On the evening of March 18, 1960, a group of invited guests assembled in MoMA’s Sculpture Garden to witness a bizarrely astonishing event, even by the standards of the era’s avant-garde. Set before the crowd was a massive Rube Goldberg–like contraption cobbled out of a discordant mix of cogs, tools, machine belts, bicycle wheels, motors, a piano, an addressograph machine, a go-kart—even a bathtub. Titled Homage to New York, it was the creation of Swiss-French artist Jean Tinguely (1925–1991). More than an assemblage, Homage was a robotic performance piece that proceeded to self-destruct when set into motion, causing a fire that the FDNY had to put out. Once the debris cooled, viewers picked through the remnants for souvenirs.
Homage To New York is Tinguely’s most famous piece, one he arguably never topped, though its anarchistic spirit courses through the works presented at this exhibit. Made over the span of his career, most pieces are motorized and operable by the viewer. They are, like Homage itself, mordantly droll. Stepping on foot pedals brings them clanking to life like post-apocalyptic Calders wandering in from Mad Max’s Thunderdome. Indeed, it’s easy to find Tinguely’s DNA in George Miller’s films and elsewhere: Tinguely created the template for a certain vision of industrial capitalism collapsing in on itself, with the means of production left to disintegrate on history’s scrap heap.
But what of the postindustrial present? From 1952 on, Tinguely lived in Paris, and considering the recent events there, it’s possible to view these objects as connecting the city’s current trauma to the one that inspired them: World War II. Tinguely, who was 20 years old at war’s end, was undoubtedly aware of the shit going down, even from the safety of Switzerland, where he grew up. The horror of Europe consuming itself is evident in his work, even as it represented a break from earlier movements such as Tachism and Art Informel, which likewise channeled the apprehensions of postwar life.
Tinguely was part of Nouveau Réalisme, a movement usually labeled France’s Pop Art. That comparison has never entirely tracked, however, especially when judged against the corporate cool of Warhol, Lichtenstein and Rosenquist. Their work reflects the fortunes of a country with its infrastructure left intact; Europe wasn’t so lucky. The imbalance remains today, with France and Europe far more vulnerable to terrorist attacks than the United States—even taking 9/11 into account.
Unlike most American Pop Art, then, Nouveau Réalisme was shot through with a combination of Expressionist angst and existential absurdism, both of which are in abundance within this riot of freakish, interactive fun. One piece fires up marquee lights and starts to spin colored feathers like a tawdry Weimar cabaret abandoned in a bombed-out ruin. Another features a boar’s skull continually opening and snapping shut with the clack of rotted teeth. The works are lined up on a raised platform that runs around the space, offering a stage for their macabre antics.
Prophetic as they are reactive, Tinguely’s objects manifest an art of devastation, not only in a material sense but in a spiritual one as well. They traffic in self-abnegation and a sardonic resignation to the inevitability of decay. Rusty, crusty and impossible to ignore, they invite us to laugh as we walk past the graveyard.