What happens to wheels and levers stripped of utility? What of mass-produced pullies and pistons robbed of recognizable function? Was it not the Dadaist movement that first relieved tubes and trundles and valves of mechanical purpose, deploying them not to materialist ends but setting them instead on more conceptual, perhaps even metaphysical, errands (fig. 1)? It comes as little surprise that—when confronted with Jean Tinguely’s varied body of work in the 1960s—European and American critics rushed to invoke the precedent of Dada.¹ The gears and gadgets disarticulated and reassembled in his oeuvre seemed to whir in an unmistakably Dadaist vein (fig.  2). A new world war, in which technology played an even more comprehensively destructive and sinister role, further underscored that affinity, along with Tinguely’s characteristic mix of iconoclasm, irreverence, and irony. While scholars have since remarked extensively upon Tinguely’s ‘continuation’ of the Dadaist spirit, that notion was already proverbial at the height of his 1960s experimentation. The former German Dadaist Richard Huelsenbeck dedicated an entire chapter of his celebrated Memoirs of a Dada Drummer to Tinguely’s Homage to New York, with Huelsenbeck’s press release for the Museum of Modern Art impishly annotated by no less than Marcel Duchamp (fig.  3). If one critic dismissed the Homage as an ‘infantile spectacle’ reminiscent of Dada, Tinguely himself proudly claimed the mantle of ‘Meta-dadaist’, reprising—like many of his generation—one of the century’s ideologically unimpeachable avant-gardes as a methodological and ideological touchstone.² For one critic writing on the Swiss artist more recently, Tinguely’s dropping 150,000 copies of his Für Statik (For Static) manifesto from a plane over Düsseldorf in 1959 recalls nothing if not ‘the provocative strategies of the Dada movement’³ along with propaganda tactics from World War II.

Yet Tinguely’s work conjures up in precisely this vein an even earlier avant-garde, and the earlier world war that fuelled its strategies. Launched in 1909, the Italian Futurist movement preceded and dynamized Dadaist experiments in typography, performance, and politics alike. Of course, the Futurists clamoured for the very war against which the Dadaists came to protest. For all his fulminations against ‘Art’ with a capital A, furthermore, the Futurist leader Filippo Tommaso Marinetti never truly questioned its ontological integrity; rather than call for the art market’s collapse, the Futurists exploited its mechanisms to new promotional ends. The Futurist assault on the propriety of aesthetics and literary language—from the roles expected of respective mediums to the nature of typography—nevertheless proved groundbreaking and influential. Following Gabriele d’Annunzio’s flight over Vienna, the Futurists were the first to scatter manifestos en masse (80,000 from Saint Mark’s campanile tower in Venice, for instance). More crucial still was their use of the manifesto itself—along with unprecedented bellicose aggression—to blur the boundaries between art and life. As the vehicle for exponential theories of artistic innovation, the manifesto became a nearly autonomous Futurist phenomenon in its own right.

One such manifesto by the artists Giacomo Balla and Fortunato Depero in 1915 proposed a Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo (Futurist Reconstruction of the Universe) pledging to remake the world in the movement’s agitated image. Balla and Depero’s text notably invokes the conflagration then gripping Western Europe—which Italy had just joined on behalf of the Entente Powers—not as a distraction to their efforts but rather a stimulus to Futurist experiments.⁴ The signatories illustrated their ambition with several multimedia sculptures: prefigurations of a world transformed by technology, speed, and the violence of modernity. In place of sculpture—and all its attendant, millennial ballast both material and cultural—the artists proposed to generate so-called plastic complexes (fig.  4). These exchanged stasis and formal simplicity for agglutinative and kinetic elements, fashioned from materials as diverse as wool and talcum, cardboard and iron, metal foil and glass. Their titles reflect this same admixture, whether Balla’s Complesso plastico colorato di frastuono + danza + allegria (Coloured Plastic Complex of Noise + Dance + Joy) or Depero’s Complesso plastico colorato motorumorista simultaneo di composizione a strati (Coloured Noise-moto Plastic Complex of Simultaneous Layered Decomposition; fig. 5). Such objects offered glimpses into a Futurist future, integrating ‘volatile’, ‘explosive’, ‘noise-creating’, and even ‘odorous’ dimensions into aesthetic (and anti-aesthetic) phenomena.

