Beyond Purposelessness
In the mid-1960s, Tinguely began creatively collaborating with the woman who eventually became his wife, the sculptor Niki de Saint Phall. Like Tinguely, Saint Phall made highly conceptual work, though less abstract and more socially concerned. As Tinguely became inspired by Saint Phall, his work took on subtly different characteristics. He made a series of fountains that were decidedly functional, marking a conceptual departure from the purposelessness of his previous works. His most famous fountain, a collaboration with Saint Phall, is the Stravinsky Fountain outside of the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
In the 1980s, Tinguely made several deeply personal, emotional works. He created artworks named in honor of the philosophers that had influenced him. After a deadly fire at a neighbor’s farm, he somberly collected remnants from the aftermath, assembling them into a memorial installation titled Mengele — Totentanz, after a name imprinted on one of the corn processing machines destroyed in the blaze. One of Tinguely’s most touching memorials is The Final Collaboration with Yves Klein, which IdeelArt wrote about when the piece was exhibited at the Venet Foundation in September 2015.
Though these memorial installations and fountains contained the same mechanical nature and abstract visual language as his earlier works, their titles, subject matter and function greatly affect the viewer’s perception of meaning, making them far less abstract. As abstraction gave way to meaning and purposelessness gave way to use, Tinguely didn’t abandon his big idea; he fulfilled it. He redefined the role of machines in the culture. He defined them as aesthetic tools that help people perform what may be their own most important task, communicating to each other the content of their hearts.
Education in Basel
Tinguely’s first job after leaving school was as a decorator for the Globus Department Store in 1941, followed by an apprenticeship with the decorator Joos Hunter, who helped him gain a place at Basel’s School of Arts and Crafts. It was here that he discovered Dada and was particularly influenced by the art of Kurt Schwitters.
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At art school Tinguely met the Swiss artist Eva Aeppli and the pair married in 1951. They set up their first home in a shabby house in a run-down area of Basel, and Tinguely began creating his first wire sculptures. To make ends meet he found work as a freelance decorator.
Homage to New York
Tinguely was a true showman as he traveled the world staging performances and events in art galleries. One of the most famous was his Homage to New York at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1960. Designed to self-destruct in front of a live audience, the robotic machine only partially performed the task before catching on fire. The NYFD was summoned to put out the flames.
During the 1970s, Tinguely incorporated elements of music into his works. In his Meta-Harmonie series, the constructions played their own musical instruments. In 1987, he held a large retrospective in Venice’s Palazzo Grassi. He brought 94 machine sculptures together into one large group.
One of his most famous works is the Luminator (1991) which was on loan to the EuroAirport Basel-Mulhouse until 2014. His sculpture Narva (1961) constructed of metal parts sold at Christie’s, London in 2006 for £198,400.
5.
Ярким примером данного направления станут работы уже упомянутого художника и скульптора Жана Тэнгли — автора механизмов, собранных из всевозможного промышленного утиля.
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| Жан Тэнгли. Плавающая водная скульптура. 1980. Фонтан. Музей Тэнгли, Базель. |
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Жан Тэнгли называли «создателем мечтающих машин», «мастером поломок, сомнения и случайности». Движение помогло Тэнгли преодолеть проблему выбора и позволило сделать жизнь произведения бесконечной, как и процесс работы над ним. Искусство Тэнгли основано на движении колеса, рождающего бесконечное повторение и изменение, и это два ключевых принципа его работ, которые почти невозможно увидеть в одинаковом виде.
Однако новаторство Тэнгли связано не с самим процессом движения — оно использовалось и до него, в частности Александром Колдером, Марселем Дюшаном и Ман Рэем, — а с тем, что ему удалось удачно соединить кинетизм, готовые объекты массового производства, звук, саморазрушение и зрелищность хеппенига для создания своих «мечтающих машин».
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| Жан Тэнгли. Фатаморгана (Метагармония IV). 1985. Железный каркас, деревянные колеса, пластиковые элементы, ударные инструменты, электрические лампы, электрические моторы |
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Jean Tinguely Museum, Basel Switzerland
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| Жан Тэнгли. Кинетический фонтан. Базель. |
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| Жан Тэнгли и Ники де Сен-Фалль. Фонтан Стравинского. Париж. |
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Фонтан Стравинского считается одной из интересных и необычных достопримечательностей Парижа. Он представляет собой большой прямоугольный бассейн глубиной всего 35 см, наполненный водой. По его поверхности передвигаются 16 сказочных персонажей: скрипичный ключ, лягушка, шляпа клоуна, русалка, слон, спираль и другие.
