The last week seemed to me a little manic as I realised that I would not have access to a PC / Computer whilst I would be on holiday on the final submission day of 9th January. So, I would need to make a concerted effort to make sure the Icon books project was completed prior to my departure. It was actually quite refreshing to put myself under a little pressure, however on reflection, I could have used a little more time to plan the approach.
My approach has been to find appropriate historical references of Tinguely's views on the current culture of his time. He seemed to be caught up in the whirlwind of life during early days, and arguably, he chose to look at this manic strive for mankind to keep building new structures as the challenge to explore in his work. In essence, I found all his work to shout out "slow down, look around you, live in the present moment and enjoy it"... Well that's my interpretation anyway.
I chose a number of images of Tinguely that I could adapt for insertion into an Icon book, which were as Tinguely in mid-life, Tunguely as a young man, and also with his wife during the crazy 1960sl; and also I was able to draw sketches of him as an older more experienced man. He still has a glint in his eye though, throughout his life.
The book was completed late on Friday 3rd Jan prior to my departure for a week's holiday. I think I may havee gone a little overboard in trying to make it look like an Icon book though, and perhaps I could have spent more time getting a personal look and feel to it, ratherr that the finished Icon Books product.
Nevertheless, I'm very happy as it's turned out, I'm keen to understand what exactly my tutor was looking for too, as in this particular excercise it has been difficult to understand what the criteria is to have worked towards.
The Google document format of the booklet is below, note that it has been produced in a booklet Print Format, so page numbers are ordered accordingly;
Acknowledgements; All references and source materials hereby acknowledged and clearly shown in the reference footnotes on each page of occurrence. This booklet has been produced for the purpose of an academic exercise and should not be used as a definitive reference in it’s own right. The copyright & moral rights of this booklet is asserted by the Author, Graham Hadfield (c) 2014.
PART ONE: THE LIFE OF JEAN TINGUELY - (Bio.)
Jean Tinguely was born on May 22, 1925, in Fribourg, Switzerland. As early as the late 1930s, he began to create hanging sculptures that used motors to propel them into motion. He later called his form of mechanized sculpture “Méta-Malevich.” In 1954, art historian Pontus Hultén coined the term “Méta-mécan- iques” (meta-mechanical devices) by which these works are now known. Tinguely studied at the Allgemeine Gewerbeschule Basel under Julia Ris from 1941 to 1945. There he discovered Kurt Schwitters’s Dadaist work, which would have a great influence on his constructions. Tinguely went through a brief Surrealist painting phase after World War II, but then appears to have abandoned painting in favor of sculpture, although he did continue to create detailed sketches of his work through the planning and preparatory stages. Tinguely’s interest in self-propelled motion was central to his sculptural oeuvre. In 1953 he and Daniel Spoerri, a Romanian dancer and artist, planned a live event called the Autothéqtre (Automatic theater), a performance that would use a mechanical set designed by Tinguely to move colored shapes and objects around a stage without human performers. In the late 1950s, he created a series of automatic drawing machines, the Meta-Matics, which use chalk or markers to create abstract works of art through a mechanized process.1
1 Reference source material from notes from the Tinguely Meuseum, Basel, Switzerland November 2013, See Tinguely Museum website at http://www.tinguely.ch/ Page 1
Tinguely was also one of the artists who signed the manifesto of the Nouveaux Réalistes (New Realists, 1960 - 63) in October 1960. In 1971 Tinguely married artist Niki de Saint-Phalle, with whom he had lived since 1965. During the 1970s, he had embarked on a series of fountain projects, and the two collaborated on Stravinsky Fountain (La Fontaine Stravinsky, 1983), located outside the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, and featuring 16 mechanical birds spouting water. The birds’ simultaneous and unpredictable movements are typical of Tinguely’s art and representative of his central belief in subverting the utilitarian purpose of the machine. Jean Tinguely died on August 30, 1991, in Bern. His wife Nikki continued to work within the genre that she and Jean collaborated upon and continued to exhibit at a number of galleries. In 1996 the Museum Tinguely opened in Basel, Switzerland, in tribute to him.2 in summary, Jean Tinguely was mainly concerned with the art of the Kinetic; “For Static” (the name given to his 1959 Manifesto) itself, and of the concept and realization of the contraption’ as a representa- tion of technology but in a somewhat absurd way (- in the author’s view to illustrate the meaninglessness greed of our human drive for more and more technology), and it’s near imminent obsolescence. His approach had been influenced by his early interest in Dadaism, particularly with the works of Kurt Schwitters & Duchamp and the concept of Anti-art; and the subsequent evolution into surrealism and Salvador Dali’s perhaps inescapable influence of the day (which it could be suggested, influenced Tinguely’s choice to grow a huge mustache), together with, it is postulated by the author, in large part, to his capabilities in the art’ of welding and light engineering. Here to o, it is a credible assertion that a current contemporary bicycle’ artist, Wilf Lunn, sought the choice of his mustache from a combination of Dali and Tinguely.3
