Liliane Lijn

Liliane Lijn (born 1939) is an American-born artist who was the first woman artist to work with kinetic text (Poem Machines), exploring both light and text as early as 1962; and in addition, she is in all likelihood the first woman artist to have exhibited a work incorporating an electric motor.

In 1958 Lijn studied archaeology at the Sorbonne and Art History at the École du Louvre, in Paris.

At the same time Lijn began to draw and paint, (although she did not attend art school), while taking part in meetings of the Surrealist group, where she met the French writer, poet and theorist André Breton.

Lijn had already begun a lifelong interest in unusual materials.

In 1960 she had used molten Tefon-Stift (polymer-based ski wax) vibrating it to make fine lines on Perspex sheets.

The writers and poets William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, Sinclair Beiles and Brion Gysin were in the same circle as Lijn, and their book on ‘cut-ups’ entitled Minutes to Go had previously been launched at the Librairie Anglaise in 1960.

In Art of the Electronic Age (p. 20) the art critic Frank Popper described Lijn as being "important among the artists who, through their practical and theoretical researches, established the passage from the mechanical to the electronic in art".

In 1961 Lijn lived in New York, where she first worked with plastics, experimenting with reflection, motion and light, and conducted her first research into invisibility at MIT.

Lijn began also working directly with manufacturers – a tradition that she has continued to this day.

In 1961, Lijn married the Greek artist Takis.

After reading Robert Graves "The Greek Myths early in 1961, Lijn became intrigued by a "feminist mythography which countered patriarchy". A White Koan is displayed at the University of Warwick, where it has played a role in many of campus’ myths and legends – it was allegedly the nose-cap of the Blue-Streak Missile (a failed Apollo mission), a supposed quick escape route for senior staff, and even a signalling device for aliens in outer space. The Koan Worshipping Society, led by the Koanists, believe the Koan is “the earth-bound manifestation of the immortal Koan, the creator of the universe”.

Lijn's Poem Machines incorporating rotating movement and text (initially cut from newspapers and then Lettrasetted text and poems) were invented in 1962 and exhibited at the Librairie Anglaise in Paris, in November 1963.

"'Lijn’s emphatic desire for the words to be blurred by movement privileges the moving text over the static one for, although the objects are elegant and mysterious when still, these artworks are machines that need to demonstrate their purpose, in order to succeed as artworks'."

The American poet John Ashbery described the show at the Libraire Anglaise: "Electric lights flash on and off Plexiglass constructions, creating a tangle of transparent shadows called ‘Echo Lights’ by the artist. Her ‘Vibrographs’ are wheels revolving too fast for you to read the words printed on them, but perhaps they affect you unconsciously like subliminal advertising".

Lijn frequented the world of the Beat poets and worked with the English poet Nazli Nour (see Get Rid of Government Time, 1962).

At the same time the concrete poetry and music magazine, Cinquieme Saison became a platform for demonstrating renewed experimentations with the word in the neo-Dada atmosphere at the end of the fifties and the beginning of the sixties.

Lijn was also interested in the work of other kinetic artists working with light and movement in Paris such as the Groupe de Recherches Visuelles.

The first space orbit by the Soviet cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin not only paralleled her interest in orbiting forms and her involvement with NASA today, but also her preoccupation with the weightless body and her reading of Buddhist texts.

As the curator and art historian Dr Sarah Wilson notes: "Takis took Lijn to Greece – an éblouissment - a dazzling encounter with land, light and sea: with ancient mythologies, with the skin and surface of things versus oracular depth, with passionate love and loss".

Lijn is also known for her drive to "re-encounter the archaic Greek as a form of Western primitivism, as a primordial field of culture and representation for contemporary techno-culture".

In the mid-sixties Lijn and Takis designed and built a circular house at Gero Vouno near Athens, combining many aspects of her work, philosophy and life.

In 1965, Lijn began work with cone-shaped Koans which continue to this day.

As Lijn stated to video poet and visual philosopher Sarah Tremlett, her aim with her text-based Poem Machines and Koans is to use kinesis to "re-energise the word, to give it back power and fresh meaning".

The word Koan is taken from Zen Buddhism meaning a puzzling, often paradoxical statement or story, used as an aid to meditation and a means of gaining spiritual awakening.

The conic shape also refers to the Greek hearth goddess Hestia’s conic symbol – a mound of white ash.

She has lived in London since 1966.

Utilising original combinations of industrial materials and artistic processes, Lijn is recognized for pioneering the interaction of art, science, technology, eastern philosophy and feminine mythology.

She is known for her cone-shaped Koan series.

In conversation with Fluxus artist and writer, Charles Dreyfus, Lijn stated that she primarily chose to "see the world in terms of light and energy".

Lijn was born in New York City, four months after her mother and grandmother had arrived by boat from Antwerp.

Both Lijn's parents, Helena Nuischa Kustanovich and Herman Segall (cousin of Zvi Segal and an active Revisionist Zionist), were from Russian Jewish families, and the family lived at 697 West End Ave. Manhattan with her younger brother Dennis Leroy Segall (who is the founder of CRYS, Coalition for the Reform of Youth Services, and currently resides in Tampa, Florida).

At the age of 9, her parents separated and Lijn was sent to a progressive boarding school, Hickory Ridge (which was subsequently burnt down), before attending a more conventional school in Pennsylvania.

During Lijn's sophomore year, her father moved to Geneva and took Lijn and her brother with him.

Lijn's mother decided to move to Lugano to be near her children.

Lijn lived with her mother and went to school in Lugano, becoming fluent in French and Italian.

She left school a year and a half before graduating, precipitated by a life-changing encounter with Nina Thoeren, her former classmate, whose mother Manina Tischler was a Surrealist painter.

In 1966, Lijn and Takis separated and Lijn moved to London where she invented kinetic clothing.

She also began her series of rotating Linear Light Columns.

These works combine surface variations made to metal cylinders, then wound with copper wire, with reflected light.

The completed wire wound coils use reflected light to make visible invisible connections between time and frequency.