⁰¹ Len Lye, A Flip and Two Twisters (Trilogy) (film still), 1977, archival footage. Courtesy of Govett-Brewster Art Gallery and Len Lye Foundation.
⁰² Athanasios Argianas, Proposal for Reading Consonants as Noise (Silver Copper), two parts: cold-cast copper, cold cast aluminum (polyurethane-based) polish, metal, patina, fixative and paint, 107 × 74 × 44 cm each.
⁰³ Installation view, left to right: Athanasios Argianas, Music by Lightness; Athanasios Argianas, Proposal for Reading Consonants as Noise (Silver Copper) (part 1 of 2); Athanasios Argianas, Rational Paintings (set 1); Athanasios Argianas, Arrangements for Broken Mirror.
⁰⁴ Athanasios Argianas, Rational Paintings (Set 1), 2008, gouache on card, stained-walnut frame with museum-quality glass, three paintings: 86 × 61.5 cm, 86 × 61.5 cm and 47.5 × 24 cm.
⁰⁵ Installation view, left to right: Athanasios Argianas, Arrangements for Broken Mirror; Athanasios Argianas, Music by Lightness.
⁰⁶ Athanasios Argianas, Music by Lightness, 2008, acrylic plaster, copper leaf, acrylic sheet, steel rods 35 × 35 × 22 cm
⁰⁷ Installation view, left to right: Athanasios Argianas, Proposal for Reading Consonants as Noise (Silver Copper) (part 2 of 2); Athanasios Argianas, Arrangements for Broken Mirror; Athanasios Argianas, Music by Lightness; Len Lye, A Flip and Two Twisters (Trilogy), 1977, archival footage. Courtesy of Govett-Brewster, Art Gallery and Len Lye Foundation.

The exhibition Athanasios Argianias – Len Lye at Arcade Fine Arts gallery in East London brought together an installation of sculptures and paintings by the London-based Greek artist and a film documentation — shot in black and white by Shirley Horrock — of a kinetic sculpture by Len Lye (1901–80).

Athanasios Argianas’ Proposal for Reading Consonants as Noise (Silver Copper), 2008, was comprised of two almost identical cast slices, each resting on a metallic tripod. On the wall, behind the first tripod, there was a set of three colour gouaches: the Rational Paintings (Set 1), 2008. The two larger ones registered two shapes in magenta and ultramarine green that unfolded on a black background. The smaller painting showed a perpetual column of stacked polyhedrons that twisted anti-clockwise around its axis.

Towards the centre of the gallery, Arrangements for Broken Mirror (with ambiguous hierarchy, left to right), a black and white screenprint, was positioned at a slight diagonal tilt. A long sheet of paper rested on the top bar of the rectangular, metallic frame and unfolded on both sides of the frame’s vertical plane, to suspend about half a metre above the floor. The traces of white, asymmetrical pieces of broken mirror were arranged in five columns that progressively narrowed down from the left to the right, on the respective surfaces of the two panels. In Music by Lightness (iwassweptoffherfeet) Hanging version, 2008, six bronze-surfaced objects, constructed by three stacked, polyhedric, bronze volumes, rested on a black, acrylic sheet that was suspended from the ceiling. Finally, the film projection of Len Lye’s A Flip and Two Twisters (Trilogy) was isolated in a ‘nook’ in the wall. It showed two thin, vertical, metallic stripes at the two ends of the projection and one thin, metallic loop that was suspended in the middle. The two, side stripes unwound (clockwise and then anti-clockwise) evoking the hushing sound of metal as they moved, while the middle oval shape flipped back and forth to the same effect.

In this installation of works arranged by Argianas there was no specific centre, no vantage point of view. The diagonal lines generated by the placement of certain elements in the exhibition space (for example, the diagonal line of the screen or the imaginary line connecting the two Noise sculptures), invested it with a proliferation of perspectives that continuously shifted as the body moved around the works. This movement created a multitude of equivalent relations, as it became impossible to reduce the installation to one static image that could be retained in memory. On the contrary, it enabled the work to open up in actual space and time and resume its relationship with the world.

