“Believe in change. Do not hold anything fast,” said Jean Tinguely, a rebellious artist who was anti-museum yet has an entire museum devoted to his pioneering audio-kinetic work, in Basel, Switzerland. For all that, Tinguely is not as well remembered as he should be. Next Thursday, Pirelli HangarBicocca, in Milan—a city that once welcomed one of his most flamboyant creations—opens an exhibition that revisits his singular practice, affirms his contemporary relevance, and launches a year of centenary celebrations.
Swiss by birth (1925), Tinguely roamed the world, an itinerant bricoleur whose movements often depended on chance, just like his Rube Goldberg contraptions—each of which broke new ground. Part theater, part performance, the exhibition at Pirelli’s vast former industrial space is organized so that visitors can likewise roam from one “stage” to the next.
Curators have placed special emphasis on the sound sculptures known as “Meta-Harmonies,” which, they confess, “are rarely shown because they are extremely complex to install, quite fragile, and frankly, a bit crazy to show.”
Tinguely’s quest—after setting aside a painting career that “got stuck,” he said, and was “at a dead end”—was “to break away from established static systems,” wrote Pontus Hultén, a museum director and Tinguely’s lifelong champion. Movement, freedom, surprise, invention—these were the goals of his often enormous constructions made of scrap metal, junkyard finds, clamps, wires, wheels, and gears. While his radical designs took influence from artists such as Vladimir Tatlin, Marcel Duchamp, Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Calder, and Yves Klein, he once fantasized about throwing a grenade at the Mona Lisa.
Leaving abstraction, modernism, and Pop behind, Tinguely proved art itself could have creative powers: permanence, for him, was anathema. Over the years he added inventive homemade sound elements to the whirligigs that sounded like “crabs in a pail,” according to one viewer. The scratchy commotions were often accompanied by pounding noises from mechanical arms. One woman threatened to call the police.
Tinguely was obsessed with the metaphysics of motion. Like his other totems to freedom and anarchy, La Vittoria, a giant phallus installed in front of the Milan Duomo in 1970, which exploded in a swirl of irony and smoke, has special historical resonance for the city. It was inspired by a self-destructing construction he had made in the Museum of Modern Art’s sculpture garden and is here documented by a film and photographs. Other works such as Gismo (with motorized wheels) and Ballet des Pauvres (featuring dancing pots and pans) as well as the Formula One–inspired Pit-Stop (he was mad for cars) are also on view.
Tinguely became a technical wizard, but like his onetime wife Niki de Saint Phalle, with whom he often collaborated even after their separation, he worked himself to exhaustion and ill health. Their relationship, another focus of the exhibition, was “a war of joy helped by our love of play and by the very opposite of our two artistic worlds,” wrote Saint Phalle, adding that Tinguely was “a gift from the Gods” and “a sorcerer.” The seductive pair—curators call them the “Bonnie and Clyde of the Art World”—also relied on a posse of artist and artisan friends whom they drew into their grandiose schemes.
Though he depended on an alchemy of improvisation, subversion, and play—even allowing that some of his best work appeared when he did not quite know what he was doing—Tinguely’s poetic machines fit neatly into our age of the spectacular in art.
“Jean Tinguely” will be on at Pirelli HangarBicocca, in Milan, from October 10, 2024, to February 2, 2025
Patricia Zohn has contributed to numerous publications, including Wallpaper*, Artnet, the Huffington Post, The New York Times, and the Los Angeles Times
