Kinetic Rebel: The Whirring, Clanging World of Artist Jean Tinguely

It whirs, it clangs, it sighs and scrapes. Of course it does! This is “Jean Tinguely” at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, showcasing 40 works by the Swiss artist who transformed mechanical parts, toys, skulls, and other detritus into monumental kinetic sculptures that influenced generations of artists. It marks his first major exhibition in decades (the last was at Palazzo Grassi in 1987) and arrives just ahead of his centenary next year.

Tinguely’s spectre looms large. It’s hard to look at Theo the dog—a wooden articulated toy, activated by a metal skewer stuck into its behind—without thinking of Paul McCarthy; or the clusters of glowing lamps and steel bars without Jason Rhoades coming to mind. Michael Landy’s debt was revealed in the credit card-crunching machine he created for Frieze London in 2011. (The British artist later staged his own show at the Tinguely Museum in Basel in 2016, as an ultimate homage).

“Jean Tinguely” runs through February 2, 2025. Here at the HangarBicocca, the curators have taken Tinguely at his word, and used the 5,000 square meters of its vast Navate gallery, to evoke the “anti-museum” of which the artist spoke frequently before his death in 1991, aged just 66. He described art as “a form of revolt, total and complete”, and that included its display.  In 1988, he had taken over a huge abandoned glass factory between Fribourg and Lausanne, Switzerland, and intended to turn it into the invitation-only Torpedo Institut, filled with his animated machines and explosive performances.

Machines in Motion

Alas, that never came to pass, but homage is paid here in in Milan, where there is nothing on show but the work itself. (Interpretation is provided by a map and a booklet that visitors can read or not.) In the dark industrial space, most works sit on the concrete floor, and those that can, still whir and clang, suddenly springing to life every 20 minutes or so.

“It’s more like a ballet between the pieces,” says Lucia Pesapane, one of the curators, who had already spent years working on a Tinguely exhibition for the Grand Palais, which ended up never happening. “Once Vicente Todoli [the artistic director of HangarBicocca] agreed to bring it here, it changed completely,” she says. “In Milan, we could use the quality of the space to evoke the spirit of Tinguely. It’s not a proper retrospective.”

The fruits of her extensive labors are very clear, though. These are 40 exceptional works and include loans from several private collectors including Larry Warsh in New York and Esther Grether in Switzerland.

The scene is set with two key works— (1981) and (1986). Both are multi-colored assembly lines of wheels, spokes, work benches, pistons and random parts that create their own as they grind into motion. The critic Pierre Restany and artist Yves Klein had established the Nouveau Realiste movement in Paris in 1960, advocating “a poetic recycling of urban, industrial and advertising reality”. Tinguely was one of its finest exponents, as he aimed to rearrange the micro parts of the industrial world into machines that developed their own self-expression, beyond human control.

He also believed in taking art out of the gallery: a film running on a black and white TV screen shows Tinguely and friends pushing one of his contraptions, through the streets of Paris in 1960. It is as much carnival as performance art. The players in the accompanying brass band are dressed in carefully curated stripey tops and bowler hats, and cute blonde girls in big white dresses are leading the way. Tinguely, for all his political critique of the postwar, machine-led, sociologically fragile world, simply can’t supress his showman tendencies.

Meanwhile, a drawing machine ( 1959) fully develops the Duchampian idea of the audience completing the artwork and the concept of chance.

At the behest of the visitor, the machine is set in motion and colored pens, held in metal grips, begin to make lines on a sheet of white paper. A white wall behind it is designated for display of the final “artworks”, though on the day of my visit, most participants had opted to take theirs home.

Not all work sits comfortably in the present day. A suspended ensemble, called appears to represent womanhood as a distressed and chaotic state, as dishevelled clothing and domestic objects dance chaotically from the ceiling. Its debt is, of course, to Dada, another anti-art movement that railed against aesthetics, logic, and the bourgeoisie and that Tinguley discovered while at art school in Basel. The onomatopoeic nonsense names of works like (one here, no.2 from 1967, is a hectic assemblage of bicycle chains, plexiglass and rubber belts that grinds up green glass bottles) reflects that heritage too.

Perhaps with the passing of time it is hard to see the freshness that would have emanated from the work in its day. Now the idea of the machine—dancing or not—is one of increasing obsolescence, rather than something at odds with human intellect. It is the digital world that threatens us more. And a certain machismo hangs in the air – what is it with all the priapic, outsized drill bits? It really is hard to see Tinguely as a feminist, even if —the 1970 performance work in Milan, where a 10m high phallus spurted out fireworks from its tip for half an hour—is proclaimed as “a feminist public statement” in a catalogue essay.

Tinguely loved Formula 1and drove a Ferrari. A particularly unsettling work is (1984) —an exploded Renault RE40 driven by Eddie Cheever and Alain Prost that looks to me like a veneration of the fatal nature of motor sports. The work was actually sponsored by Renault itself. Times have changed.

Let There Be Light

Still, the artist wasn’t impervious to the mortal coil. With his health in poor shape by the mid-1980s, his world—and this exhibition—darkens. Movement is replaced by glowing lights; great philosophers are conjured up in a baroque series of portraits, made of salvaged metal, feathers and fur.

The exhibition finishes with a literally dazzling work created by Tinguely and his sometime partner in life, and eternal partner in art, his wife Niki de Saint Phalle.

Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely were married from 1971 until Tinguely’s passing in 1991. Their enduring and unconventional relationship blended personal and professional bonds, marked by mutual respect and numerous collaborations. It was de Saint Phalle who delivered the Tinguely Museum in Basel after his death. He bequested her his entire estate.

In a massive mushroom sculpture, the couple are seen intertwined, her fecund and him aroused, covered with mirrored mosaic in which the viewer becomes equally absorbed. It’s a testament to creativity and collaboration. It’s a good way to end.

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com