Page 56 - Studio International - February 1965

Tinguely is he a sculptor?

1 Paris Commentary by Michel Conil Lacoste
' matics' said to us the other day in front of his latest
machines of war, presented at the gallery of Alexandre
lolas. 'All that which is movement remains. It is to this
which my sculptures in movement respond: the
JI movement in stability.·
Fair enough. But. one says, the machines break down.
/ff"· maker. 'for in my case all that is needed is to rejoin two
·Break down? One can always repair them,' replies the
wires. My sculpture is unbreakable because it moves.·
This idea has always been at the basis of the works
of this super jack-of-all-trades, where, however. the
engineer has never stifled the artist. He is not a sculptor
only because he works in three dimensions. The most
unpleasant. the most fanciful of his meta-mecaniques
assemblages, is always at the same time a sculpture, but
in repose: see his pedestals, his cradles. his tripods
bought by the case, or even that kind of petrified lassoo
which constructs in space the bizarre rotating wheel
of Suzuki 1 963.
Regard also. even earlier, the extravagant and
aggressive excrescences which ornamented the extra­
ordinary machine for drawing in colour which welcomed
,he visitors to the first Paris Biennale of 1959. Under the
peristyle of the Musee d'Art Moderne, this impudent
robot executed 40.000 different paintings by jumping
in all directions and by constantly modifying its profile.
This Metamatic No. 9 is not only ·automotive, fragrant
and deep-toned': if I remember correctly, it inflated, also
automatically, all in working, a kind of foil which on
the opening day exploded in the face of an illustrious
official (otherwise sympathetic). while its train of paper,
spread to the rhythm of its production, rose in the sky
of Chaillot like the scarf of Isadora Duncan.
Humour has always beflagged the work of Tinguely.
The Moulin a priere of 1953, which one found again
with pleasure at the Galerie lolas, makes one think. on
reflection, of the 'Big Wheel' of fairgrounds and The
Third Man of Orson Welles. But it is also spider-like
armature, a Klee in movement. Tinguely at this time
worked from nothing to begin with. with steel wire, a
vice and some little irregular motors. These slender
machines, of which the wheels skidded and shrank in
_ .. . .. .., competition, represented a defiance of the machines of
watch-making: a sacrilege for a Swiss. With them,
Tinguely inaugurated a kind of mechanical exploitation
of accident and soon, according to his description 'an
organization of the breakdown·. Their revolution was
punctuated by gratings and unwinding, which the
visitors to the former Galerie Arnaud. where in 1954
were exhibited a half-dozen of these automatic
abstracts. have still in the ears. To these were soon added
If you protest. before the machines of Tinguely, that the clatter of workshops, the devastating explosions of
'this is not sculpture' he will reply to you citing the case great schemes and of ulterior 'happenings': ululations
of the superb monolith of marble in which one of his of blue monochrome discs by Yves Klein animated by
sculptor friends-a true one-believed he had created Tinguely at Iris Clert's in 1958 and of which the
an eternal form and which broke in two suddenly at shattering rotation prevented the residents of the rue ..
the very moment of unloading from a lorry to exhibit it. des Beaux-Arts from sleeping for a fortnight, crazy
The friend had worked for months and months on this mechanical piano of the Hommage a New York 1960,
1 form-an elementary and abstract form which more­ self-destructive machines set up on each side of the
Tinguely at work on over would not itself have appeared to constitute a Atlantic in the following years as glorious monuments
Eos, 1964
sculpture for Donatello or Rodin. And here at the heart to disorder and which fall in pieces during the convul­
2 of that mass, of which its very immobility seemed to sions of Apocalypse bombarding in decibels the ear­
Tinguely guarantee its permanence, it required only one fault to drums of spectators. From his first crop of 'meta­
MK Ill. 1964 see everything endangered and spoiled and to become mecaniques· to Eureka, a giant machine commissioned
even more useless than the machines of Tinguely: the for the Swiss National Exhibition last summer, Tinguely
3 time, the costly marble. the cutting and the polishing, has never ceased to make from sound and noise the
Tinguely
Metamauc No. 9, 1959 the form and its expectation to traverse the ages. corollaries of movement, a material as indispensable to
Galerie Alexandre lolas 'All that is fixed falls to pieces,' the father of 'meta- his work as iron and solder. If Tinguely had been a
88