CHARLOTTE, NC.- The Bechtler Museum of Modern Art is presenting Celebrating Jean Tinguely and Santana from May 12 through September 10 in the fourth floor gallery. This exhibition is a survey of over 150 artworks spanning the forty-year career of this revolutionary Swiss kinetic artist and his contemporaries.
Bechtler Curator, Jennifer Sudul Edwards, Ph.D., organized the show with loans from the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, along with the Bechtler Museum’s holdings, which includes three kinetic sculptures, 42 original drawings, 23 prints, and a quarter-scale model of Tinguely’s last commissioned installation, Cascade, the original of which churns five blocks east of the museum. An auxiliary show of Tinguely’s contemporaries, including Bernhard Luginbül, Daniel Spoerri, Hansjürg Brunner, Robert Müller, Max Bill, and Niki de Saint Phalle offer a historical context for Tinguely’s innovations. Supplemental educational programming will explore his continued importance. Finally, the museum can draw on the personal connection of the founding patron, Andreas Bechtler and his father, Hans, who had close relationships with the artist and his circle.
The son of a factory mechanic, Tinguely first started making art as a child, wandering the woods outside his home in Basel, and mounting small water wheels in the creeks to create sound sculptures. He made art out of what he knew and what surrounded him, the natural movement found in the world with the industrial materials lying around his house.
He moved to Paris in 1953 and spent the rest of the decade pioneering kinetic art, beginning with interlocked wires and swinging arms, then advancing to automatic drawing machines called Méta-matics. Like a carnival fortune teller, they would make you a drawing for the price of a token.
This performative element of his work married to the acknowledgement of the viewer as a participant would continue throughout the next forty years of Tinguely’s work. Some of the work remained interactive, with the viewer activating the sculpture with the push of a button, but in others, the sculptures whirl with balletic grace continually (e.g. the Stravinsky Fountain in Paris, done in partnership with his frequent collaborator Niki de Saint Phalle), or clanked occasionally to solitary life (e.g. Cyclops, the monumental installation hidden in the French forest of Milly-le-Forêt).
Dr. Sudul Edwards adopted a unique perspective for the Bechtler exhibition: “There have been a number of European shows over the last twenty years examining Tinguely’s importance, both historically and for contemporary artists. However, this is the first to investigate the central nature of collage in his practice. Because of the Bechtler family’s personal relationship with Tinguely from the early 1960s until his death in 1991, the museum has a number of collages. Tinguely gifted over 100 of them to Andreas Bechtler just before he died, in fact. Also, these are delightful objects to enjoy—you can lose yourself for an hour in one 12 by 8 inch rectangle.”
The Bechtler is also showing North Carolina artist Hoss Haley’s Drawing Machine for the first time in Charlotte. Haley reminds us that Tinguely not only continues to influence artists working today, but inspires our regional artists. Haley says of Tinguely’s work: “For me, it spoke of something else, the seduction of the machine. I grew up around agricultural machinery and had a level of comfort with the language of moving parts, but I had never seen it used in this way—as a form of expression. My relationships with machines have been an important part of my career as an artist. Most often they are a means to an end, but with this drawing machine I feel I’m able to approach the spirit I felt seeing Tinguely’s work nearly 30 years ago.”
This is the second Tinguely exhibition at the Bechtler: Charlotte independent curator June Lambla organized Remembering Cascade, on view from September 9, 2011 through January 16, 2012. However, Celebrating Jean Tinguely and Santana is the largest exhibition of Jean Tinguely displayed in an American museum.
