Points of Agreement

Points of Agreement

Tessa Laird’s Points of Agreement was commissioned for the exhibition Old Genes: Artists reading Len Lye. Curator Tyler Cann invited five contemporary artists to look anew at the interweaving of sound, vision and the verbal Lye’s work, and consider the artist’s legacy.

Laird gives Lye’s handwriting enlarged, pictorial form. In the mid-1920s Lye hand-copied 26 pages of Sigmund Freud’s recently translated book Totem and Taboo into his sketchbook. On the facing pages he carefully made pencil, ink and gouache images of African, Polynesian and Māori art. Many of these were drawn from life in museums, others were copied out of books. Out of this assemblage of non-Western art forms, as well as compositions by Mikhail Larionov, Fernand Léger and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, Lye built an alternative artistic legacy for himself, while at the same time Freud’s text provided him with a theoretical continuity between the cultural and mental life of ‘savages’ and the dynamics of the modern subconscious. Laird’s Points of Agreement copies of Lye’s copied text and images, complete with running commentary in the margins, work out her own position with respect to Lye (amongst others) as an alternative ancestral figure, an omnivorous, curious, post-colonial Kiwi confronting the totality of art, as well as its margins.

— Excerpt from Tyler Cann, Old Genes: Artists reading Len Lye, 2012. Adapted for Collection Online, 2023.