On Jean Tinguely

Iwish​ I’d been there. On the night of 28 November 1970, in front of the Duomo in Milan, a sheet of purple drapery was removed to reveal a ten-metre-high golden penis, with a pair of massive golden papier-mâché balls on the plinth at its base. When darkness fell, a firecracker went off, and then another, as sparks and smoke issued from the tip, with louder explosions following, rockets shooting out everywhere, until the whole thing was a tower of flames erupting into the sky. Somewhere in the crowd a man sang ‘O Sole Mio’; within half an hour the structure had burned down.

This was Jean Tinguely’s self-immolating sculpture La Vittoria, or ‘Suicide of the Machine’. It was the culmination of a series of events celebrating, or mourning the death of, Nouveau réalisme, the movement founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany along with Tinguely, Yves Klein and others. The Nouveau réalistes were Europe’s answer to Pop Art, dedicated to the ‘poetic recycling of urban, industrial and advertising reality’ through collage, assemblage and Dadaist performance. It was also a giant fuck-you to whatever you like: the patriarchy, the Church, the sanctity of museum-bound art. As part of the festival, Tinguely’s wife, Niki de Saint Phalle, executed one of her Tirs, firing a gun at capsules of paint which exploded over an altar.

Tinguely, born in 1925 to a French Swiss working-class family, loved to entertain. In the grainy footage of the événement in Milan you can see him running around like a manic imp. He spent his career – he died in 1991 – making sculptures from salvaged materials, discarded machine parts and other detritus, but he didn’t arrive at the high-art avant-garde by the usual route: one of his earliest jobs was as a window dresser in Basel, where he put up elaborate, fun displays with department-store chairs, saucepans and handbags suspended from pieces of wire. He got used to, I suppose, the spectacle that drew the eye but was gone in a flash, and he took his interest in ephemeral consumerism with him – the pleasure of it, and the despair – when he moved with his first wife to Paris and set up a small studio while continuing to just about make a living by (for example) producing an installation for the café at the Bon Marché. When he hit fame, he still wanted to provoke by putting things up and pulling them down. Invited in 1960 by MoMA to contribute a piece, he built Homage to New York, his first piece of ‘auto-destructive’ performance art: he gathered bicycle wheels, a bathtub, a piano, radios, hammers and saws from the junkyards of New Jersey, riveted them into a whole, and then blew the structure up. (Not being used to this kind of happening, the New York City fire department jumped in to put out the blaze.)

But what he really loved was machines, or art made from machine parts that clanked and whirred, constantly in motion. Take Cercle et carré éclatés (1981), an assembly of connected rods and cranks, belts, gears and wheels, all driven by an electric motor turned on with the press of a pedal. It’s cobbled together from reclaimed pieces of steel, rubber and wood, along with an industrial drill bit, a photographer’s studio lamp, a rusty metal cart that moves backwards and forwards on a track. The machine is geared so that some wheels spin fast, some slow, clockwise and anticlockwise, each mechanism operating on the next to produce a different kind of motion in every plane: a curved section of steel scythes from side to side, a curved wooden branch nods up and down. And there’s noise: an orchestrated arrangement of screeches, whines and hums; with every revolution of a wooden cartwheel there is a loud clack as a bar falls back into place.

‘Cercle et carré éclatés’ (1981).

At first all you see and hear is the movement: it’s an ingenious carnival contraption that is also a reminder of mechanisation, both industrial and agricultural. But then you realise that the structure has a simple, underlying geometry. The title is a reference to Cercle et carré, the 1930s Paris journal whose contributors and subjects included Kandinsky, Mondrian, Léger, Taeuber-Arp and Schwitters: the whole apparatus is a monument to Russian Constructivism. Compare it to a single picture, Schwitters’s Merzbild Kijkduin (1923), a collage in relief of painted wood. A black semicircle tops an off-vertical line, looking like a hammer off balance about to fall. Above, a wooden square subdivided into Mondrianesque sections of pink, white and blue meets a line that rests on a fulcrum. It’s a static assemblage full of implied or anticipated movement: you feel the weight of that hammer that will hit that lever, and the almost swing of the rod on the fulcrum. Cercle et carré éclatés is Schwitters’s picture animated, fully realised in three dimensions, and set in electric motion. The line becomes a crank, the circle a wheel, as if the picture was only ever a diagram of a machine that would come to be.

Tinguely’s 13-metre-long assemblage is usually found in the Musée d’Art et d’Histoire in Geneva. Last October, though, it was disassembled and reinstalled at the Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan for a Tinguely show that gathered forty of his kinetic sculptures and other fantastic constructions. A large number were shipped from the Museum Tinguely in Basel, donations from Saint Phalle; others from private collections. The advantage of seeing them all arranged in a 5000 square metre factory space is that together the machines become elements of a larger machine: one sculpture is set in motion for its three-minute burst of activity, then comes to rest, before the next one starts thumping and turning. It’s a vast choreography of sound and movement. The pieces speak to one another, sometimes purposefully, as in the case of the ‘Philosophers’ series (1988-89).

They’re called Henri Bergson, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Piotr Kropotkin et al, and each has a distinct character derived from the choice of materials and pattern of motion. Wittgenstein is made from blue steel and plastic piping and moves like a walking robot. Kropotkin’s body is an oil drum standing on a wooden pallet; protruding from the part that must be his head is what looks like a giant carabiner but is apparently part of a surfboard – it looks like his massive, friendly beard. Bergson is a rotating and swaying doll or spinning top with copper-basket pineapple head, turning around a central axis while also oscillating from side to side – of course the philosopher of mind in motion does a complex dance. Ingeniously, the sculpture’s form also resembles Bergson’s diagram – the inverted cone – with the apex representing the present moment and the stacked segments layers of memory. The eight ‘philosophers’, arranged in a circle, are engaged in some high-minded symposium as they nod and shake away. But they are also silly, and entertaining: circus performers on a stage.