Необычный фонтан на площади Стравинского появился в 1982–1983 гг. Идея создания авангардного фонтана принадлежит Пьеру Булезу, французскому композитору и дирижеру, основателю расположенного в Центре Помпиду Института исследования и координации акустики и музыки (IRCAM). Причудливая инсталляция должна была оживить скучное и неинтересное пространство перед Центром Помпиду.
Авторами этого необычного фонтана стали швейцарский скульптор Жан Тенгли и его супруга, французская художница Ники де Сен-Фалль. Необычный монумент посвящен композитору Игорю Стравинскому, который значительную часть жизни провел во Франции и был награжден орденом Почетного Легиона.
Кинетические скульптуры необычных форм двигаются под его музыку из балетов «Весна священная» и «Жар-Птица», как будто разыгрывая сценки из произведений прославленного композитора. Первоначальный план предусматривал, что фонтан будет украшен лишь фантастическими машинами швейцарца, выкрашенными в черный цвет. Однако Тэнгли показалось, что такая композиция будет слишком мрачной, и предложил оживить площадь яркими фигурами в стиле поп-арт. Так появились скульптуры из полиэстера художницей Ники де Сен-Фалль. Черные механизмы, сочетающие шестеренки и колеса со шлангами, цикл за циклом повторяют замысловатые движения. Торчащие из воды огромные яркие фигуры время от времени выпускают струйки воды. Смотреть на все это увлекательно и забавно. Все скульптуры выполнены из пластика и легких металлов.
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| Жан Тэнгли. Автопортрет. |
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Later Years
After suffering a series of health issues following his chronic smoking, Tinguely became increasingly preoccupied with death, and brought animal materials including bones and skulls into his constructions.
In 1987, he held a huge retrospective at the Palazzo Grassi in Venice, which brought together a staggering 94 machine sculptures into one large group, celebrating the vast depth and breadth of his artistic legacy.
He was so popular, that following his death in 1991, more than 10,000 people lined the streets of Fribourg in Switzerland, where he was buried, to pay their final respects.
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Career
In 1953, together with Daniel Spoerri, a Romanian dancer and artist, Jean Tinguely planned a live event, called the Autothéâtre (Automatic theater), a performance, that would use a mechanical set, designed by Tinguely to move coloured shapes and objects around a stage without human performers. In the late 1950s, Jean created a series of automatic drawing machines, called «the Meta-Matics», which use chalk or markers to create abstract works of art through a mechanized process. His constructions, which combine junk sculpture with kinetics, are often witty, humorous and ironic, owing a great deal to the Dadaist legacy of anti-art.In 1960, Tinguely carried out his famous «Homage to New York», in which his site-specific sculpture was intended to self-destruct in the courtyard of the Museum of Modern Art. Even though the sculpture did not completely destroy itself, it the attention of American audiences and led to collaboration with Robert Rauschenberg on his Experiments in Art Technology project.On October 27, 1960, together with Yves Klein and other artists, Tinguely signed the manifesto of a new group, who called themselves the Nouveaux Réalistes. Tinguely marked the group’s tenth anniversary by staging his major auto-destructive performance, a work called «La Vittoria», in front of Milan Cathedral in 1970.During the 1970s, Jean started to work on a series of fountain projects. Some time later, in 1981, he began to incorporate animal skulls into his art. His first machines to feature built-in bones and skulls were shown at the exhibition, organised by the automotive group Renault in June 1981. Despite his assertion, that the skulls lent emphasis to the burlesque element, they are also symbolic of his own growing preoccupation with death. This awareness of his own mortality is also evident in works like Inferno, which Eberhard Kornfeld exhibited at his gallery in Bern in late 1984. The skulls, like Tinguely’s ever more extensive use of consumer products and neon tubes, became a defining characteristic of his late works of the 1980s.Jean’s passion for Formula 1 car racing is reflected in some of his key works of this period. His «Fontaine Jo Siffert», erected in Fribourg in the spring of 1984, is a tribute to the racing driver, Jo Siffert, who died on the racetrack. In 1988, Tinguely combined racing car components and bones to build the work «Lola T 180 – Mémorial pour Joakim B.», created in memory of his friend, the racing driver Joakim Bonnier, who was killed in 1972.There was a posthumous exhibit of his work in 1996 at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, followed later that year by the inauguration of the Jean Tinguely Museum in Basel, Switzerland.Also, Jean Tinguely took part in different important exhibitions, including the exhibition «Le mouvement», devoted to Kinetic art, at the Galerie Denise René in Paris.
