Book Synopsis

Celebrating a great kinetic artist who liberated the machine from the "tyranny of utility" and encouraged the unexpected with his contraptions

This volume documents the first major Italian retrospective since his death of the work of Swiss artist Jean Tinguely (1925-91), one of the 20th century's greatest exponents of kinetic art. At the center of his work lies research into the functioning and intrinsic poetry of machines. Tinguely was among the first artists to use found objects that he then welded together, creating noisy and cacophonous machines whose movements were driven by motors. This monograph analyzes Tinguely's practice, providing detailed descriptions of the works in the exhibition, accompanied by an ample selection of contemporary and archival images. The volume also includes an essay that sets Tinguely's work against the background of the contemporaneous avant-garde, another on the role of sound and performance in his work in the context of the 1960s, an illustrated timeline of the artist's career and two reprinted texts written by Tinguely himself.