Treestone Psychology Book Archive

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M. W. 7 Around 1920, Lye was inspired by a stray comment from his favourite teacher, the talented but traditional painter Harry Linley Richardson. Richardson never talked about modern art but he was supportive of his unusual student. On this occasion, Lye heard him praise an artist for having developed his own distinctive approach to art. In the context of the art education of the period, this was a radical idea and Lye was immediately seized by it. He remembered the precise moment, months later, when he succeeded in formulating his own approach.

Although Duchamp himself did not use any of these terms at the time – not even claiming the work as ‘art’ – he is certainly a prestigious figure for kineticism to claim as its father. Since the development of conceptual art in the 1960s, his reputation has grown to eclipse Picasso’s. After a phase of making canvases with implied movement such as Coffee Mill (1911) and Nude Descending a Staircase (1912), Duchamp rejected the medium of painting and turned instead to ‘ready-mades’ (manufactured objects found by the artist and applied to his own purpose) and to devices that produced optical illusions.

His only collaborator was his Australian friend Jack Ellitt, who had followed Lye to London. He wrote rhythmic piano music to accompany Lye’s film. This was for live performance, since they could not afford a soundtrack, although the technology had recently become available. 39 This was the first animation film based on ‘modernist primitivism’. At the same time, it drew upon Lye’s ‘imagery for the description of nature processes in terms of human drama’. The film was not entirely abstract since it told a story of conflict, though its protagonists belonged to unknown species (like mysterious forms of life seen through the microscope).