This is what’s weird about Tinguely: what should be forbidding and abstract – mechanised geometries, industrial detritus – is full of personality. Clearly, people were drawn to him, and he was drawn to them. So much of his work is homage to predecessors he admired – predecessors like Alexander Calder, whom he credited with giving him the idea of suspending moving parts from wire. He was always collaborating, repeatedly with Saint Phalle, most monumentally on Le Cyclop, built between 1969 and 1987 in Milly-la-Forêt outside Paris. It’s a one-eyed giant’s head in the forest, 22 metres high, with Tinguely designing the scrap-metal superstructure and moving parts (levers and pulleys, cams and cranks) and Saint Phalle covering the surface with mirrored tesserae. Inside, among the staircases and gangways, are works provided by various artist friends: Daniel Spoerri, Eva Aeppli, Larry Rivers, Jesús Rafael Soto. The ‘mad sculptors’, as Tinguely called them, who spent years contributing to this anarchists’ playground often lived at the site, having the time of their lives. Another close collaborator was Renzo Piano, who spoke to Tinguely regularly throughout the design and construction of the Centre Pompidou. ‘I’d say the Beaubourg is to some extent Jean Tinguely’s brainchild as well,’ he remarkably reported in 2021. At its opening in 1977, the foyer was dominated by Tinguely’s Crocrodrome: a Chinese dragon made of rusted iron, thirty metres long, with jaws that opened and closed to allow you to walk inside, passing the ghost train in the stomach to reach the mechanism ejecting chocolate at the rear. Le Crocrodrome was dismantled after only six months, but the Beaubourg stands as an even more mammoth version of one of Tinguely’s crazy contraptions, a utopian machine for visitors with its workings on display for all to see.

Still, for all his interest in human interaction, Tinguely loved the thrill of pure machinery. Pit-Stop (1984) is a kinetic sculpture made from the reassembled parts of two Formula One racing cars: Renault RE 40s, driven by Alain Prost and Eddie Cheever during the previous year’s season. Each perfectly engineered carbon-fibre part – nose, wing, cockpit – rotates independently as the whole structure slowly turns. Unlike the tarnished iron and weathered paint of most of the other sculptures, the Renault-yellow surfaces here are shiny new. Projected on the wall beside it is a video – Tinguely’s only video work – of Prost in action. It’s a deliberate puzzle: these cutting-edge machines, hurtling around the track at 200 mph, are the definition of speed – but the sculpture itself, with its stately gyration, is as much about slowness. And another contradiction: Pit-Stop is a spectacular celebration of millimetre-precise assembly, yet the whole thing is fractured into a hundred exploded bits. Tinguely was wild about cars – in later life he owned Ferraris – but you can’t be wild about very fast cars without anticipating the impending accident.

‘Pit-Stop’ (1984).

Accident mattered to him. You assume that machines are predictable: each part operates on the next in a controlled, unchanging sequence, on and on and on. But any engineer knows that perfect manufacture is an impossibility: there have to be tolerances, and a single screw microscopically out of alignment can lead to disaster. In the real world, the elements of a machine don’t move in exactly the same way every time. There is random variation that comes from the way the thing is affected by its environment – a change in temperature, an eddy in the wind – and from the way, say, a drive belt is fitted at a slight angle to the ideal line, or the circumference of a wheel isn’t quite a perfect circle. Tinguely made the most of the aleatory. One of his crowd-pleasing projects was the Méta-Matic, a drawing machine (he made many versions) which the visitor can half-control by choosing a pen to put in its grip, then adjusting the angle and speed. The resulting pictures – inscribed onto a sheet of paper fixed to a tripod – are necessarily all different, each a surprise. For one of their first appearances, at Galerie Iris Clert in Paris in 1959, a prize of 50,000 francs was awarded for the best drawing a visitor could produce.

The clearest demonstration of the effects of chance is Rotozaza No. 2 (1967). An operator hooks empty beer bottles onto a chain attached to cogwheels. The motor slowly pulls the bottles towards the endpoint, where a hammer comes down to smash each in turn. It’s a disassembly line: gradually, shards of green glass pile up on the floor. But what you really notice – and you’d never expect it – is the extreme variation in sound. No crash or tinkle is the same: depending, perhaps, on the sway of the bottle or the moment of impact, the noise can be louder or softer, thumping or high-pitched. Sometimes there’s a waterfall of clattering fragments, sometimes a ringing high note that could come from the top end of a glockenspiel. What you get is concrete music, and naturally Tinguely explored it: among his friends and collaborators was John Cage, for a performance of whose Variations II in 1961 he contributed a motorised sculpture to add to the soundscape.

I wasn’t at the Théâtre de l’Ambassade des États-Unis in Paris on the night of 20 June 1961 – more’s the shame. So much of Tinguely’s work is about the moment: catch it quick or it’s gone, existing only in memory or description. By the time you read this, all the ‘useless machines’ (as he called them) at HangarBicocca will have been dismantled and packed away, perhaps occasionally to pop up again in a city somewhere in Europe. But this was some show, and I’m sorry you missed it.