Stedelijk Museum | Jean Tinguely

During a trip to Amsterdam over the break I visited the Stedelijk museum. There was a really good range of art and design there, some I was quite inspired by. From contemporary art, to graphic design, furniture and product design, sculpture, painting, and more.

I also liked how the design section laid out posters and printed materials (pamphlets, programs, catalogs, etc) as if they were art objects in their own right. In some ways, presenting it as art but in a different context. The text about the artists in italic is from the museum itself.

Machine Spetacle, Stedelijk website

"I don't know if one can be operative without drawing" stated Tinguely. This room presents an overview of all the ways his works on paper took shape. The variety of drawing styles and techniques is striking ranging from meticulous pen drawings to brightly coloured expressions in chalk, and from dark watercolours to absurd Dadaist collages covered with stickers and feathers (which Tinguely always kept in the pockets of his overalls)

Drawing also played a crucial role in maintaining Tinguely's international network. Through an immense number of letter-drawings he communicated with the curators, collectors, and artists he befriended. The good-humored and personal letters are generally made up of a mix of languages, and are often combined with drawings of current projects.

In this way Tinguely transformed drawing from a traditional medium into an experimental component of the new network society. The catalogs in this room reflect this same tendency towards experimentation. The artist stretched the boundaries of the medium and used innovative forms of publication in order to constantly rewrite his own oeuvre and keep it in motion.

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What I enjoyed about the exhibition was the breadth of Tinguely's work and how across all of the different formats and mediums there was a sense of invention, play, and humour. Another aspect that I appreciated was how he consciously tried to make his work, and consequently, the environment it was placed in, a more open and accessible thing for all.

He encouraged visitors to make work, and his drawing machines (controversially) became the artists themselves, mechanically producing their own works of art.

His sculptures and kinetic artworks were meant to make people laugh, his weird contraptions created confusion yet involved the viewer through the use of buttons and launchpads that activated the machines. As well as that, they were intended for adults and children alike. He had a real do-it-yourself attitude, using scrap materials to bring his ideas to life.