Homage to New York
Jean Tinguely is perhaps best known for his 23-foot high and 27-foot long conceptual piece Homage to New York that was supposed to destroy itself in the garden of The Museum of Modern Art. On March 17th, 1960, several hundred of invited people attended the event which was unsuccessful as the complex assemblage of motors and wheels failed to operate properly and only partially completed its task—its flames were put out by the fire department. The machine paid homage to NYC’s ability to constantly renew itself. Tinguely’s next two self-destroying pieces entitled Study for an End of the World detonated more successfully.
Master of Art in Movement
The artist, who died on August 30, 1991, in Bern, was one of the icons of kinetic art widely recognized for his witty, humorous, and ironic moving sculptures of waste material that work as machines but don’t have any useful purpose. Since his first one-man show in Switzerland in 1962, his work has been included in numerous important exhibition throughout Europe, the United States and beyond. In 1996, the Museum Tinguely opened in Basel. His unpredictable mechanized sculpture-machines that often included music recordings and performances left an indelible trace on the 20th-century art.
Featured image: Jean Tinguely — portrait, 1988, photo by Vera Isler
Life with Niki de Saint Phalle
In 1960 Tinguely and his first wife separated and he began a new relationship with the artist Niki de Saint Phalle, who he later married. Following this period of personal change Tinguely’s practice shifted as he began painting his constructions, first black, and later introducing elements of colour.
He also began regularly collaborating Saint Phalle and other artists, producing a series of vast, labyrinthine constructions. In the 1970s, Tinguely brought elements of music into his huge constructions, as seen in his Meta-Harmonie series, which played their own musical instruments. He also began living between Switzerland and France, while continuing to develop the self-destructive strand of his practice.
Meta-Matics — Tinguely’s Painting Machines
Tinguely was one of the pioneers in the field of art that engenders social engagement. In the late 1950s, he designed a series of automatic drawing machines, the Meta-Matics, which use chalk or markers to make abstract drawings through a mechanized process. These were portable machines with drawing arms that allowed the spectator to produce abstract works only by pushing the button. The “painting machines” were exhibited at the Biennale de Paris in 1959, resulting in almost 40,000 paintings produced by visitors in two weeks. However, not all of the Meta-matics functioned properly, and Tinguely destroyed some of them. He then began to incorporate electric motors into his works, taking as his models Marcel Duchamp’s Roto Reliefs.
Stravinsky Fountain
In 1955, Tinguely met French sculptor, painter, and filmmaker Niki de Saint Phalle whom he befriended before they decide to live together in the early 1960s. During the 1970s, he had embarked on a series of fountain projects, and, in collaboration with Niki, who became his wife in the meantime, created the notorious Stravinsky Fountain (La Fontaine Stravinsky, 1983) — a whimsical public fountain ornamented with sixteen works of sculpture, moving and spraying water, representing the works of the famous Russian composer, pianist, and conductor Igor Stravinsky. Located between the Centre Pompidou and the Church of Saint-Merri, it is one of the most photographed Parisian fountains.
Who Inspired Jean Tinguely?
Several artists and creatives inspired the works of Jean Tinguely beginning with decorator Joos Hunter whom he apprenticed for. Hunter helped him gain entrance to Basel’s School of Arts and Crafts. Here he discovered Dada and was influenced by the works of Kurt Schwitters.
The art movement known as Dada was an art movement that began during Zurich’s first world war. The art form was a negative reaction to the revulsion of war. The work of Dada artists through art, poetry, and performances was often satirical in nature. The goal of Dada artists was to question a society that could start a war and prolong it. They were anti-war, anti-bourgeois, and had political views that aligned with the radical left.
Writer Hugo Ball was the founder of Dada. He opened a satirical nightclub in Zurich in 1916. The movement became international and later formed the basis for surrealism in Paris.
Dada artists who influenced Tinguely were Otto Piene and his ZERO group, Martial Raysse, Yves Klein, and Niki de Saint Phalle who he later married and collaborated for the rest of his career.
Adding to the inspiration of these creatives was Tinguely’s innate interest in self-propelled motion and other artists who were developing art using kinetics and robotics,
дальнейшее чтение
- Музей Тингели в Базель
- Глава о Tinguely в Calvin Tomkins ‘ Невеста и ее холостяки.