Despite the extensive resonance between Tinguely’s oeuvre and Futurist innovation, little scholarship has addressed its consequence for the trajectory of modernist sculpture, on the one hand, or for Tinguely’s post-war reinterpretation of avant-garde strategies, on the other. Various elements of Tinguely’s work find precedent in multimedia Futurist experiments, which sought to revolutionize the very premise of sculptural practice: from kineticism and motorization, to interactive soundscapes, to the premise of the ‘useless machine’. The formulation of this latter phenomenon by the former Futurist artist Bruno Munari has invited direct comparison with Tinguely’s work; yet the accompanying scholarship addressed their respective developments separately.⁵ Vital in considering their confluence, I think, is an understanding of Futurist precedent, with particular regard to sculptural kineticism. To be sure, Tinguely’s installations rhyme formally and conceptually with a range of historical avant-garde examples from between the world wars, including Soviet and international Constructivism (figs. 6, 7). But it is in many ways the divergence between Tinguely and Futurist politics that renders the resonance striking and demands further, careful inquiry.

That inquiry was long hindered by Futurism’s political legacy. The movement’s full-throated support for Mussolini’s regime—well after its consolidation as a dictatorship and imperialist aggressor in Libya, East Africa, and elsewhere—rendered it an art historical liability following the defeat of Fascism. If various artists began reprising Futurist strategies beginning in the 1960s, its history was either truncated following World War I (and hence spared any taint by Fascist politics) or else its examples were invoked independently from those same politics. In other words, Futurism was either cast as an extension (and originator) of Fascist ideology, or else a kind of sui generis phenomenon occupied only with the aesthetic realm. Tinguely’s work appeared alongside historical Futurist works in major international exhibitions and studies, from William Seitz’s exhibition The Art of Assemblage in 1961 to Pontus Hultén’s The Machine, As Seen at the End of The Mechanical Age (1968).⁶ Yet their juxtaposition proved passing and casual, while the institutional account of Futurism dodged entirely the movement’s ideological compromise. Even Harald Szeemann’s landmark 1975 Junggesellenmaschinen, which extensively addressed both Tinguely and Dada, makes only one glancing mention of Marinetti and Futurism.⁷

In what remains of this essay, I address some of the intersection between Tinguely’s work and the precedent of Futurism, taking care not to flatten the differences that separate them. I hope not only to shed some light on the gestation of Tinguely’s body of work but to let it in turn illuminate various misconceptions of Futurist mechanization—a fundamentally antipositivist phenomenon in its earliest iterations, as I will discuss. For concision’s sake, I will focus on Tinguely’s Homage to New York and its critical aftermath, particularly those forums which actively discussed the event’s significance. Even here we find an unwitting affinity with Futurism—specifically with Depero’s time in New York. For it was here that the Italian artist not only vowed to ‘Destroy Museums’ (echoing one of Futurism’s founding shibboleths) but also used the city as touchstone for his aesthetic ambitions during the late 1920s.⁸

Though Tinguely’s Homage did not destroy the MoMA patio on which it was installed, its selfcombustion—and the efforts of the fire department to put it out—conjured up a fundamentally Futurist impulse to dilate the work’s temporality beyond its spatial envelope, adding to its physical components a further, performative extemporaneity.⁹ More fundamentally, Tinguely’s will to kineticism bears a decidedly Futurist provenance, however oblique. The injection of duration into the sculptural object—forever associated with fixity and permanence—proved one of Futurism’s most urgent imperatives. Marinetti’s cohort of artists complained in the early 1910s that Cubist painters and sculptors continue to render ‘objects motionless, frozen … static’.¹⁰ Of course, the actualization of movement in avant-garde sculpture traces an undeniably varied genealogy, from Naum Gabo’s Kinetic Construction (Standing Wave) (1919–20) to László Moholy-Nagy’s Light-Space Modulator (1930). Yet these simply literalized Futurism’s pictorial and sculptural evocations—thoroughly nourished on the philosophy of Henri Bergson. Aside from Nietzsche’s writings, perhaps no body of thought proved more vital to Futurist theory than Bergson’s philosophical assault upon chronological time.¹¹

It is telling that Tinguely would go on to create a kinetic portrait of the philosopher in 1988 (fig. 8). Yet we also know from Tinguely’s writings—including his manifesto Für Statik—that his understanding of sculpture was steeped in Bergsonian principles.¹² Penned in September 1959, Für Statik names the phenomena of ‘movement, disintegration, [and] change’ as the only constants—and hence the only truly ‘static’:

