 I caught this exhibition just before it finished on the 2nd of November.  It was a large exhibition occupying the whole of the extension.

Liliane was born in 1939 in New York but now lives in London where at 85, she continues to create.  She is from a Russian Jewish family that arrived in New York from the Netherlands shortly before she was born.  When she was 9, her parents separated and her father moved with her to Geneva, with her mother following to Lugano, also in Switzerland.  She studied archaeology but also has interests in light and materials and was an early pioneer of automation in art.  

This exhibition covers her long career and gives a really nice representation of some of her different types of work.  I think it's important to understand that some of the pieces are absolutely ground breaking and she was a true pioneer but that to our eyes now, they appear simplistic and dated.  As a child I remember watching Dr Who and being astounded by the daleks, but now, watching them again, the idea of a spray painted sink plugger as a deadly weapon is more amusing.  Its much the same here with some of the works.

The oldest of the automaton (Get Rid of Government Time, 1962) is now sixty years old and incredibly fragile.  It's a simple piece of kinetic art with words printed on a rotating barrel.  It's so fragile that it is only switched twice each day, for five minutes at a time.  Other pieces switch on for longer periods of time, depending on how fragile they are, and I imagine, how long they can run without overheating.  The Attendant was really helpful and gave me times for when different pieces would switch on, so I was able to circle back and see pieces running.

Much of the art on display is her older work and its clear looking online that much of Liliane's more recent works are large scale public installations.  Her earliest work is well represented in the exhibition and shows a curious mind that was as much experimental and scientific as artistic.  For me, this made the exhibition fascinating, although it was not always beautiful.  

Cones are a huge feature in her works.  They are amongst her earliest automaton as small scale revolving pieces of kinetic art featuring different words.  As Koans, they continue to feature to this day.  My favourite was one of her large white koans which rotated.  It had five different ellipses of different colour lights.  I think it was Lost Koan.  I could very easily have one of these as a light in the corner of my room, on a smaller scale.  Or even a set of them in different colours.  Looking at her work online, her exploration of koans goes further than shown in this exhibition and is fascinating, with striped cylinders,  or deconstructed cylinders and then reconstructed.

There were three smaller dark rooms with different kinetic pieces in.  The first held (Liquid Reflections, 1966 - 1968) two rotating glass disks with different sized balls on them.  The balls moved in seemingly random ways.  The glass disks contained water and light was shone through on to the wall behind.  The second room held Lady of the Wild Things (1983) and Woman of War (1986).  These two came on and performed every half an hour.  The third room contained Electric Bride (1989) was made in response to seeing giant transformers at a power station and featured many sheets of micanite on spikes within a cage.  I nearly left this room before it switched on, but as I went to leave, the room went dark and the sculpture transformed with a voice whispering in Japanese.  Tiny almost invisible wires linking from the cage to the micanite spikes glowed red.

A number of her earlier pieces explored the effects of drilling into a clear material, so that the drill holes appear solid and the solid clear material appears as empty space.  There were three of these pieces on display and my favourite was Inner Space, 1961.  The drilling had damaged the material and introduced bubbles and the drillings appeared white.

I really liked her pictures, in many ways, more than her automaton.  They were beautiful with some very fine mark making, there was a lot to look at.  Some of these pieces were mixed media too.  There were three of her Sky Scrolls, 1959 - 1961 and these are made using crayon, gouache and ink.  They were inspired by Chinese horizontal scrolls and a fascination with the sky.  Cosmic Wings, 1986 featured 12 watercolours of butterfly wings using the same shape and colour scheme.  I also loved her large watercolours including the diptych, Good Mother and Bad Mother from 1989 which were exuberant and full of life.  I liked that she went from large colourful exuberant works to tiny detailed precise pictures, like those in the concertina books on display.

I didn't like everything equally but I think that's going to be part of it when you are a cutting edge experimental artist.  She was not creating to make beauty, she was creating to explore and experiment.  From those early explorations she honed her craft.  I think her Koans and her paintings / drawings were my favourites.

I would really like to see some of her large scale public installations, such as Dragon's Dance in Cardiff.  Reading online, she does not like to create these sorts of pieces any more.  According to this article, budgets tend to be too small and things change making these sorts of projects difficult.  In one project, they sold the premises and tried to give her the artwork back.  The piece White Koan was made for the University of Warwick and eventually needed restoration.  The Vice Chancellor didn't want to do this and wanted to throw it away but the students loved it and protested, so it was saved.

Liliane has a great website here