Artforum (original) (raw)

To mark the centenary of Swiss artist Jean Tinguely’s birth, Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan has opened a forty-work retrospective of the kinetic-art pioneer’s famously cacophonous art. In a nod to the show—and to other initiatives undertaken under the tinguely100 banner—Artforum looks back to the magazine’s January 1984 issue and to a project created by Tinguely with legendary museum director Pontus Hultén.

As explained in a brief introduction, the portfolio consists of “questions posed by Pontus Hultén to Jean Tinguely, with Tinguely’s replies.” The resulting dialogue, however, is anything but straightforward. “Partly a discourse, partly an art-object,” the ten collage-like pages overflow with Tinguely’s madcap scrawl: handwritten “word-constructions,” eccentric doodles, and Dadaist wordplay and puns. —The editors