F1 CARS AS KINETIC ART

CURATORS AT THE PIRELLI HANGARBICOCCA say “Jean Tinguely (Fribourg, 1925–Bern, 1991) is considered one of the pioneering artists of the 20th century. As one of the most important exponents of kinetic art, he revolutionized the concept of the artwork itself.”

“At the heart of his work,” the curators continue, “is the exploration of the machine, its function and movement, its noises and sounds, and its inherent poetry.” 

As beautifully exemplified in F1 machines.

Tinguely’s (and Prost’s and Cheever’s) F1 Cars. Another reference to this is Daniel Soar’s “On Jean Tinguely,” London Review of Books, February 6, 2025. Soar notes, “…. Tinguely loved the thrill of pure machinery. Pit-Stop (1984) is a kinetic sculpture made from the reassembled parts of two Formula One racing cars: Renault RE 40s driven by Alain Prost and Eddie Cheever during the previous season.” 

Pit-Stop (1984), by Jean Tinguely. This and other images from Pirelli HangarBicocca.

Soar continues, “Each perfectly engineered carbon-fibre part—nose, wing, cockpit—rotates independently as the whole structure slowly turns. Unlike the tarnished iron and weathered paint of most of the other sculptures, the Renault-yellow surfaces here are shiny new. Projected on the wall beside it is a video—Tinguely’s only video work— of Prost in action.”

Another view.

Furthermore, Soar observes, “It’s a deliberate puzzle: these cutting-edge machines, hurtling around the track at 200 mph, are the definition of speed—but the sculpture itself, with its stately gyration, is as much about slowness. And another contradiction: Pit-Stop is a spectacular celebration of millimetre-precise assembly, yet the whole thing is fractured into a hundred exploded bits. Tinguely was wild about cars – in later life he owned Ferraris – but you can’t be wild about very fast cars without anticipating the impending accident.”

The Tinguely exhibit has completed its stay at Pirelli HangarBicocca, a showplace north of Milan centro about a third of the way to Monza. Disassembled, Tinguely’s kinetic art works are being transported to storage or reconstructed at various sites throughout Europe. In particular, the exhibition was organized in collaboration with Museum Tinguely, Basel, and it is part of the tinguely100 programme. 

Soar describes in LRB, “Tinguely, born in 1925 to a French Swiss working-class family, loved to entertain. In the grainy footage of the événement in Milan you can see him running around like a manic imp. He spent his career—he died in 1991—making sculptures from salvaged materials, discarded machine parts and other detritus, but he didn’t arrive at the high-art avant-garde by the usual route: One of his earliest jobs was as a window dresser in Basel, where he put up elaborate, fun displays with department-store chairs, saucepans and handbags suspended from pieces of wire.”

An Artful Café. The Museum Tinguely describes, “The Café Galerie Tinguely in Kyoto’s main shopping street Karasuma-dori was opened on April 15, 1987. Tinguely designed the entire interior. In addition to the 14 ceiling lamps in various sizes, there were 5 large tables, a rolling bar and several smaller tables.”

Café Kyoto (1987), by Jean Tinguely.

“The chairs,” the museum notes, “were mass-produced in Japan in 6 different types based on Tinguely’s designs and models. In addition, dishes, cups, glasses, coasters, matchbooks and placemats were decorated with Tinguely’s lettering. The menu cards were printed with a reproduction of a drawing by Jean Tinguely, which was also used to design a scarf and the house’s napkins. Tinguely was the constant theme in the Café Kyoto.”

The Café Kyoto exhibit closed in the summer of 1987, its remaining art shown here. 

Exploded Circles and Squares. “But what he really loved,” Soar continued, “was machines, or art made from machine parts that clanked and whirred, constantly in motion. Take Cercle et carré éclatés (1981), an assembly of connected rods and cranks, belts, gears and wheels, all driven by an electric motor turned on with the press of a pedal. 

Cercle et carré éclatés (1981), by Jean Tinguely.

Soar describes, “It’s cobbled together from reclaimed pieces of steel, rubber and wood, along with an industrial drill bit, a photographer’s studio lamp, a rusty metal cart that moves backwards and forwards on a track. The machine is geared so that some wheels spin fast, some slow, clockwise and anticlockwise, each mechanism operating on the next to produce a different kind of motion in every plane: a curved section of steel scythes from side to side, a curved wooden branch nods up and down. And there’s noise: an orchestrated arrangement of screeches, whines and hums; with every revolution of a wooden cartwheel there is a loud clack as a bar falls back into place.”

Méta-Matic: DIY Art.  “Tinguely made the most of the aleatory,” observed Soar. “One of his crowd-pleasing projects was the Méta-Matic, a drawing machine (he made many versions) which the visitor can half-control by choosing a pen to put in its grip, then adjusting the angle and speed.”

Méta-Matic No. 10 (1959), by Jean Tinguely.   

Soar recounts, “The resulting pictures—inscribed onto a sheet of paper fixed to a tripod—are necessarily all different, each a surprise. For one of their first appearances, at Galerie Iris Clert in Paris in 1959, a prize of 50,000 francs was awarded for the best drawing a visitor could produce.”

“By the time you read this,” Soar writes, “all the ‘useless machines’ (as he called them) at HangarBicocca will have been dismantled and packed away, perhaps occasionally to pop up again in a city somewhere in Europe. But this was some show, and I’m sorry you missed it.”

Me too, especially Méta-Matic No. 10 and Pit-Stop (which, of course, in my mind kinetically never stops). ds 

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2025