Art For the Doomsday Scenario

Kinetic art in the Dada tradition known as metamechanics or sculptured machines were a form symptomatic of the New Realist school of art and manifesto as signed by Swiss painter and sculptor Jean Tinguely. Tinguely satirized the inherent nature of over-production in Westen societies where the supply in general, always exceeds demand, thus the need for moral suasion and debt . Whether its the push strategy through the distribution channel or the pull maneuver through advertising, there is always plenty left to go around.

 

 

Tinguely seized on these industrial paradoxes whereby most people are poor yet the capacity to produce is almost unlimited. In the end, there must be a meltdown or destruction either to acknowledge a new beginning or bury the past; interred in a mausoleum that is a tribute to hypocritical choices a society permits. That at least, seems to be the purpose of his ”Homage to New York” sculpture (1960) which was conceived as self-destroying yet only partially disintegrated when the pin was pulled at the Museum of Modern Art. ”Study For An End of the World No.2” (1962) detonated successfully outside Las Vegas, and showed that art could have built in obsolescense in much the same fashion as a Barbie Doll or more ironically The World Trade Center .

Tinguely was part of the new realism which was in part , a reaction against the lyricism of abstract painting while avoiding the trappings of figurative art.The Nouveaux Realistes rejected  the neo-romantic aesthetic of abstract expressionism and its subjective and spontaneous expression of the artists inner state and particular variety of individuality. Instead, a poetic recycling was advocated as a means of perceiving the real through techniques of collage and assemblage of material goods within the work; avant-garde art that appropriated popular culture and therefore became an influence on the pop-art movement.

 

 

Tinguely explored the potential of the algorithm and mechanical dynamics so that his sculptures becames machines without practical function,inspired in part by the animated art inventions  of Rube Goldberg. Hundreds of parts interacting with each other and serving as a mediator between the viewer and their relationship to the art.

‘‘ Using industrial and household objects in artworks, the Nouveau Realistes gave physical form to a topical social problem ( the exponential increase in objects and the need to thematize attitudes to them ) and joined the definitive of the twentieth century tradition of transcending the two-dimensional space of easel painting- a tradition that may be defined as the metamorphoses of the object. In this tradition, artists are no longer creators of worlds nor do they express their complex inner world

ey are only in relation to the existing world, which is a world of objects”

Is the validity of the Realist manifesto in 1960 no longer valid? ” The world of objects is impenetrable, growing alarmingly, alienated, a world of waste and chance, deprived of form, grotesque… the production of objects is also a saturation of the existing world with garbage. Generally speaking, this is a world in which the familiar aesthetic of beauty cannot be found.”

It was the structural incoherence and irrationality in Realist art that succeeded in its intention to provoke the viewer. The redefinition of familiar objects created the desired response of whether their belongingness in the field of art was warranted. The uncertainty and irritation arose from the confrontation with absurdity, a result of purposeful estrangement, de-familiarization and agressivity on the part of the artist.