For Statics

For Statics is a text-based print with a manifesto from Jean Tinguely reading:

Everything moves continuously. Immobility does not exist. Don’t be subject to the influence of out-of-date concepts. Forget hours, seconds and minutes. Accept instability. Live in Time. Be static – with movement. For a static of the present movement. Resist the anxious wish to fix the instantaneous, to kill that which is living.

Stop insisting on ‘values’ which can only break down. Be free, live. Stop painting time. Stop evoking movements and gestures. You are movement and gesture. Stop building cathedrals and pyramids which are doomed to fall into ruin. Live in the present, live once more in Time and by Time – for a wonderful and absolute reality.

The print was produced for Tinguely’s work, Concert of Seven Pictures, exhibited at Galeria Schmela in 1959, when he dropped 150,000 copies of the text from an aeroplane across Düsseldorf, Germany.

Tinguely was interested in the relationship of time to machines. He once was fired from a department store for ripping a clock from the wall, as he insisted you cannot buy time. His manifesto ‘For Statics’ urges people to live in the present. His call to ‘Be static – with movement’ reflects his interest in kinetic art, of which he was a pioneer, having introduced movement into his work from 1948. He created mechanical sculptures, auto-destructive sculptures or performances. His work has been said to ‘take the place of the old fashioned circus’. [1] He was included in the first ever exhibition on kinetic art, Le Mouvement, at Galerie Denise René in 1955.

Also in 1959, Tinguely gave a lecture at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London about his theory on stability in modern machine movements. He himself sat motionless and silently, whilst two tape recordings played. The first was his own voice, whilst a second recording included an English woman interrupting and correcting his English.

Tania Moore, June 2021

Read More