Jean Tinguely

Jean Tinguely (born May 22, 1925, Fribourg, Switz.—died Aug. 30, 1991, Bern) was a Swiss sculptor and experimental artist, noted for his machinelike kinetic sculptures that destroyed themselves in the course of their operation.

Tinguely studied painting and sculpture at the Basel School of Fine Arts from 1941 to 1945, showing an early interest in movement as an artistic medium in his work there. Growing dissatisfied with the staid artistic climate of Basel, Tinguely moved to Paris in 1953. He then began to construct his first truly sophisticated kinetic sculptures, which he termed métaméchaniques, or metamechanicals. These were robotlike contraptions constructed of wire and sheet metal, the constituent parts of which moved or spun at varying speeds. Further innovations on Tinguely’s part in the mid- and late 1950s led to a series of sculptures entitled “Machines à peindre” (“Painting Machines”); these robotlike machines continuously painted pictures of abstract patterns to the accompaniment of self-produced sounds and noxious odours. The 8-foot-long “painting machine” that Tinguely set up at the first Paris Biennale in 1959 produced some 40,000 different paintings for exhibition visitors who inserted a coin in its slot.

Tinguely was meanwhile becoming obsessed with the concept of destruction as a means of achieving the “dematerialization” of his works of art. In 1960 he created a sensation with his first large self-destroying sculpture, the 27-foot-high metamatic entitled “Homage to New York,” whose public suicide he demonstrated at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. The event was a fiasco, with the complicated assemblage of motors and wheels failing to operate (i.e., destroy itself) properly; it had to be dispatched by city firemen with axes after having started a fire. But Tinguely’s next two self-destroying machines, entitled “Study for an End of the World,” performed more successfully, detonating themselves with considerable amounts of explosives. In the 1960s and ’70s he went on to create less aggressive and more playful kinetic constructions that combined aspects of the machine with those of found objects, or junk.

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Tinguely’s art implicitly held a wealth of ironic social commentary. His whimsical machines deftly satirized the mindless overproduction of material goods typical of advanced industrial society. They expressed his conviction that the essence of both life and art consists of continuous change, movement, and instability, and they also served to refute the static art of the past. Tinguely was an innovator in his appreciation of the beauty inherent in machines and junk and in his use of spectator participation; in many of the events he engineered, spectators were able to partially control or determine the movements of his machines.