Beady Lye

Interlaced: Animation and Textiles is an exhibition running at the Len Lye Centre from 7 December 2024 to 27 April 2025. The exhibition looks at the interplay of two art forms typically given short shrift in the museum and art gallery environment. Curated by Canadian media scholar Alla Gadassik, Interlaced is situated in the Len Lye Centre recognising the role of textiles in Lye’s animated films. The exhibition includes two of Lye’s films, Kaleidoscope and Color Cry but here I want to look quickly at a more obscure item included in this exhibition, Lye’s glass and bead stencil (from the Len Lye Foundation collection) used in his unsuccessful 1952 commercial for Cheerios cereal.

Len Lye, glass stencil for Cheerios, c. 1953. Len Lye Foundation Collection.

In the 1950s, following the end of his March of Time work and before his success with Free Radicals (1958), Lye produced a handful of short films that were pitched to companies in the hope of securing a commercial sponsor; however, his efforts for Plexiglass, Cheerios and Time Inc. failed to secure the necessary partnerships. Fortunately, these experimental films are extant to a certain degree.

The title of the Cheerios film is unknown although I presume it to be simply Cheerios on account of the studio packaging and labelling around this stencil. The film sits with Color Cry in Lye’s family of ‘shadowcast’ or photogram films – a process that dominated his filmmaking in the early 1950s. Using a darkroom, Lye cast light onto unexposed film with materials such as fabric providing a pattern that would be registered on the film. The addition of coloured gels to the process provided lush colours equal to Lye’s earlier painted films (it’s worth noting Color Cry, the exemplar of this technique, still retained some painted sequences).

Frames from Cheerios, c. 1953. Len Lye Foundation / Museum of Modern Art.

Cheerios necessarily employed circular objects to mimic the form of the cereal. The stencil on display in Interlaced (top of page) provides evidence of one sequence. Here, a sheet of clear glass has a line of carefully placed glass or plastic beads running down its centre. Arranged to occupy the approximate width of a strip of 16mm film, the line of beads would sit above a strip of film in Lye’s darkroom. A light shining over the arrangement would cast the image of the beads through the glass and onto the film. The image above shows the static results.

The effect in motion can be seen in the film Lye pitched to Time Inc., Life’s Musical Minute (1953). Here Lye recycled his Cheerios experiments. The bead sequences can be seen at 0:31-041 and then at 0:52-1:00. Although seemingly finely placed on the glass surface, the imperfections both in the beads themselves and their registration on the plate create the skittery effect seen in the film. Paired with the percussive soundtrack, there’s a delightful sense of the beads bouncing around on the surface of the drums during the soundtrack’s solo.

Len Lye, Life's Musical Minute, c.1953

That soundtrack is a 1940 performance by the Woody Herman Orchestra of The Golden Wedding with Lye focused on the 34-bar drum solo by Frank Carlson (not Gene Krupa or Buddy Rich as most references to Life’s Musical Minute suggest). A nice detail to ponder further is that a different soundtrack appears to have been involved with the actual Cheerios film. Lye’s deposit of films at New York’s Museum of Modern Art includes a recording of bata drumming attributed to the Cheerios project.