Michael Landy in conversation with Richard Calvocoressi
Leeds Art Gallery 30/11/12
…continued
Landy also showed us his film on Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York (1960) entitled H.2.N.Y. (2007). He cited Tinguely: He said “It should come from the dump and end up at the dump.” There was a newspaper article reviewing the work with the headline “Wacky artist of destruction”. Peter Selz is on the film explaining that performance art didn’t really exist at that time and that it was in a way the first performance by a machine.” Billy Klüver was Tinguely’s electrical engineer collaborating on the construction and noted that most good machines self-destruct but Tinguely’s constructively self-destructed. He also points out that this was a machine that would not see the inside of a museum unless ther was a collector in the audience. The remains were taken to the city dump where they came from. Tinguely had asked other NY artists to contribute and Bob Rauschenberg was one who immediately said yes. At the last minute Tinguely painted the sculpture white to stand out against the dull landscape but it snowed overnight before the event so Tinguely asked the workmen to paint the snow black – which they refused.
The event was attended by the gallery’s invite list – the arty and influential of New York. John Cage was there. The audience thought the contraption was functional and waited around for hours in the cold before anything happened – confused and bemused. The event had a timeline built into into beginning with piano playing itself and a text scroll but both of these failed to work properly – the piano only playing three notes throughout and the text scrolling backwards. The ‘suicide carriage’ that was supposed to propel itself out of the structure and drown irtelf in the pond failed and Tinguely later donated it to MOMA which remains the largest remaining piece of the sculpture although many peple in the audience took pieces home as souvenirs or mementos of the occasion – quite possibly the first time this had happened at an art event.
H.2.N.Y (2007) is apparently screening at Tate Britain until 5 January 2014 in Art under Attack: Histories of British Iconoclasm http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-britain/exhibition/art-under-attack-histories-british-iconoclasm and Landy and others in the exhibition talk about their work in the Guardian 28 September 2013 http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2013/sep/28/tate-britain-art-attack-artists-sabotage