The individual pieces acted as fragments that were doubled, reflected, repeated; they were rotated or turned upside down in a way that rendered twin objects un-identical; they depended on their spatial relation to generate their meaning. For example, in the two sculptures identified as Proposal for Reading Consonants as Noise (Silver Copper), the artist presented two sides of the same crumpled piece. This flipping of the pieces upside down and their orientation in space made it impossible to recognise them as the same. They functioned in a similar fashion as Robert Morris’ L-Beams, 1965, where three identical ‘L’-shaped forms were positioned in different relationships to the ground. ‘Their sameness belongs only to an ideal structure […] to a logic that exists “prior” to experience’ [i], wrote Rosalind Krauss. To complicate Morris’ project further, Argianas demonstrated this disorienting experience with a complex, irregular form that represents noise and is difficult to register in memory. The objects’ sameness thus, was thus forever withheld from the viewer (it was impossible to recognise the two sculptures as exactly identical, unless we received this information from a source exterior to the work: the artist, a piece of writing etc.). This sense of de-familiarisation generated an uncanny experience that upset rational systems of thought and perception. Argianas performed the same act in the Rational Paintings this time within pictorial, two-dimensional space. He depicted the same veiled object from two different points of view, rendering the two images similar but different. What is important in the paintings is not the concealed object itself, but the allusion to the very act of appearing.

In Arrangements for Broken Mirror, the fragments of a broken mirror were laid out by size of fragments twice: once with larger shards to the right, smaller to the left, and then vice-versa. These arrangements were photographed and then screenprinted, one on each side of the panel. This act is reminiscent of Donald Judd’s intention to propose a non-hierarchical relationship in the arrangement of objects, following the principle of ‘one thing after the other’ [ii]. Argianas, nevertheless, does not altogether suppress the idea of a hierarchy but proposes instead alternative ones or more precisely he proposes a dialectic relationship between two different, reversed as in a mirror, hierarchies that constantly shift and displace each other.

Many of Argianas’ sculptures can be read as attempts to visualise musical structures or to translate one form into another: ‘it’s like feeding a record through a video player or a fax through a CD player’ [iii], the artists says. Although they are embedded in the tradition of Russian Constructivism that handles the object as a representation of mental space, ’the visualisation of an abstraction’, [iv] and despite their formal and conceptual affinity to such notions, the works resist metaphor. Their metaphorical space (sculpture as music, for example) is suspended, while meaning is ultimately formed through their relations in actual space. The work does not realise its full potential until it establishes its proper relations, its rhythm, in space and it is this set of operations that finally conditions the viewer’s reception. The essence of the work is thus relocated from a metaphorical, interior space (in the Constructivist tradition), [v] to an exterior, literal space (in the manner of Minimalism). More precisely, the works oscillate in the space that exists between mental and actual space, in a twofold, perpetual movement between the two. Their meaning is finally formed in the gap, the chilly distance between these realms: real and metaphorical, literal and fictional.

On the upper-left corner of the gallery, as we enter from the entrance, in a relatively isolated ‘nook’, there was a wall projection with the documentation of Len Lye’s kinetic sculpture A Flip and two Twisters (Trilogy). By placing the piece on a theatrical stage (there is a black curtain behind the sculpture that alludes to theatre), Lye allows the beholder a single vantage viewpoint. The sculptural installation operates as a gestalt object [vi] in its unifying form and performance. [vii] Unlike Argianas’ installation, (with the exception of Music by Lightness suspended across Trilogy, that acts on the viewer in a similar way, as ‘the work stands apart, as a radiant instant’ [viii]) the viewer’s experience of Trilogy allows his/her perception to grasp visual information ‘all at once’ [ix]. The body seems to freeze as the work unleashes its energy upon it. One reviewer that witnessed the actual piece in New York, commented: ‘The whiplash strain upon the steel produces a series of frightening, unearthly sounds in perfect accord with the mood of barbaric energy that seems to have been released … The viewer comes upon Lye’s Trilogy as he would come upon a volcano.’ [x]

Visual perception seems to collapse instantaneously upon encounter with the work, to give way to an ‘empathic’ bodily experience, described by Len Lye, as follows: ‘I, myself, eventually came to look at the way things moved mainly to try to feel movement […] I didn’t know the term “empathy” — that is, the psychological trick of unconsciously feeling oneself into the shoes of another person — but I was certainly practising it. I got so that I could feel myself into the shoes of anything that moved, from a grasshopper to a hawk, a fish to a yacht […] Such shoes were around in profusion.’ [xi] Len Lye’s work relocates the viewer’s sense of self into an open-ended system of sense-consciousness, before subjectivity and the subject’s alienation from the ‘world’. The sense of self is re-established here in a collective consciousness, restoring the subject’s continuity with the world through identification with the other, in a complete surrender of its narcissistic armour. The work functions as a passage, a gateway that also signifies ‘the transformation of sculpture from a static, idealised medium to a temporal and material one.’[xii] In its ethical dimension, as Rosalind Krauss remarks, this ‘image of passage serves to place both viewer and artist before the work, in an attitude of primary humility in order to encounter the deep reciprocity between himself and it.’ [xiii]

