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The touring exhibition 'Len Lye' presents Australian audiences with a delightful but modest introduction to the breadth and quality of work produced by one of the most technically innovative and visionary of 20th century modernists. Painter, art theorist, pioneering short film-maker, internationally celebrated kinetic sculptor, Lye (1901-1980) is represented in this exhibition by fourteen films, three kinetic sculptures (Grass, 1961; Roundhead, 1961; and Universe, 1963-75) and twenty-one photograms or shadowgraphs. The film program is the most comprehensive aspect of the exhibition, featuring many of the major works that have placed Lye at the forefront of the history of experimental film, most particularly with regard to techniques in 'direct' film (scratching and painting the film surface), colour experimentation and the rhythmic synchronicity of music and visual motion. Lye's kinetic sculptures have come to occupy an increasingly important place in his posthumous reputation. Roundhead is one of the smallest, comprising a set of metal rings hanging one within the other spinning on a central axis. Grass is made up of a set of stainless steel rods or reeds embedded in a wooden plank that gently tips back and forth on a motorised base making the rods sway as if fingered by a sea-breeze. Universe is the largest of the three works—a big looped piece of steel that bulges back and forth responding to electro-magnets in its base, occasionally developing enough energy to bounce and resonate against a wooden ball suspended above. Lye's sculptures were sometimes abstract, sometimes anthropomorphic figures of motion in tensile steel and fibreglass forms, swaying, flipping, crashing and pulsing with life-energy. Many of these are large works, technically complex to construct and install (although this... The rest of this article is available to subscribers of Eyeline