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Len Lye laid the foundation for the history of the moving image. In his easy transition between disparate forms of media - spanning film, photography, poetry, sculpture and painting - his work embodied the term 'multimedia'. His versatility was that of an artist who existed outside genre, art movements, locality and even historical specificity. Lye subverted the hierarchies of the arts, rendering his work accessible and influential to a new generation in the twenty-first century.

So a Lye retrospective was always destined to be ambitious, and 'An Artist in Perpetual Motion' was a dense and dynamic investigation that did not disappoint. Billed as the largest posthumous Lye exhibition to date, the showcase unearthed a range of miscellaneous artefacts, sculptures, assemblages and sketchbooks from the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery's Len Lye Foundation and the New Zealand Film Archive, combining artworks with rarely seen biographical ephemera. The sum of Lye's career is evidence of a preternaturally restless, omnivorous curiosity. He was a true autodidact who bridged pre- and post-Second World War movements and trends. Given Lye's continual reinvention of his own artistic direction, it was important that such a seminal modernist be recognised in this monumental way at Melbourne's Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) ...

Lye's key ideas of rhythm, motion, kinetics and sensation were based around the idea of perpetual motion. Deeply ingrained in Lye's practice was his philosophy of motion and kinetic feelings that are discovered in the body. Lye looked to movement - to pure sensation - and thus to sensorial and emotional triggers. This was founded in ideas of primitivism and influenced by his research into non-western art, prehistoric and indigenous cultures. At the same time, Lye's work strove for connectivity, freedom and attunement with what he saw as an essential, primitive life force that would bypass conscious, rational thinking ...

For this seventh Gertrude Contemporary Art Spaces and Art & Australia Emerging Writers Program review, Rachael Watts was mentored by Charles Green, artist and Reader in Contemporary International and Australian Art at the University of Melbourne; Len Lye: An Artist in Perpetual Motion, Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne, 16 July - 11 October 2009.

This article appears in excerpted form. You can read the entire article in Art & Australia's Autumn 2010 issue.