Fountain III

Fountain III

Fountain’s plume of steel rods sways gently as it rotates haltingly at the base.
Standing underneath the towering work, one sees flashes of light course through the rods, and their close parallels cause optical vibrations that destabilise the perception of figure and ground. Mesmerised by their shifting and shimmering, it becomes difficult for viewers to locate the rods in relation to each other.

Lye understood his kinetic sculptures in relation to the physical body. In particular, he saw them as externalisations of a feeling of movement, tension and resistance to gravity inherent in his own way of carrying the body. “Kinetic experience lies deep in our bones,” he wrote, “It is a more constant experience than any other. Our hearts beat, blood runs, rib cages expand and contract, eardrums resonate, lungs vibrate, every attitude we enact, we enact kinetically.” With a pace akin to breathing, Fountain’s billowing sheaf is one of Lye’s quieter “tangible motion sculptures”.

Between 1959 and 1976, Len Lye made several versions of Fountain, ranging in size from three to 15 feet(1 to 4.6 metres) tall. While guarding his own image for their movement, in each of these works Lye collaborated with an engineer. Lou Adler, a Greenwich Village radio and television repairman, assisted with the creation of Lye’s first version. Another owner of a machine shop a few blocks from Lye’s New York studio, Morris Gross, helped to redevelop the work in 1963. The Govett-Brewster Art Gallery’s work was developed with the assistance of John Matthews in 1976, in the lead up to Lye’s seminal exhibition at the Govett-Brewster the next year. None of these works is equal to Lye’s most extravagant visions, which included a Fountain 150 feet (45.7 metres) tall situated in the middle of a lake and rotated by jets of water.