- КГ. Pontus Hultén: Жан Тингели «Мета». Лондон: Thames & Hudson, 1975 (оригинальная немецкая версия, Франкфурт / М .: Ullstein, 1972)
- Г. Бишофсбергер: Резюме каталога, 3 тома. Базель, 1982.
- Маргит Ханлозер-Ингольд: Пандамониум — Жан Тингели. Берн: Бентели, 1988 (скорее агиографический, но с интересными личными воспоминаниями и справочными материалами)
- Хайди Э. Виоланд: Кинетическое искусство Жана Тингели или миф эпохи машин. Дисс, Нью-Йоркский университет, 1990 г.
- Музей Жана Тингели (ред.): Die Sammlung. (Сборник) Берн: Бентели, 1996 (включая интересный биографический отчет Маргит Ханлозер: «Жан Тингели унд умирает Швейцария»)
- Музей Жана Тингели (ред.): Жан ле Жен. Базель: Бентели, 2002 (включая биографический текст Джоселин Дейнс о ранней любви Тингли к материалам и машинам, его пацифизме и католицизму, стр. 23-65).
What Materials Does Jean Tinguely Use?
Tinguely created most of his madcap motorized art from recycled materials he found. This included tin cans, wheels, and other scrap metal. The robotics he created could move on their own, make music, encourage spectator participation, or self-destruct. He attached wire wheels to pieces of flat cardboard painted black on one side and white on the other. He intertwined them with stick-straight objects to form an interlocking system. He balanced the assemblage above an iron tripod with legs that were linear to the straight objects.
Tinguely became obsessed with death after suffering health related to chronic smoking. He began incorporating animal materials such as bones and skulls into his art.
Начало в Швейцарии
Жан Тингели, портрет Лотара Воллеха .
Жан родился во Фрибурге ; его отец Чарльз Тингели — рабочий. Ее мать, Жанна-Луиза Руффье (1899-1980), родилась в многодетной крестьянской семье. В 1928 году семья переехала в Базель . Жан дома говорит по-французски, в школе — по-немецки.
Его биография очень рано свидетельствует о напряженных отношениях между ним и его родителями. Противодействуя авторитарной семейной атмосфере, Жан бросает школу и становится прилежным читателем лорда Байрона, Александра Великого, Наполеона и находит убежище в лесу, где создает свою первую метамеханику :
В 1939 году он попытался добраться поездом в Албанию , чтобы поддержать албанский народ в его сопротивлении агрессии фашистской Италии . Ему тогда было четырнадцать лет. Он был арестован полицией на швейцарской границе и отправлен обратно домой.
В 2 мая 1941 г.он начал ученичество декоратора в универмаге « Глобус » под руководством Э. Тео Вагнера. В25 августа 1943 г.Джин увольняют из «Глобуса» с немедленным вступлением в силу за недисциплинированность и отсутствие пунктуальности. С сентября принят в ученики на декоратора Joos Hutter
Он не регулярно посещает занятия в Kunstgewerbeschule («школа прикладных искусств»), но особенно следит за занятиями Джулии Рис, которая привлекает его внимание к движению как средству художественного выражения.
После войны, Джон живет в Burghof, строительство планируется к сносу, недалеко от Музея изобразительных искусств, в п O 2 Санкт — Альбан Vorstadt. Базель становится местом встречи политических беженцев: профсоюзные деятели, анархисты, бывшие коммунисты встречаются у книготорговца Генриха Кёхлина. Тингли принимает участие в дискуссиях и, таким образом, получает политическое образование. Он занимается версткой книг для Кехлина, его особенно интересуют Ив Танги , Сальвадор Дали , Жоан Миро , Пауль Клее и все работы Баухауза . В то же время он подружился с Даниэлем Спёрри , бывшим танцором балета Berner Staatsoper, с которым он разделял тот же вкус к анти-общепринятым средствам выражения. В 1951 году он женился на Еве Эппли , студентке Школы прикладных искусств в Базеле, где у него была дочь Мириам, родившаяся двумя годами позже, в 1953 году.
Summary of Jean Tinguely
Jean Tinguely first began creating assemblages composed of found-objects, but soon thereafter, intrigued by the current debate regarding the effect of mechanization and industrial innovation on modern society, he completely altered these static works by putting them into motion. Tinguely was intrigued by the effect of these moving constructions on the spectator and devoted the rest of his career to its exploration. The resultant oeuvre, on both a small and large scale, in works that generated corollary works of art and those that self-destructed, instigated spectator reaction and forever challenged the concept of a static experience of viewing art.
