Review of Jean Tinguely: Machine Spectacle at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

04/11/16

Jean Tinguely: Machine Spectacle

Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

1 October 2016 – 5 March 2017

“I wanted something ephemeral, that would pass like a falling star and, most importantly, that would be impossible for museums to reabsorb,” said Swiss artist Jean Tinguely (1925-91), best known for his kinetic sculptures or metamechanics, of his equally famous self-destructing installations. “I didn’t want it to be ‘museumised’.” It is a moot point then, that, to mark the 25th anniversary of his death, the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, where Tinguely co-curated two seminal exhibitions in the early 60s, should (a) be hosting such a comprehensive retrospective and (b) be showing 166 works, 62 of which are machine sculptures, and only 42 of which are, intermittently, functioning. Would an artist who so railed against the white cube walls of formal galleries – “The more immaculate the gallery was and the larger and whiter the museum, the more repulsive were some of the machines I turned up with” – really have wanted his life presenting in such a documented manner, with drawings, photographs, letters, newspaper cuttings, film clips, patent applications, and all sorts of extensive archival material? What could be a more textbook example of being “museumised”?

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Review of Niki de Saint Phalle: Je Suis Une Vache Suisse at Omer Tiroche Contemporary Art

30/07/16

Niki de Saint Phalle: Je Suis Une Vache Suisse

Omer Tiroche Contemporary Art

17 June – 10 September 2016

At first sight, Omer Tiroche Contemporary Art is filled with a menagerie of joyful, celebratory and colourful works: gouache paintings and crayon drawings; sculptures and reliefs studded with coloured glass mosaic; ornate mirrors and intricate yet simple jewellery – all infused with a sense of playfulness and naivety, like that of a child. But look more closely and there is more to the works on display than meets the eye: a gorilla with a gaping hole where his internal organs – including his heart – should be; serpents; skulls; and a satisfied lion, recently having feasted on a man, whose shirt and shoes lay abandoned by the miniature settee. Catherine Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle, or Niki de Saint Phalle (1930-2002) as she became known, had a traumatic early life, which later unavoidably fed into her artwork, making it more worldy-wise and complex than it might at first seem.

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