The Bride and the Bachelors by Calvin Tomkins

Author:Calvin Tomkins [Tomkins, Calvin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gagosian Gallery
Published: 2014-04-27T00:00:00+00:00

George Staempfli, a New York gallery owner and art dealer, had met Tinguely in Paris and promised him a New York show, and in January 1960 Tinguely crossed the Atlantic in tourist class on the Queen Elizabeth to be on hand for the first exposure of his art in America. During the trip he began drawing up rough sketches for a work that would express some of his complex ideas about New York, a city he had never seen. New York, to Tinguely, had always seemed the place where modern man was in closest contact with his machines. “The skyscraper itself is a kind of machine,” he said. “The American house is a machine. I saw in my mind’s eye all those skyscrapers, those monster buildings, all that magnificent accumulation of human power and vitality, all that uneasiness, as though everyone were living on the edge of a precipice, and I thought how nice it would be to make a little machine there that would be conceived, like Chinese fireworks, in total anarchy and freedom.” The machine that Tinguely envisioned was to be called Homage to New York, and its sole raison d’être would be to destroy itself in one act of glorious mechanical freedom. The simplicity, appropriateness, and grandeur of this vision so impressed Tinguely that he decided at once that the only proper locale for the event was the outdoor sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art, and as soon as he landed he set about achieving this almost impossible objective. The fact that he spoke practically no English and that he had few friends and, at best, a tiny reputation in New York seemed small obstacles to him, and he immediately began lining up supporters for his plan. Dore Ashton, an art critic for the New York Times who had seen his work in Europe, came down to the pier to meet him, and he showed her the drawings for his machine. “It has to be in the Museum of Modern Art,” she remembered his saying. “It has to end up in the garbage cans of the museum.” Miss Ashton, who had considerable opportunity to observe Tinguely in action during the next few weeks, was somewhat awed by his talent for getting what he wanted. “He often adopts the manner of a simple peasant when you ask him serious questions,” she reported, “but he is certainly not at all simple. He is a very complicated person. If he feels you understand him, you’re in; if you don’t, he uses you.”

One of the people who proved most helpful to Tinguely was Dr. Richard Huelsenbeck, in whose apartment he stayed for the three months he was in New York. Huelsenbeck, the Dadaist turned psychiatrist, had met Tinguely in Paris, admired his work, and enthusiastically proclaimed him a “Meta-Dadaist,” who had “fulfilled certain ideas of ours, notably the idea of motion.” Dr. Huelsenbeck provided Tinguely’s entrée to a group of young innovators in New York that included the painters

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