2 Reference source notes taken from The Gugenhiem Museum, New York December 2013.
http://www.guggenheim.org/new-york/collections/collection-online/artists/bios/1004 3 (For a humourous look, see http://www.wilflunn.com/wilf_lunn.htm to compare for yourself). Page 2
PART & MANIFESTO TWO: THE WORKS of JEAN TINGUELY
His constructions, often witty, humorous, which combine and ironic, junk owing sculpture a great with deal kinetics, to the are Dadaist legacy of anti-art. Tinguely was also a pioneer in the field of art that engenders social engagement. His sculptures often relied on the spectator to push a button, pull a lever, or somehow cause them to start moving. He often incorporated not just what appeared to be “junk” metal, but also the tools with which he worked the iron and materials with. This can be most clearly seen in one of his artworks currently held within the Tate Modern, London, called “Debri-Collage”. This moving sculpture, powered by a motor, is made up from a hammer, a screwdriver, a Hack-saw, a file, an awl / drill, a pair of tin snips, and a plumbers wrench set. The components are either welded together or connected via pivotal bolts to form an intriguing sculpture which seems to move with an irregular beat, The combined tools’ movements appear purposeful, but are pointless in functional terms. Tinguely perhaps had in mind the obsolescence created by mechanical progress. In addition to the colourful handles and movement of the tools which provide the aesthetic, there is also sound.. 1 This piece was produced in 1970, against a background of the ending of “The Hippy” era, when art was fully accepted as “anything goes”. The contemporary culture at that time was in full swing with that of the rights for freedom, the flower-power’ movement and continued exploration of new experiences like transcendental meditation (incl. sex, drugs and rock and roll), against an architectural post war explosion of the building of many many modernist’ edifices (like town shopping centres, bus terminals, huge monolithic living dwellings and the like. It seems apparent that Tinguely had almost predicted all of this, and it’s later demise, some 11 years earlier and declared a view of it within his manifesto “For Static”.
1 Reference source notes from; The Tate Modern, London. December 2013.
See; http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/tinguely-debricollage-t03822 Page 3
TInguely’s Manifesto - “For Static” (1959);
Everything moves continuously. Imobility does not exist. Don’t be subject to the influence of out-of-date concepts. Forget hours, seconds and minutes.Accept instability. Live in Time. Be static - with movement. For a static of the present movement. resist the anxious wish to fix the instantaneous, to kill that which is living. Stop existing on ‘values’ which can only break down. Be free, live. Stop painting time. Stop evoking movements and gesture. Stop building cathedrals and pyramids which are doomed to fall into ruin. Live the present, live once more in TIme and by Time - for a wonderful and absolute reality. (2)
In order to understand this manifesto, the best explanation is perhaps taken from a discussion by the man himself, on what was one of his most famous works “Homage to New York, 1960”. - The sculpture was built for the Museum of Modern Art, New York, included over 300 bycy- cle wheels, and was designed to self-destruct in front of a live audience of spectators. It notoriously only partially completed its task its flames were put out by an over zealous member of the fire department. (The following extract is from an interview in 1962, some two years after completion of “Homage to New York” 1960);
“Homage to New York was for me an attempt to liberate myself from the material. The best way to do this was to make it self-destroying, like Chinese fireworks, so that during the event – and naturally it became an event, a spectacle – all these materials, even the smoke, became part of the sculpture. I say Chinese fireworks because that is the best example in classic art. What was important for me was that afterwards there would be nothing, except what remained in the minds of a few people, continuing to exist in the form of an idea. This was for me very liberating. The next day they just swept up and every trace was gone. It was just a marvellous thing people talked about Why liberating? Because I was totally engaged and yet totally free. It gave me every opportunity and left me in a semi-trance, in a sort of dream. It was for me the ideal solution, it was the form of art that seemed the most perfect I have yet found. It could be stripped of all significance, or it could be interpreted in a symbolic sense; it could be taken as a spectacle, a rape, a joke, a gadget – anything you wish. It wasn’t the idea of a machine committing suicide that fascinated me primarily; it was the freedom that belonged to its ephemeral aspect – ephemeral like life, you understand. It was the opposite of the cathedrals, the opposite of the skyscrapers around us, the opposite of the museum idea, the opposite of the petrification in a fixed work of art. It would be beautiful if every work of art were like that. Perhaps they are, ..time-worn; it is truly more than the artist made it, and we have certainly accepted this modification." 3
2 Manifesto M67, Jean Tinguely, For Static 1959. Page 336,
100 Artists’ Manifestos, By Alex Danchev. 2011. Penguin Books Ltd, London Page 4
Tinguely participated in several important exhibitions, an early one was devoted to Kinetic art, Le mouvement (Movement, 1955), Galerie Denise René, Paris. This important exhibition also featured artists Alexander Calder, Jesús Rafael Soto, and Victor Vasarely, among others. Additional exhibitions/performances include Vitesse pure et stabilité monochrome (Pure velocity and monochromatic stability, 1958) with Yves Klein at the Galerie Iris Clert, Paris; Cyclo-Matic-Evening (1959), a “happening” at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Study for an End of the World, no. 1 (Étude pour une fin du monde No. 1, 1961), at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; and Study for an End of the World, no. 2 (Étude pour une fin du monde No. 2, 1962), the successful self-destruction of a work in a desert near Las Vegas. Tinguely went on to influence many other artists, particlarly in the re-use of discarded material, junk metal, and that old favourite of his, bicycle wheels. (see earlier refeer- ence to Wilf Lunn!). Other notable retrospectives were at the Tate Gallery, London (1982), and Palazzo Grassi, Venice (1987).4 He died on August 30, 1991, in Bern, Switzerland, in his country of birth.
3 Extract from an unpublished interview conducted by Calvin Tomkins for a 1962 article for The New Yorker (courte- sy Calvin Tomkins Papers, II.A.5. The Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York), Published at http://www.tate.org. uk/context-comment/articles/homage-destruction
