Body Electric

LILIANE LIJN was eighteen years old in 1958 when she moved to Paris, enrolled in and quickly dropped out of art school, and became immersed in the Surrealist circle around André Breton. By then, Surrealism was on its last legs, and artists were moving in new directions: toward the Happenings of Jean-Jacques Lebel or the kinetic constructions of artists like Takis, whom Lijn would later marry. But the Parisian art scene remained a heavily male milieu in which Lijn, as a young woman, often felt dismissed. Looking back on that moment, she would later say, “Being a woman installs you so totally in your body that you could do two things: you could say, ‘Yes, I am body and I’m proud of it,’ or you could say, ‘I’m mind! Forget the body.’”¹ 

For the next decade, Lijn chose the mind. From the early 1960s to the late ’70s, she produced cerebral kinetic sculptures that reflected her interest in “dematerialization—the idea of losing the body.”² These were years of intense exploration. Lijn read extensively about astronomy and physics and employed industrial plastics to explore the artistic potential of light and motion. In some works, including Echolights, 1963, and the 1965–66 series “Cosmic Flares,” the projected electric light onto lenses embedded in Perspex,while in other works she used motors to produce optical effects, as for example in Vibrographe, 1962, in which two metal drums are marked with rows of lines that blur when set in motion. Vibrographe was the origin point of her best-known series, the “Poem Machines,”begun in the same year, for which Lijn transferred Letraset letters onto the curves of cylinders and cones, often quoting poems by her friends and associates. GET RID OF GOVERNMENT TIME, reads one; another, ARISE ALIVE. When the works’ motors are switched on, the sculptures spin rapidly and the texts dissolve in a whirl of motion, becoming nearly or entirely illegible.   

By the early 1960s, the practice of using movement to visually dissolve matter had a long history. In his 1928 treatise The New Vision, László Moholy-Nagy noted the evolution of sculpture from weighty volumes to hollow, light, and kinetic objects, citing the work of artists like Naum Gabo, whose 1919–20 Kinetic Construct­ion (Standing Wave) was a thin metal rod whose motorized movement creates the illusion of a ghostly volume in space.³ After the war, artists including Jean Tinguely made their own examples of motorized “virtual volumes.” 

What made Lijn’s early work stand out in this field was her unique fusion of movement-based dematerialization with language. Many artists working during this period incorporated language as a strategy to do away with physical stuff—to replace the heaviness of objects with the lightness of words. Yet as Liz Kotz notes, words have material, as well as immaterial, elements: “By their nature, words are both here—concretely and physically present on the page, or in the moment of utterance—and yet also elsewhere—referring to, evoking, or metaphorically conjuring up sets of ideas, objects, or experiences that are somewhere else,” she writes.⁴ But Lijn’s poem machines dissolve the material words printed on them; thus meaning also vanishes. Why, then, engage language at all? 

Lijn explained her simultaneous recruitment and dissolution of language as a way to cope with her growing sense that words had become tired and lost any vital force. Paradoxically, she aimed to reawaken the power of language by making it unreadable. “The word accelerated loses its identity and becomes a pattern pregnant with energy,” she wrote in a 1968 artist statement. “It is pregnant with the energy of its potential meaning should it once again become a word.”⁵ Lijn describes a kind of what the Russian formalists called estrangement—an interference with our automatic habits of perception, and the deferral of recognition as we struggle to make out letters and impute meanings. For the formalists, the goal of such perceptual slowing was ultimately to restore sensation to language, yet Lijn’s rapidly spinning words may never reach the point at which they are legible at all. In that sense, a formalist reading gives way to a mystical one: Some have noted the works’ resemblance to Tibetan prayer wheels, in which printed prayers wrapped around a cylinder are spun to be sent them into the world. (Lijn was interested in Tibetan Buddhism at the time, though she was not yet familiar with the device of the prayer wheel when she developed this series.) In this light, the “Poem Machines” might also be seen as prayers for a future, better language.

Lijn, now eighty-five years old, has lately been the subject of renewed attention. Haus der Kunst in Munich and Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien in Vienna recently co-organized “Liliane Lijn: Arise Alive,” the largest-ever solo exhibition of the artist’s work; the show is on view through November 2 at Tate St. Ives in England. Works by Lijn also appeared in the recent exhibitions “Radical Software: Women, Art & Computing 1960–1991”at Mudam in Luxembourg and Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, and “Electric Dreams: Art and Technology Before the Internet” at Tate Modern in London, both of which turn to the early 1960s as a touchstone for our digital present. Together these exhibitions make the case that Lijn’s work—with its surprising blend of themes drawn from physics, mythology, poetry, and embodied experience—abrades standard readings of the science- and technology-inflected art of the late twentieth century.  

Lijn’s key move has been to recode the concepts of energy and mechanical movement themselves as female or complexly gendered.

The rapidly spinning texts of the “Poem Machines” in particular hold a continued allure, maybe because words right now feel both empty and overwhelming—an endless doomscroll. (Lijn’s early-1960s optimism, her sense that language might eventually be made to “live again,” seems unfortunately harder to access today.)⁶ “Arise Alive,” though, does not limit itself to Lijn’s best-known work, but rather explores her full trajectory—especially the shift her work underwent in the 1970s and ’80s, when she began to make explicitly feminist sculptures and installations that centered the body that she had previously disavowed.

