Jangling Man

Over Duesseldorf last week, a dark, beetle-browed young man leaned from the window of a low-flying Cessna and shoveled out handbills by the thousand. "Everything moves. Nothing stands still," they proclaimed. "Stop building cathedrals and pyramids which crumble like lumps of sugar! Stop resisting changeability! Be free! Live!" In the streets below, one man picked up a copy, read it, then shook his fist at the plane. Artist Jean Tinguely, 33, was delighted. "Some will say, 'very good.' Others will object. The overall result will be just what I wanted: total confusion."

Total confusion was what Duesseldorf found in Tinguely's show of 17 "Meta-Mechanisms" in the Galerie Schmela. The Meta-Mechanisms were constructions of stovepipe-black sheet metal from which sharp, whitewashed metal fragments on wire stems sprouted like weird abstract flowers. Driven by hidden electric motors, they jiggled, skittered and bounced. Some spun like mad pinwheels, others rotated gravely like segments of an ear trying vainly to reassemble itself. Most were accompanied by sound effects as hidden camshafts thumped cowbells or old teakettles. The opening was notable for three eulogies read simultaneously by three admirers ("An apparatus of Tinguely is useless. An apparatus of Jean Tinguely is meaningful. An apparatus of Tinguely moves only to move").

Born in Switzerland, Jean Tinguely was an early rebel, was expelled from school after school and took up art in desperation at the age of 14. Nine years ago, he quit Switzerland in disgust ("They're suffocating in security and drowning in comfort"), settled in a lean-to shack in Paris' scruffy Impasse Ronsin. There, in a litter of old iron, cooky crumbs and whirling clockwork, Tinguely constructs his "abstractions," erratically watched over by his wife Eva. Says her husband: "She paints the kind of things Edgar Allan Poe would have, if he'd been able to paint. See the type?"

So far, few customers have proved willing to pay $200 to $1,000, which Tinguely asks for his moving abstractions. But Tinguely has a new gadget, which harnesses one of his machines to a crayon or pen. When a slug is dropped in the slot, the machine traces circles, ellipses and swirls on a piece of paper. A friend is manufacturing the slugs, each marked "Good for One Tinguely." At his next exhibition, visitors will be invited to buy the slugs at perhaps 500 francs apiece. For a mere 5,000 francs more, Tinguely will consent to sign the result.

Despite lack of sales, Tinguely has his critical admirers. One critic has called him a new Prometheus "who has subdued the demon machine, forcing it to produce satisfyingly random results." Another has hailed "an entirely revolutionary art," adding: "This art knows neither beginning nor end nor future; only eternal transformation. It is the exemplary materialization of relativism." Tinguely agrees. Says he: "In my paintings, there is only pure event, pure transformation. If you want to stop the painting and look at it, don't buy my work. Go buy a Van Gogh."

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