In the realm of this exhibition though, Trilogy’s interiority gave way to its exteriority, as the work was established in the exhibition space through its surface, its formal characteristics and in its relation to the other works. For example, Trilogy’s form (‘parenthesis’) functioned as a visual allusion to the imaginary brackets formed in space by Argianas’ inverted Noise pieces. Also, the play of light in Trilogy, as the metallic strips unwound, could be read as a visual correspondence to the effect of light in Argianas’ bronze pieces. Overall, in this installation, the works were not regarded solely in terms of their function or substance but they were established through their exteriority and their arrangement in space, as their ‘optical nature absorbed both their function and substance. ’ [xiv] The interest in their visual attributes that pointed towards a ‘complex organization of space’, [xv] put no special emphasis on any of the individual works but allowed them instead to ‘enter in a fragmentary dialogue.’ [xvi] It seems to me that their meaning was ultimately established through these complex relationships in space and in the viewer’s own perception within this space.

These successive displacements (in real, pictorial and mental space) enabled a number of labyrinthine mutations. The installation resembled a puzzle that unfolded in two-dimensional planes (for example the arrangement of mirror fragments on the screen surface), while it also opened up in three-dimensional space and in time. This mode of display managed to upset the spectator’s cognitive faculties by de-familiarising identical objects or by introducing double functions (for example the screen functioned as a flat surface and a three-dimensional object at the same time). Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes the method of ‘phenomenological reduction’ that allows us ‘to see the world and grasp it as paradoxical, [by breaking] with our familiar acceptance of it and, also from the fact that from this break we can learn nothing but the unmotivated upsurge of the world.’ [xvii] This can be achieved through the act of reflection that ‘slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice.’ [xviii]

Argianas’ installation allows us to reflect on the conditions of our perception, as the works’ inner logic, their presumed autonomy is disrupted. As the objects become detached from their referents, they are rendered free to form a new syntax in their spatial arrangement. Argianas’ treatment of the individual works and the formation of space can be summarised in Roland Barthes’ account of Alain Robbe-Grillet: ‘to establish the novel on the surface: once you can set its inner nature, its interiority between parentheses, then objects in space and the circulation of men among them, are promoted to the rank of subjects. The novel becomes man’s direct experience of what surrounds him without being able to shield himself with a psychology, metaphysic, or a psychoanalytical method in his combat with the objective world he discovers.’ [xix]


[i] Rosalind Krauss, ‘The Double Negative: A new syntax for sculpture’, in Passages in Modern Sculpture, Cambridge, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1981, p. 267.
[ii] Ibid., p. 250.
[iii] From an email discussion between Athanasios Argianas and Natasha Adamou, 10 November 2008.
[iv] Rosalind Krauss, ‘The Double Negative: A new syntax for sculpture’, p. 64.
[v] Krauss talks about the idealistic concerns of the Constructivists ‘to visually present the creative power of thought, a meditation on the growth and development of Idea [where] an interior [is] always indicated.’ Ibid., p. 253.
[vi] ‘Gestalt form […] provides structural unity, to objects and spaces, whose nature is tied to perception, which is instantaneous […] this “all at once” information […] antithetical to the behavioural, temporal nature of extended spatial experience.’ Robert Morris, ‘The Present Tense of Space’ in Continuous Project Altered Daily: the writings of Robert Morris, MIT Press, Massachusetts, Cambridge, 1995, p. 197.
[vii] Rosalind Krauss writes on the Loop another sculpture of Len Lye with a similar function: ‘Automatically programmed and specifically staged as performance, this sculpture is meant to “enact” itself.’ Rosalind Krauss, ‘Mechanical Ballets: light, motion, theatre’ in Passages in Modern Sculpture, Cambridge, MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1981, p. 220.
[viii] Roland Barthes, ‘Objective Literature: Alain Robbe-Grillet’ in Two Novels by Robbe-Grillet: Jealousy and In the Labyrinth, Grove Press, 1965, New York, p. 17. ‘Here, the works seems to stand apart, as a radiant instant. The “lustre” of the work predominates, the object’s/subject’s unity is restored.’
[ix] Morris, ‘The Present Tense of Space’, p. 197.
[x] http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/lye/art.asp
[xi] From Len Lye ‘The Art That Moves’, in http://www.nzepc.auckland.ac.nz/authors/lye/art.asp.
[xii] Rosalind Krauss, ‘The Double Negative: A new syntax for sculpture’, London, p. 282.
[xiii] Ibid., p. 283.
[xiv] Ibid., p. 14.
[xv] Ibid.
[xvi] From the exhibition press release ‘Athanasios Argianas, Len Lye’, in Arcade Fine Arts, 2 October – 2 November 2008.
[xvii] Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, Routledge, 1962, p. xiv
[xviii] Ibid., p. xiii
[xix] Roland Barthes, ’Objective Literature: Alain Robbe-Grillet’, p. 25.