Detached Elements
Tinguely’s earliest mechanical sculptures were made in the 1950s, and were simple kinetic reliefs designed to hang on the wall. They were made from thin wires and gears that rotated. Their simplicity reflected Tinguely’s effort to deconstruct the building blocks of machines. Sketches he was making at the time, some of which are in the possession of Museum Tinguely in Basel, Switzerland, reveal a glimpse of his mental process. He was isolating mechanical elements and abstracting them, in a way similar to abstract painters isolating formal elements such as color, line, surface, plane and form.
A sketch by Jean Tinguely of mechanical functions and movements, c.1954. Jean Tinguely
He then added elements to his reliefs that complicated their meaning and functionality. In a series of works he called Élément Détaché, he cut out abstract shapes from Pavatex, an industrial wood fiber product, then painted the shapes and attached one to the center of each of the work’s gears. When the work of art was moved, touched or interacted with in any way it became kinetic as the abstract painted shapes moved about on the gears.
Jean Tinguely — Élément Détaché I, Relief méta-mécanique, 1954, 81 x 131 x 35.5 cm. Jean Tinguely
Ранний период жизни
Альберто Джакометти на 31- й Венецианской биеннале в 1962 году, фото Паоло Монти (Fondo Paolo Monti, BEIC )
Джакометти родился в Боргоново , Швейцария , был старшим из четырех детей Джованни Джакометти , известного художника-постимпрессиониста , и Аннетты Джакометти-Стампа. Он был потомком протестантских беженцев, спасавшихся от инквизиции . Имея художественное образование, он с раннего возраста интересовался искусством. Альберто учился в Женевской школе изящных искусств . Его братья Диего (1902–1985) и Бруно (1907–2012) также стали художниками и архитекторами. Кроме того, его двоюродный брат Заккария Джакометти , впоследствии профессор конституционного права и ректор Цюрихского университета , вырос вместе с ними, осиротев в возрасте 12 лет в 1905 году.
Jean Tinguely and Dadaism
Born in 1925, in Fribourg, a city in Switzerland, Jean Tinguely grew up in Basel where he carried out an apprenticeship as a shop-window decorator in a department store during his teens. Aged fifteen, he enrolled in evening classes at the Art School (Kunstschule) where he studied under the tutelage of Julia Ris, who introduced Tinguely to the Dadaist collages of Kurt Schwitters, a German artist most commonly associated with the Dada movement. Schwitters’ Dadaist collages made of discarded ticket stubs, pieces of old newspapers and magazines, buttons, gears, and other objects assembled into compositions made a deep impression on Tinguely’s constructions. After World War II, he began painting in a Surrealist manner, but he soon abandoned painting to concentrate on sculpture made of junk.
Sculpture by Jean Tinguely
Tinguely and his first wife, Swiss painter and sculptor Eva Aeppli, relocated to France in the early 1950s, where he became involved with the Parisian avant-garde movement, meeting artists such as Yves Klein, Arman, and Daniel Spoerri. They were part of the Nouveaux Réalisme (New Realism) which can be seen as a European counterpart to pop art. Subsequently, Tinguely began creating his most famous works — sculptural machines, known as metamechanics, which incorporated a vast array of materials, including wood, metal, fabric, gears, musical instruments, and found objects into moving or static constructions. Highly skeptical about the potential of technology to improve human life, he used his pieces made of industrial machinery to express an anarchic, satirical attitude to machines and industrial development. Some of his pieces were designed to self-destruct and others were made in a way that predetermined a malfunction, culminating in an unpredictable finale.
Accomplishments
- Tinguely updated the Dada practice of creating sculptural assemblage composed of found-objects, most often scrap metal that might easily have been considered junk, by actually mechanizing them. The revolutionary step of putting a work of art into motion would become known as Kinetic Art.
- Also following the lead of Dada artists, who used various means to make fun of society, Tinguely’s mechanized creations were intended to mock the «improvements» of the industrial revolution and modern reliance on technology.
- Tinguely challenged the assumption of the artist’s monopoly on creation with his metamatics, mechanized assemblages fitted with a drawing stylus chosen by any given spectator. The works of art that resulted were given significance on their own, separate to that of the original construction.
- The self-destructing assemblages took the concepts explored in his earlier mechanized sculptures to a new level. Providing an actual spectacle for the viewers, a one-off experience with a defined beginning and end intended not only to be seen but in addition, to evoke their reaction, these assemblages illustrate Tinguely branching out into more interactive art whose effect simulates a performance.