Not coincidentally, it was the clockface that served as the bête noire of Bergson’s philosophy. The way in which minute and second and hour hands quantified time into spatial integers defied how time was lived, experienced in the body. ‘Rien est plus inepte qu’une horloge’, Tinguely would declare in 1959—nothing is as inept as a clock.¹⁴ The word invoked by the critic Peter Selz in MoMA’s press release for Homage to New York just a couple years later—‘flux’—underscores these Bergsonian affinities.¹⁵ The same notions had spurred Umberto Boccioni’s interventions into sculptural form. How might sculpture—Boccioni wondered—evince the duration attendant upon all objects and bodies, no matter how apparently still and static? Boccioni had imagined the mechanization of his assemblages as early as 1912. The Parisian press reported on an ‘engine installed expressly for this purpose’,¹⁶ though they were never realized. Motorization, Boccioni claimed, would accentuate the Futurist object’s aesthetic autonomy, ‘like the fury of a flywheel or the whirling of a propeller’.¹⁷

Boccioni’s untimely death during World War I saw his peers take up the crusade of motorization. At least one of Depero’s pieces incorporated a motor, deployed for no recognizable purpose other than automation. It remains uncertain how exactly the work’s pistons and cylinders might have animated its cloth sails. The same may be said for the miniature bellows incorporated into the Complesso plastico colorato motorumorista simultaneo di scomposizione a strati (Coloured Plastic Complex of Simultaneous Motor-Sound Layered Decomposition, 1914), which added the further phenomenon of sound. This followed from various preparatory sketches that likewise specify a sonic dimension to their agitation, including even the designation of a ‘piano’ (fig. 9). Many of the works were proposed not simply to gyrate and move but also explode. Balla’s Strumento musicale rumorista (Clac Clac) (Noisemaking Musical Instrument [Clac Clac], 1916) further conflated the domains of sculpture and sound. A drawing from the same period reveals an enlarged version of such a ‘noisemaking’ instrument (Progetto di strumento musicale rumorista; fig. 10), vaguely suggesting a piano in its frontal orientation but outfitted with wedged slats and handles. The point here is not that Tinguely saw these objects, drawings, or illustrations. This is almost certainly not the case. Rather, Futurist precedents dynamized interwar experiments, particularly regarding innovative uses of sound, kineticism, and other sensorial dimensions. That which Boccioni proposed as the ‘sculpture of environment’ found eventual evocation in a number of Dadaist and Constructivist works to which Tinguely paid close attention (fig. 11).

A piano, in any case, played a prominent role in Tinguely’s Homage to New York, along with metal drums, an enamelled bathtub, a meteorological balloon, and— in temporal and phenomenological terms—the ensuing chaos of destruction and the verbal reactions of the audience. The seven-metre-long by eight-metre-high installation was presented as simultaneously ‘sculpture, a picture, a painting’. Yet as Tinguely remarked in a video shot at the event, the work did not merely comprise a picture but made its own pictures; it was not merely a kind of surrogate poet, but also a declaration. ‘This machine’, Tinguely averred, ‘is a situation.’¹⁸ An integral part of that situation was, of course, its disintegration. The Homage was announced in advance as both ‘selfconstructing and self-destroying’.

Let us note, in this vein, the phrasing that accompanied many of Depero and Balla’s objects: that of ‘simultaneous decomposition’. Whether realized or drafted, many of their sculptural assemblages anticipated their own disassembly. Part of this derived from the original impetus of Futurism at large: Marinetti’s crashing of his FIAT roadster in a ditch near Milan. The movement’s founding, in Marinetti’s account, derived not simply from the miracle of modern technology, but its volatile and event violent misuse. Let us not forget that Futurism’s founding manifesto invited its own destruction by subsequent generations of artists: ‘When we are forty let younger and stronger men than we throw us in the wastepaper basket like useless manuscripts!’ Marinetti celebrated the ‘the destructive gesture of the anarchists’, positing Futurism’s self-construction as a kind of self-destroying, at least in theory.¹⁹

