Homage to New York?

"A machine that destroys itself," was the billing, and it proved irresistible to Manhattan's earnest pursuers of the avantgarde. Last week some 250 of them braved cold and slush to watch as Switzerland's Jean Tinguely fiddled and fussed with his 27-ft.-high tangle of white-painted iron in the garden of the Museum of Modern Art. An hour and a half later, the suicide-fated machine started flaming and sawing at its mixed-up insides, turned balky despite several judiciously aimed kicks from its creator, got doused betimes by an anxious fireman, and had to be finished off with an ax.

Tinguely had spent three weeks preparing his gizmo, which he called Homage to New York. "New York is a phallic city," he explained, adding that he could not possibly have conceived of a suicidal sculpture anywhere else. His materials included a meteorological trial balloon, many bottles (to break), an upright piano, a gocart, a bathtub, hammers and saws, 80 bicycle wheels and sundry other items, picked for the most part from New Jersey dumps.

The crowd was patient, and only booed the intruding fireman (who may have remembered that the Modern was almost destroyed by fire a scant two years ago). What the connoisseurs witnessed for their pains was an unbeautiful joke with no punch line. As the New York Times's Critic John Canaday gently put it: "Mr. Tinguely makes fools of machines while the rest of mankind permits machines to make fools of them. Tinguely's machine wasn't quite good enough, as a machine, to make his point."

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