Lilian Line. Arise Alive is the most comprehensive individual institutional presentation to date of the artist, who was born in New York in 1939 and has lived in London since 1966. Lijn has worked at the intersections of visual art, language and science for over six decades and has created an extensive body of work that includes sculptures and installations, collages and paintings, videos and performances. The exhibition presents the most important stages of this category-breaking work from the late 1950s to the present day.
Lijn’s multimedia practice has its starting point in the kinetic art of the late 1950s as well as in the examination of surrealist ideas, ancient mythologies and Far Eastern religions. Even her earliest works show an interest in unconventional artistic materials that continues to this day: in 1961, Lijn created her first works made of Plexiglas, in which Lijn experiments with reflection, movement and light. “Electric lights flash on Plexiglas constructions and create a tangle of transparent shadows,” wrote the American poet John Ashbery in 1963 about an exhibition of Lijn’s in Paris. Also visible there are “cylinders that spin too fast for you to read the words printed on them.” Related to the language experiments of the Beat poets, Lijn uses these so-called Poem Machines Words moved mechanically to free them from their fixed meanings. The works mark the beginning of her ongoing engagement with language, with the idea of the spoken word as vibration and therefore energy: “The main concern of my work has been and is ‘energy transfer’”.
Lijn’s work is often based on everyday observations – the behavior of water droplets on a pane of glass; the insight that letters are made of lines – and can be understood as experimental arrangements to get to the bottom of the principles of our cosmos. As the titles of her works demonstrate – Cosmic Flares I (1966), Act As Atom (1967-68), E=mc3 (1968) – she sees technology and science as allies from the beginning in order to penetrate into regions beyond the visible, and also sees this as a feminist project: the dematerialization of language and body, their translation into vibration, light or sound For the artist, it is an attack on patriarchal structures and on the reduction of women to their bodies. “I was interested in dematerialization – in the idea of losing the body. And that was related in a way to being a woman”.
Lijn’s book, published in 1983, can also be viewed against this background Crossing Map on which the artist worked for over fifteen years and which paved the way for the multimedia sculptures of the 1980s. In the second half of the 1960s, in search of new formats and forms of expression, Lijn began producing a text whose final version could be described as a hybrid of science fiction, autobiography and ecofeminist manifesto. This linguistic work of art, which she also performed publicly, is about the spiritual journey of an artist who overcomes her material body.
At the same time, Lijn turns to the human figure in visual art to reflect the effects of technological developments on the body. Using feather dusters, synthetic fibers, optical prisms and lasers, futuristic female ‘deities’ are created that appear to be part machine, part animal, part plant. A highlight and the literal center of the exhibition at mumok is the confrontation between Lady of the Wild Things (1983) and Woman of War (1986), which Lijn first presented at the Venice Biennale and which were aptly referred to at the time as “goddesses of the Space Age”. A six-minute dialogue unfolds between the two larger-than-life computer-controlled characters, involving singing, 250 LED lights, lasers and artificial smoke. In Lijn’s interactive sculptures, which she negotiated under the term “Cosmic Dramas”, for which she was inspired not least by the facilities of the modern energy industry, the cosmic and the personal and mythology and high-tech are combined to give female archetypes a contemporary form .
Liliane Lijn was born in New York in 1939 and has been working internationally as an artist since the 1960s. Her works are in collections such as the Tate Modern, the British Museum and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London as well as the Musée de la Ville de Paris and the Kunstmuseum Bern.
Selected exhibitions and exhibition participations:
Radical Software: Women, Art and Computing 1960-1991Mudam Luxembourg (2024), Americans in Paris: Artists Working in Postwar France, 1946-1962Grey Art Museum / New York University (2024), Siren, (some poetics)Amant Foundaton, New York (2023); Concrete ExperienceBadischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe (2023); The Milk of Dreams59th International Art Exhibition of the Biennale di Venice (2022); I AM SHEThe Word, Milan (2020); Action Reaction: 100 Years of Kinetic ArtKunsthal Rotterdam (2018-2019); Spotlight: Liliane LijnTate Britain (2017-2018); Cosmic DramasMiddlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Middlesbrough (2012-2013); Liliane Lijn: Works 1959-80Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre, Coventry (2005); Beyond Light: Liliane Lijn and Bill CulbertSerpentine Gallery, London (1976-1977); Liliane Lijn: Echolights and VibrographsGalerie de la Librairie Anglaise, Paris (1963)
Press conference in the presence of the artist
Thursday, November 14th, 10 a.m
Register at: presse@mumok.at
Press photos at: https://www.mumok.at/presse/liliane-lijn
Opening with free entry
Thursday, November 14th, 7 p.m
Duration of the exhibition
15 November 2024 to 4 May 2025
Curator
Manuela Ammer
cooperation
Liliane Lijn. Arise Alive was organized together with Haus der Kunst Munich and in collaboration with Tate St Ives.
Catalog
Liliane Lijn. Arise Alive
hrsg. v. Manuela Ammer, Emma Enderby
Foreword by Andrea Lissoni, Karola Kraus, Anne Barlow, texts by Manuela Ammer, Emma Enderby, Sabeth Buchmann and Ilse Lafer, Jennifer Higgie, conversations with Liliane Lijn with Anne Barlow and Michelle Kuo, introductory texts by Teresa Retzer
316 pages, 29 x 20 cm, hardcover trimmed on three sides with dust jacket
Publisher of the bookstore Walther and Franz König, Cologne
ISBN 978-3-7533-0708-4 (English Edition, Denslens am Cover)
ISBN 978-3-7533-0707-7 (German edition, The Beginning on the cover)
Press conference “Lilian Lijn. Arise Alive” in the presence of the artist
Datum: November 14, 2024, 10:00 a.m
Art: Press conference
Ort: mummies
Museum Square 1
1070 Wien
Austria
URL: https://www.mumok.at/presse/liliane-lijn