At the same time, we must attend to the rhetoric of revelry and play attendant on early Futurist work. To which Balla’s objects titled Complesso plastico colorato di frastuono + danza + allegria (Coloured Plastic Complex of Noise + Dance + Joy, 1915) or Depero’s later Festival: Complesso plastico moto-rumorista (Festival: Moto-Noise Plastic Complex, 1924). The comparison with Tinguely’s work not only sheds light on the latter but invites a consideration of Futurism’s will to play—a tendency indissoluble from its will to power. Consider one sequence from an early Futurism film. Balla is revealed to have ‘married a chair … and a stool is born’.²⁰ As vital to Futurism’s assault on bourgeois culture as its pledges of violence was its ludic sense. The word surprise repeatedly surfaces in its manifestos and other texts—a key weapon in the campaign against passivity. Futurism’s courting of chance is, in great part, what recommended it to Dadaist strategies. The Dadaists discarded the nationalist warmongering; in place of Futurist earnestness they exchanged irony. Included among Homage to New York’s detritus was not only a toilet but an American flag, which—like the work at large—caught fire in due course. Peter Selz described the work’s conflagration in MoMA’s courtyard as a ‘concentration of human life and energy, a virility which accelerates its own destruction’.²¹

If Tinguely’s body of work often appears deceptively apolitical, its author was not. He belonged to an antifascist youth movement in his adolescence, and alongside the plainly anti-authoritarian ludic dimension of his work lurks a no less patent critique of capitalist production. ‘[H]is gear systems’, writes Guy Brett, ‘are not obliged to produce the maximum energy for the minimum work; they can expand themselves in wild spontaneity.’²² Douglas Davis argues in a related vein: 

Of course, function cannot be gauged here in strictly utilitarian terms. That is, the proverbial uselessness of Tinguely’s machines does not take into account either their exchange value or their cultural capital. Yet, however symbolically, Tinguely’s work also short-circuits the mechanisms of capital itself—not simply misusing castoff industrial objects but reusing them to aesthetic ends which serve no purpose other than their own presence.

1. See, inter alia, Richard Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer [1974], ed. Hans J. Kleinschmidt, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); William S. Rubin, Dada, Surrealism, and Their Heritage (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1968); Hans Richter, Dada 1916–1966: Documents of the International Dada Movement (University Park: Pennsylvania State University, 1966); and Jean Tinguely: Recent Constructions, April 4–April 22, 1961 (New York: Staempfli Gallery, 1961). See also Richard Sheppard, Modernism—Dada—Postmodernism (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000).
2. Cited in Joseph D. Ketner II, Witness to Phenomenon: Group ZERO and the Development of New Media in Postwar European Art (London: Bloomsbury, 2017), 151; Huelsenbeck, Memoirs of a Dada Drummer, 131.
3. Thomas Folland, ‘Jean Tinguely: Homage to New York’, in Modernisms: 1900–1980, Smarthistory: Center for Public Art History, 12 October 2020, https://smarthistory.org/tinguely -homage-new-york/ (accessed 1 July 2025).
4. See Ara H. Merjian, ‘Design: Domesticating Transcendence’, chap. 2 in Fragments of Totality: Futurism, Fascism, and the Sculptural Avant-Garde (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2024).
5. See, most notably in this regard, Tinguely e Munari, ed. Bruno Corà et. al. (Milan: Edizioni Gabriele Mazzotta, 2004).
6. The Art of Assemblage, 4 October–12 November, 1961, Museum of Modern Art, New York; The Machine as Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age, 27 November 1968–9 February 9 1969, Museum of Modern Art, New York.
7. Harald Szeemann, Junggesellenmaschinen: Les Machines célibataires (Venice: Alfieri, 1975).
8. See, inter alia, Raffaele Bedarida, ‘Bombs Against the Skyscrapers’: Depero’s Strange Love Affair with New York, 1928–1949’, in International Yearbook of Futurism Studies 6 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016), 43–70.
9. John Canaday, ‘Device Saws, Melts and Beats Itself at Museum; “Homage” to City Is Extinguished as Crowd Boos’, New York Times, 18 March 1960, 27.
10. Giacomo Balla, Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, and Gino Severini, ‘The Exhibitors to the Public’ (1912), in Futurism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence S. Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 106.
11. See Mark Antliff, ‘The Fourth Dimension and Futurism: A Politicized Space’, Art Bulletin 82, no. 4 (December 2000): 720–33; Mark Antliff, Inventing Bergson: Cultural Politics and the Parisian Avant-Garde (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); and Mark Antliff, Sculptors Against the State: Anarchism and the Anglo-European Avant-Garde (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2021).
12. ‘For Lee, Bergson’s concept of duration, or constant change, is the key to understanding Tinguely’s moving sculptures, whereas Bury’s fantastic reliefs, which move at a barely perceptible pace, are demonstrations of Bachelardian discontinuity.’ James Meyer, review of Pamela M. Lee, Chronophobia: On Time in the Art of the 1960s (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), Art Bulletin 88, no. 4 (1 December 2006): 781–3.
13. Jean Tinguely, For Static (original title: Für Statik), 1958 programmatic text for the ‘Concert for Seven Pictures’ in Düsseldorf; reprinted in Arts/Canada 25 (1968): 4.
14. Jean Tinguely, quoted in Albert Sonnard, ‘L’art motorisé’, Panorama (Paris) (1–7 December 1959): 1–7; cited in Pamela Lee, Chronophobia (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 326.
15. ‘Homage to New York: A Self-Constructing and Self-Destroying Work of Art Conceived and Built by Jean Tinguely, the Museum of Modern Art Sculpture Garden, March 17, 1960, 6:30–7:00 P.M.’
16. André Warnod, ‘Petites Nouvelles des Lettres et des Arts’, Comoedia, 22 February 1913, 3: ‘An exhibition will open this summer which will make people talk. It is a show of sculptures conceived according to theories expressed in my recent manifesto. These statues will be articulated and mobile and will be activated by an engine installed expressly for this purpose.’
17. Umberto Boccioni, ‘Futurist Sculpture’, in Futurism: An Anthology, 118. See also Boccioni, undated manuscript ‘Scultura’, Boccioni papers, Acc. N. 880380, Box 3, Folder 27, Getty Research Institute. Warnod, ‘Petites Nouvelles’, 3.
18. D. A. Pennebaker, Breaking It up at the Museum, 1960, Courtesy of PHfilms.com. Excerpt accessible at https://www.nytimes.com /video/arts/design/100000000761945/tinguely.html (accessed July 1, 2025).
19. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, ‘The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism’, in Lawrence S. Rainey, Christine Poggi, and Laura Wittman, eds., Futurism: An Anthology (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 49–54.
20. Vita Futurista, 1916; lost.
21. ‘Homage to New York: A Self-Constructing and Self-Destroying Work of Art’.
22. Guy Brett, Kinetic Art and the Language of Movement (New York: Reinhold Book Corporation, 1968), 36–7.
23. Douglas M. Davis, Art and the Future: A History/Prophecy of the Collaboration Between Science, Technology and Art (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1975), 123.

