Homage to New York: The Machine That Destroyed Itself at MoMA, 1960
On March 17, 1960, Jean Tinguely's Homage to New York shook, burned and smoked itself apart in MoMA's sculpture garden in 27 minutes, run by a timer built at Bell Labs by Billy Klüver.
On the evening of March 17, 1960, a white machine stood in the sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Jean Tinguely had built Homage to New York from bicycle wheels, a weather balloon, a piano, a radio, an American flag, a bassinet and a toilet, all painted white. It was designed to perform once and destroy itself, and it did, in 27 minutes.
The build started with a letter. In early January 1960, Pontus Hultén asked Billy Klüver, then working on electron beams and lasers at Bell Laboratories, to help Tinguely, who was in town for his first New York show at the Staempfli Gallery. Klüver hauled bicycle wheels from a dealer in Berkeley Heights, New Jersey, then took Tinguely to the Newark dumps for more junk, which they threw over the garden fence from 54th Street at night. Tinguely worked inside a Buckminster Fuller dome in the garden. With a Bell Labs colleague, Klüver built a timer that closed 8 circuits every 3 minutes or so, each setting off part of the destruction; resistors buried in Wood's metal melted it so the supports would collapse.
It had snowed all night, and Tinguely refused to test anything. When the switch closed, Robert Breer poured titanium tetrachloride into the bassinet of ammonia and white smoke rolled over the invited audience. A $10 piano played while a candle on its keys, lit by an overheating resistor, set it alight, "furiously playing away," as the E.A.T. account puts it. The weather balloon never filled, a small cart shot out with its horn blaring into NBC's television equipment, and Robert Rauschenberg's money throwing "mascot" flung a dozen silver dollars into the crowd. Klüver ended up talking to a fireman. The audience applauded and picked through the wreckage for souvenirs.
The bottles of foul smelling liquid failed during the show and broke the next morning, leaving the garden stinking for days. The partnership between an engineer and artists did not end there. The E.A.T. archive files Homage to New York among the activities that led to Experiments in Art and Technology, the group that would stage 9 Evenings at the 69th Regiment Armory 6 years later.
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