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Some of Tinguely’s work is equally interesting and, in our opinion, achieves a similar result. Emerging from a tradition of Dada, Tinguely’s most famous artworks were kinetically destructive and self-destructive in nature, with Tinguely’s Homage to New York (1960) serving as the most famous and typical example. {Fig. 101} Set up in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art, Homage to New York was described by Tinguely as a ‘self-constructing and self-destroying work of art’ comprised of wheels, motors, a bathtub, a piano and various other objects and, once set into motion, proceeded to destroy itself with crashes and fire until stopped by the local fire department.
Fig. 101 Jean Tinguely, Homage to New York (1960) While the link to Dada is apparent, as is the link to a long tradition of destruction in art, like Paik’s work there is a setting-forth of a systematic autonomy in Homage to New York that regressively undermines its sense of determinativeness; Tinguely’s aesthetics necessitated a lack of control on the artist’s part, once the processes had been set into motion, that transferred an autonomous agency over to the artwork. Much of Tinguely’s career can be understood as an exploration of the relationship between the artist, his work as technology, and human culture, with a clear conclusion that technologically-dependent objects have an alien life all to themselves, an interpretative position reinforced with a statement by Michael Landy, co-curator of a major exhibition of Tinguely’s work at the Tate Liverpool in 2009, that Homage to New York ‘committed suicide’,88 an act only a living creature with a sense of self-awareness could do. The aesthetic strategies and their results as employed by both Paik and Tinguely are, in many respects, radically different from each other, but the resulting consequences are the same: in each case a system is created, closed and self-referential, initiated by the artists but quickly moving out of their control with unexpected results. In a way, both Paik’s and Tinguely’s artworks represent an aestheticization of Kurt Gödel’s incomplete88
Michael Landy, ‘Home to Destruction’, Tate Etc., Autumn 2009, http://www.tate.org.uk/contextcomment/articles/homage-destruction.