What are you fighting for?
LENLYE: His kinetic sculptures, films, inventive scratchings and the gloriously glowing New Plymouth gallery holding them bring visitors from across the country and beyond. They also bring apoplectic splutters from reactionary ratepayers.
How significant is the guy? Ingenuity, sensory impact, subversive wit, even enchantment; his works have them all, especially as rendered by John Matthews’ remarkable engineering. Emotional resonance? That shifting of the world which major art can bring? Maybe.
Lye wrote as well — voluminously, perceptively, sometimes pretentiously ( his own word), passionately. He’s near his best in this short, co- operative essay, elegantly introduced by Roger Horrocks.
Individual Happiness Now took form in 1941, a time in World War II when German victory seemed imminent. Lye wanted to promote values and a vocabulary “that would function as a powerful alternative to Nazi propaganda” and focus on “freedom FOR . . . not freedom FROM”, in language that went beyond the British Government’s cautious cliches.
Lye urged a politics that started from each person’s world view. Individual virtues needed to be developed ( art would help); small groups of like minds encouraged.
The essay was never published. It ended up being part of the papers Lye bequeathed to a not entirely appreciative New Zealand. Horrocks makes a strong case for it being particularly relevant in our increasingly totalitarian and irrational era of Trump, Isis and Kim Jong- un. I suspect people will read it mostly for its stylistic idiosyncrasies and historical curiosity.
It’s a nifty little publication, accessible and stylishly presented.