On 17 March 1960, at 18:30, the sculpture garden at the Museum of Modern Art in New York was filled with people gathered to witness a work of art 'commit suicide'. It had been constructed by Jean Tinguely using bicycle wheels, motors, metal drums, a bathtub, a pram, an address printing machine and a piano, all painted white; eight metres high by seven metres wide. The museum programme announced what was to occur: a self-constructing and self-destructing work of art. Tinguely had stated that the piece should make people dream and converse, and nothing more: by the following day, nothing would remain.
The device was not an explosive charge. An engineer from Bell Labs, Billy Klüver, constructed a timer with a colleague that closed eight electrical circuits, approximately one every three minutes, over the course of twenty-seven minutes. Each circuit triggered an event: smoke, sound, a drawing, a launched object, a breakage. To topple the structure, they inserted a resistor into a piece of low-melting-point metal; as it heated, it was intended to melt and release the support. Fire was also anticipated: the piano held a candle, and three minutes after it was lit, a bucket of petrol was to tip over onto it. All of this was designed, assembled, and tested.
And it functioned only in part. During the twenty-seven minutes, events occurred: there was white smoke, sounds, drawings produced by the machine, and the piano caught fire while continuing to play, just as planned. A piece that Robert Rauschenberg had added to the assembly fired a dozen silver dollars into the audience around the seventh minute. However, according to the account of Klüver, who assembled the circuits, three things failed. A weather balloon that was to inflate and burst remained hanging because there was insufficient gas in the tank. The mechanism intended to release bottles of foul-smelling liquids so they would roll and shatter did not activate during the performance; it activated the following morning during the cleanup, and the museum garden stank for several days. Furthermore, the structure did not collapse entirely: parts remained standing.
In the end, with pieces still burning, a fireman sprayed the machine with water. The popular version recounts it in reverse: the fireman did not prevent the work from being destroyed nor did he interrupt anything midway. The sequence had already reached its twenty-seven minutes. What he extinguished were the remains, and those remains existed not due to his intervention, but because several mechanisms had failed beforehand. The work did not remain unfinished because of the firemen. It remained unfinished because it broke down.
Klüver recounts that the audience applauded and rushed towards the debris to collect souvenirs. And herein lies the paradox. Tinguely had promised that by the following day nothing would remain, yet the following day quite a lot remained. So much so that today, sixty-five years later, two fragments can be seen in two museums. The MoMA preserves one, which Tinguely himself donated, catalogued with its inventory number, its materials described with curatorial precision—painted metal, fabric, tape, wood, and tyres—and its dimensions exact to the millimetre. The Museum Tinguely in Basel holds another, featuring a horn and some pram wheels. A work conceived to leave no trace possesses a collection record.
The irony is evident in the distinction between destroying a work and programming its destruction. When an individual burns a painting, the painting ceases to exist. When a work is designed to self-destruct, that destruction becomes part of the plan and, like any plan, it may fail. In doing so, it produces an intermediate residue, debris that has outlived the author's intent. This debris is not documentation of the work, such as a photograph or a film. It is the work itself, incomplete in its disappearance.
And the museum did what it knows how to do with an object: it preserved it. The institution that had invited a machine to destroy itself ended up archiving what the machine failed to destroy of itself, and it archived it with the same care it accords a Cézanne. There is no error in this, nor any institutional contradiction; it is simply that a museum possesses no protocol for nothingness. Faced with twisted iron that was a work yesterday and is a remnant today, it can only assign it a number, measure it, and store it.
Tinguely intended for his machine to make people dream for an evening and then vanish. He succeeded in the former and failed in the latter due to a lack of gas in a tank and a jammed mechanism. His debris has remained in two collections ever since, catalogued, measured, photographed, and waiting for someone to observe it. It is the most contrary fate that could befall a work created not to endure, and it arrived by way of a malfunction.
On the open conversation
This text originates from a verified case: the self-destructing machine that Jean Tinguely set in motion in the MoMA garden on 17 March 1960, which failed to destroy itself completely. I distinguish the fact—the 27-minute programme, the planned fire, the mechanisms that failed according to the engineer who assembled them—from the popular version—that the fire brigade interrupted the work, when the sequence had already concluded and only the remains were extinguished. And I highlight the documentary paradox: a work conceived to leave no trace now has two fragments catalogued in two museums. Should anyone wish to intervene from the perspective of kinetic art, the conservation of the ephemeral, or the history of performance, this notebook remains open.
Sources
Original MoMA programme: Homage to New York: a self-constructing and self-destroying work of art conceived and built by Jean Tinguely, Sculpture Garden, 17 March 1960, 18:30-19:00. (The current record for one fragment indicates 18 March, in contradiction to the programme, the museum archive, and witness accounts.)
Account by Billy Klüver, the Bell Laboratories engineer who constructed the timer, preserved by Experiments in Art and Technology: the balloon that failed to burst due to a lack of gas, the bottle mechanism that activated the following day, the burning piano while it was playing, and 'It was all over in 27 minutes'. The MoMA record describes some of these episodes differently.
Collaborators: Klüver (engineering and timer), Robert Rauschenberg (materials and his piece Money Thrower), and Robert Breer (construction, smoke, and the film Homage to Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York, 1960).
Preserved fragments: Fragment from Homage to New York (MoMA, obj. 227.1968, gift of the artist) and Homage to New York (Klaxon), Fragment (Museum Tinguely, Basel). Additionally, sketches, photographs by David Gahr, and the film by Breer.