Page 43 - Studio International - May 1969

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1
Liliane Lijn photographed in Holland Park in 1969
by John Pennent
2 The beginning, 1959
wax crayon, ink and India ink
22 X 20 in.
Courtesy: Hanover Gallery, London
3
Liquid reflections, 1966-8
perspex, water, mineral oil and turntable
4 ft diam.
4
Highway cones, 1968
painted cork with turntable
15-18 in. high
5&6
Linear light (Vlinder, 1967
copper-wound metal coil, motor
8 ft long x 2 ft high
7
Anti-gravity cone, 1967
fibreglass, perspex, fluorescent light and turntable
6 ft high, base diam. 40 in., top diam. 10 in.
Photo: Lewinsky

LINDSAY: So you mean the romantic idea of ever come to invent his helicopter? Obviously LINDSAY: So in fact museums as we know them
artists creating out of their state of psychosis we are not making actual machines, but it's cannot go on, and it is really these museums
is finished, and that it is reality that will a kind of signal, a kind of manifest. that have undone the artist's place in society.
inspire you? LINDSAY: Da Vinci wasn't making a machine LIJN: In other periods the work of art and the
LIJN: I am involved in reality, but there is a either, was he? building were one thing and each piece fitted
certain truth that the artist is a bit schizoid; if LIJN: He was predicting the future, which is into its environment, and it wasn't something
he wasn't he couldn't dematerialize himself. He the present one, the machine era. I feel I am that gave you a little amusement or a little
is, after all, in a sense, splitting himself, going predicting an era where there won't be any intellectual curiosity. It was probably some­
out to space and observing it without being machines, which is quite an advance on our thing that you worshipped, and to which you
allowed to go. But imagine if he was allowed. age. The industrial designers and technicians brought ritual offerings. I mean in a sense
LINDSAY: But maybe the machines that you look at my objects and think they are not museums should be eliminated and one should
and your colleagues are making out of your valid for that very reason. Whereas it isn't build palaces for art. One should put art into
imagination, may prove in the end better than and never can be a machine-it is something the churches. We could have John Cage
the complicated direct scientific invention. else. A research physicist maybe could under­ music in the churches and Ginsberg reciting
LIJN: I think they may laugh at us for another stand what I am doing, and maybe could poetry. We should try and bring recordings of
600 years and then they will look back as we compare it to his own work. Whereas the the stars and the solar system and put that in
do on Leonardo da Vinci. How did da Vinci technician or designer would find it useless. the churches. D

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