Jean Tinguely

Galerie Burén, Stockholm

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1967

Milan, Galleria Alexandre Iolas, Tinguely, 1966

Stockholm, Galerie Burén, Tinguely, 1967, n.p., no. 17, illustrated

Amsterdam, Stedelijk Museum, Jean Tinguely, 1973, n.p., no. 46, illustrated

Colour: The colour in the printed catalogue is fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition and in full working order. There are a few unobtrusive scuffs and light scratches to the front of the wheel, and a few nicks to the inside of the wheel at the back. Close inspection reveals some light oxidation in places to the base.
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Created in 1966 Santana IV illustrates the explicitly sculptural aspect of Jean Tinguely's practice and a distinct evolution from the wall mounted pieces. Freestanding, Santana IV rests on a pair of bowed train-track-like runners; the piece has a sense of momentum and perpetual instability designed into its base. When set into motion a centrally dominating wooden disc extends out and up in erratically cyclical motions. Converse to Tinguely’s ‘meta-mechanical’ pieces of the 1950’s we no longer encounter a medley of interacting forms, but rather a single animatronic entity, a curious black creature with which nothing can be certain other than its determined manoeuvrability, sustained by the laws of motion.

In creating one of the most iconic pieces of modern art with his original Bicycle Wheel of 1913, Marcel Duchamp introduced movement to the work of art. Whilst this piece has been lauded as the forerunner to the ready-made, in the implied invitation to spin its wheel, Duchamp inaugurated the dynamic possibilities of momentum as a concept to guide art. Jean Tinguely takes after Duchamp in his irreverence towards the conventional image, creating works which incorporate a humour that moves between the sublime and the ridiculous. From 1960 onwards his practice had become centred on the creation of extravagant kinetic sculptures from scrap iron, old obsolete mechanical parts and discarded household products, often leaving them raw and un-worked in appearance to highlight their status as mundane and regular objects. Re-crafted as machines devoid of utilitarian function they engendered an art that was socially familiar, yet truly unique much in line with the Nouveau Réalisme movement with which he was aligned. The central contention that bound Tinguely to this group was that art should have direct contact with urban and industrial culture, its bi-products and side effects.

As an eloquently crafted object that is more self-conscious of its physical presence, Santana IV shows Tinguely solidifying his movement into a new concerted aesthetic that he began to develop around 1964. Having venerated the idea of the ready-made constituent parts within his work, Tinguely now seeks to obfuscate the humble origins of his materials, masking them with an enigmatic matte black in order to emphasise their formal plastic qualities. Most fervently in this period, Tinguely’s machines start to take a nostalgic resemblance of nineteenth-century industrial machinery, performing a re-appropriation of an aesthetic that celebrates the power of the machine by looking back to its historical genesis. Whilst previously Tinguely sought a certain sense of demystification in his art, here he relents to the captivating and visceral power of motion. Santana IV is typically anthropomorphised, calibrated to groan and grind. It marks Tinguely’s new interest in giving not just animate life, but a sense of human personality to his pieces. Indeed, Santana IV is a perfect example of this. Once set in motion, the machine repeatedly attempts to rotate the central wheel; after some time, it finally succeeds and triumphantly rotates the wheel at an increasing speed. Suddenly, drained of momentum, the spinning comes to a halt and the entire stuttering struggle begins once again.

An ambitious period of production, 1966 marked the year that the artist created the monumental work Hon with Niki de Saint-Phalle and Per-Olof Ultvedt at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm; twenty-eight meters long, seven metres high and nine meters wide, this giant female body, with fantastically mechanised internal parts, could be physically entered and investigated by visitors. In his closing of the gap between the nature of humans and machines, Tinguely guided spectators to consider one of the guiding principles of our own biology, of life: that an equilibrium remains in a constant state of flux.