Fragment from Homage to New York

Jean Tinguely, 1960 · Gallery 405 · Floor 4

The sculpture garden, downstairs. A Thursday evening, March 1960. Half past six. In the middle of the garden is a machine the size of a two-story house. Painted white. All of it. A couple hundred people stand around it. Ya know, invited. Good clothes. So the fall before, Jean Tinguely put a hundred fifty thousand copies of a manifesto out in Düsseldorf. Story goes, out of a plane. The gist was simple. Nothing holds still. So quit pretending anything lasts. Then he comes to New York and builds something that won't last through dinner. He does it with Billy Klüver, an engineer at Bell Labs. They drag the materials back from dumps, scrapyards and junk shops. A player piano. A radio. A bathtub. A bassinet. A toilet. Bicycle wheels. An American flag. The whole thing is built to destroy itself. So, it starts up. Wheels turning. Metal on metal. The piano banging away. A weather balloon fills up, keeps filling, then pops. Colored smoke pours out. The machine paints a picture and tears it up. Then it paints another one. Bottles come down and smash. Sparks fly. Then flames. NBC is filming. A piece breaks off and hits one of their camera crew. That's when a New York City fireman steps forward and puts it out. It's not even seven. The machine wasn't finished destroying itself. Twenty-seven feet high that night. What's left is six foot eight. White metal. Bicycle wheels. A paint can with a red band. A big wooden disc down low, like the end of a cable spool. That long curved rod over everything. And up top, a little red flag in rags. The original machine was called Homage to New York. This is Fragment from Homage to New York. Honest, at least. That night, people went through the wreckage and took parts home. Souvenirs. Not this one. This one turns up in the collection eight years later. Gift of the artist.

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