Méta-Harmonie

Swiss artist Jean Tinguely assembled scrap iron, metal parts and junk into machines which, as he says, “are useless and make productive action look ridiculous”. His absurd mechanical constructions are distorted mirror images and an ironic take on technology and are to be understood as social criticism. Tinguely detaches the real scientific and technical connections to the functional machines of our everyday life leaving nothing more than their own implicit artistic and aesthetic value. And so it is that as soon as the electric motors of the three part Meta-Harmony are switched on, the contraption rattles, squeaks, turns and makes noise in what is otherwise a quiet and static art space. The succession of movements and noises is only apparently random. It is, however, a purely technical sequence that is always the same and can neither be influenced nor changed from outside. His kinetic, that is, moving, sculptures deconstruct their own generic term and demand a new definition. In a work entitled Hommage a New York [Hommage to New York], in the courtyard of the MoMA in 1960, the machine actually destroyed itself. That year he became a founding member of the Nouveau Réalisme group to which both Daniel Spoerri and Yves Klein belong.