Lijn continued to work with rotating conical forms after the “Poem Machines.”Her “Koans,” begun in the late 1960s, are fiberglass structures ringed with strips of acrylic, lit from within. When set in motion on a rotating turntable, the sculptures produce the sense that the acrylic lines—rather than the cone—are moving. The “Koans”could be quite large, many reaching heights of over five feet. In the 1970s, her sculptures began to assume more humanoid shapes. In one group of works, she set prisms atop Minimalist columns, evoking heads; some of the sculptures later sprouted floppy aluminum arms. The most dramatic shift happened at the end of that decade, when Lijn suddenly embraced a range of new materials and colors and began to make overt references to gender. The nearly seven-foot-tall Feathered Lady, 1979, isa glass prism set atop a tower of feather dusters, while Heshe, 1980, incorporates flowing purple and orange plastic bristles, the kind one might find in a car wash. These works were followed by sculptures incorporating a profusion of beads, mica, and blown glass, including the large figure Gemini, 1984, and a series of smaller sculptural heads and headdresses.

The public culmination of this body of work was the kinetic installation Conjunction of Opposites at the 1986 Venice Biennale, which paired the imposing figures Lady of the Wild Things, 1983, and Woman of War, 1986. Nearly eight and nine feet tall, respectively, the sculptures are made from cores of painted steel, with wings of brightly colored synthetic fibers. A computer program housed in Woman of War activates a six-minute choreography sequence: As the figure begins to emit artificial smoke and to chant in Lijn’s recorded voice, Lady of the Wild Things responds by activating 250 LED lights embedded in her wings. The recorded monologue is the story of a woman hardened in battle with a lover. “I’m the image of woman, the woman of war,” the voice says. “My eyes are laser beams, my mind a prism through which you take your aim, my breath the fire of death. . . . Look, I am the Medusa. Look at me, turn to stone.” Conjunction of Opposites is a kinetic performance with roots in the historical avant-garde, recalling the machinelike puppets of Fortunato Depero’s 1918 Balli plastici (Plastic Dances) or Kazimir Malevich’s radically strange, geometric costumes for the 1913 Russian Futurist opera Victory over the Sun. But Lijn’s mechanized drama is a resolutely feminist one, a face-off between two cyborgs who both conjure and complicate the archetypes of the nature goddess and the murderous woman. 

Over the course of three decades, then, Lijn journeyed from an apparently disembodied and dematerialized art to one that not only embraces the body but does so in an exaggerated, over-the-top way. It is hard to square the spare mechanics of the “Poem Machines”with the maximalist, spectacular figures of Con­junction of Opposites. In a 2002 interview with Lijn, Guy Brett repeatedly returned to this question, pushing Lijn to think about the “moment of transition” from her abstract, kinetic work to that in which “the image of woman begins to appear.”⁷ Lijn, though, resists drawing a neat line between these phases of her work: “Possibly kinetics and feminism are more closely related than one realizes,” she concludes.⁸ 

In hindsight, the aim of “losing the body” that Lijn set for herself at the start of her career may have been impossible to sustain. Animated objects tend to activate the deeply rooted human impulse to perceive things that move as alive—a tendency harnessed to great effect in the uncannily twitching wires of Pol Bury’s reliefs or Robert Breer’s creeping domes. Even in Lijn’s 1960s work, there are instances of the artist drawing analogies between kinetic machines and bodies. Breathing Cone, 1968, is a small rotating cone bisected with blue Perspex, which seems to pulse as the work spins, as if it were inhaling and exhaling. The masterful series “Liquid Reflections,” 1966–68, intended as a metaphor for the behavior of photons and electrons, is a miniature drama of acrylic balls on the surface of a motorized disk; the unpredictable paths and behaviors of each marble give the impression that we are watching the movements of small, animate beings. Some of the large white “Koans” that Lijn made during the same period were scaled to the artist’s height, indirectly introducing her body into the sculptures. Her later works embrace these bodily readings directly and give them a distinctly feminist cast.

Lijn’s key move has been to recode the concepts of energy and mechanical movement themselves as female or complexly gendered. There is her early description of the “Poem Machines” as “pregnant with energy,” holding the potential to birth a new language. There are later sketches of electrical transmission towers morphing into women’s bodies and emitting bolts of lightning. Much of Lijn’s kinetic sculpture over the past several decades has been informed by feminist revisions of ancient mythology and the recovery of powerful, violent figures such as Inanna, the Sumerian goddess of war. Her work reminds us that the materials and techniques employed by kinetic and program-oriented artists from the ’60s onward—mostly men—could be directed toward dramatically different ends. As recent studies of this moment have shown, some artists employed movement, light, and electricity to address the emergence of automation, cybernetics, and new communications technologies. Lijn reworked the same vocabulary to craft a new language of gender, not only using the strategies of kinetic art to reflect on the embodied experiences of women, but additionally proposing that science, engineering, and energy might themselves be understood as feminine.