Jean Tinguely: “Meta-Harmonie II”

The Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely (1925-1991) is a new art-crush of mine.  I first heard of him in the excellent documentary series on 20th-century art called The Shock of the New.  Tinguely specialized in building elaborate mechanical sculptures that would gradually break down and destroy themselves.  His constructions are often sonically beautiful as well, and several recordings have been made of the “sound-effects” of Tinguely’s machines in motion.

His stunning “Meta-Harmony II,” built in 1979 and kept in the Tinguely Museum in Basel, is the most emphatically musical of his works that I’ve encountered.  It is a baroque assemblage of wheels and gears, wheezing scales of tones, and sudden jolts of percussive noise— a distinctly materialist interpretation of the ever-sounding “music of the spheres.”

(The first part of the video shows scenes from the museum; “Meta-Harmonie II” is featured starting at about 1:00.)

August 21, 2009, 9:34am