Photo Credits:

Fig. 1: Photo: Tate

Fig. 2: © Museum Tinguely, Basel

Fig. 3: Museum Tinguely, Basel, Photo: Fredi Zumkehr, Bildpunkt AG

Fig. 4: Mart, Archivio del ’900, Fondo Depero

Fig. 5: Mart, Archivio del ’900, Fondo Depero

Fig. 6: Photo: Tom Bisig, Basel

Fig. 7: © Estate of Liubov Popova. Photo: Andy Crouch

Fig. 8: © Museum Tinguely, Basel, Photo Christian Baur

Fig. 9: Mart, Archivio del ’900, Fondo Depero

Fig. 10: Fondazioe Ragghianti, Lucca, Photo Library Carlo Ludovico Ragghianti

Fig. 11: Museo di arte moderna e contemporanea di Trento e Rovereto

© 2025, ProLitteris, Zurich, for the reproduced works by Jean Tinguely

© 2025, ProLitteris, Zurich, for the reproduced works by Giacomo Balla

© 2025, ProLitteris, Zurich, for the reproduced works by Fortunato Depero

Ara H. Merjian is professor of Italian studies at New York University and an affiliate of the Institute of Fine Arts and Comparative Literature. He is the author and editor of several books, including Giorgio de Chirico and the Metaphysical City: Nietzsche, Paris Modernism (Yale, 2014) and, most recently, Fragments of Totality: Futurism, Fascism, and the Sculptural Avant-Garde (Yale, 2024) and Futurism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2025).

This contribution is published in conjunction with the conference ‘Jean Tinguely Revisited: Critical Rereadings and New Perspectives’, held from 20 to 22 March 2025.

Keywords

Kinetic sculpture

Dadaism and Futurism

Manifesto culture

Useless machines / Technological repurposing

Destruction and performance

Tinguely Studies, December 2025

Scholarly online journal

Published by Museum Tinguely, Basel

www.tinguely.ch

ISSN 3042-8858