Tinguely's Heureka Returns to Zurich

Irony, fantasy and fun are words that easily come to mind when viewing the works of  Niki de Saint Phalle, like her Guardian Angel in Zurich's main railway station; but these words also describe the giant, kinetic sculptures of her husband, Jean Tinguely.

A couple of weeks ago I walked along the promenade on Lake Zurich's sunny right bank, admired Henry Moore's Sheep-Piece, but was disappointed to discover that Tinguely's "Heureka" was missing.  It had been standing here at the Zurichhorn since the 1960s, and it's not the sort of sculpture that could easily be stolen.  Some time spent distractedly searching on Google revealed that Heureka had been removed, for the first time since its installation in 1967, and loaned to the city of Amsterdam for its ArtZuid exhibition.  But that exhibition had ended nearly a year ago. What a mystery.  Then, purely by chance, I picked up a newspaper in a train a few days ago and discovered a short article describing how Tinguely's massive sculpture was in the process of being reassembled at its home in Zurich.

And so I set off, once again, along the promenade, passed the ice-cream stands and skateboarders, passed the Le Corbusier house and the Museum Bellerive.  As I walked through the maze of flowers and shrubs, there is was, silhouetted against the sky, gleaming in its freshly painted black splendor.

Heureka was commissioned as an exhibit at the Swiss State Exhibtion in Lausanne in 1964. It was bought by an industrialist and donated to the city of Zurich. Tinguely's kinetic works are often described as parodies of the consumerist, industrial society. The parts all move, but they  achieve nothing.  Like Facebook, the blogosphere and the frenzied  traffic of Twitter, the pieces work together, aimlessly making a lot of noise; there's a lot of huffing and puffing and loud banging. But the mountains beyond take no notice. They simply stand in their white splendor.

Sometimes described as a surrealist, Tinguely was certainly influenced by the Zurich born Dada art movement. At 5:00 pm every afternoon his machine comes alive and bursts into useless, Dadaist activity.



Tinguely constructed Heureka in 1962-1963. The pace of our lives has accelerated quite a bit since then. A lot of movement, a lot of noise, a continual series of Eureka moments that, for the most part, distract us from what we should be doing. As Pascal wrote: "All of man's misfortunes comes from one thing, which is not knowing how to sit quietly in a room." While poking fun at us in an ironic way, this is what Tinguely's art teaches us.

Henry Moore's Sheep Piece by Lake Zurich

Just a short walk beyond the Museum for the Cultural History of Coffee (I couldn't do without a museum of coffee culture, could you?),  a few steps from the yachts berthed on Lake Zurich, two bronze shapes graze upon a green hillock: Henry Moore's beautiful "Sheep -Piece".

Moore himself recorded:

I have always liked sheep, and there is one big sculpture of mine that I called Sheep Piece  because I placed it in a field and the sheep enjoyed it and the lambs played around it. Sheep are just the right size for the kind of landscape setting that I like for my sculptures, a horse or a cow would reduce the sense of monumentality. Perhaps the sheep also belong to the landscape of my boyhood in Yorkshire.
Henry Moore quoted in Henry Moore’s Sheep Sketchbook, Henry Moore and Kenneth Clark, Thames and Hudson, London 1980.


There are no sheep sheltering under the Zurich piece, though children, instead of lambs, cannot resist its charm.

The sculpture, from 1971/'72, was put on display here in 1976 for a Moore exhibtion at the lakeside that attracted 74,000 visitors.  A private person bought it and gave it to the city.  And here it still stands, large and brooding, soaking up the sunrays, or heaped with snow, or rain running off its sleek surface.  Day and night, everyday, it suffers whatever the elements throw at it, whatever indignity humans inflict upon it, its gentle, curved forms a reminder of the silent animals that we admire but choose to eat.

NOVA in Zurich Main Railway Station

Is it art or is it science?

Hanging from the ceiling of Zurich Main Railway Station, just in front of Mario Merz's The Philosopher's Egg and caught by the gaze of Niki de Saint Phalle's Guardian Angel, we find the NOVA. Designed in 2006 by scientists at Zurich's Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the founding of this world class university (ranked in the Times Higher Education Supplement as the best in continental Europe), NOVA provides a sort of dialogue across the frontiers that lie between art, science, mathematics and society. At least, that's the theory.

NOVA consists of 25,000 luminescent spheres, each equipped with 12 light emitting diodes, capable of generating 16,000,000 colours. I don't know how many combinations can be generated, but I'm pretty sure its an awfully big number - probably bigger than can fit on any regular calculator. NOVA can refresh itself at a rate of 25  pictures per second.  I have no idea what that really means, but it certainly wowed me when I first heard it.

And here is the neat thing: you, the spectator, can participate in this work (hence the society part).  At the group meeting point in the station stands a large, very tall glass box with a touch screen embedded into the glass.  You can draw your finger across the screen, then stand back and watch the effet on NOVA.  These days you can even  hold your mobile phone (if you have one - I don't) to the screen and scan your text message onto the NOVA.  Funnily enough, I've tried this, using a friend's phone, when looking for a student who was late at the group meeting point.  The student's name appeared on  NOVA, but the student himself never turned up. Maybe it's a good way of making students disappear!

NOVA reacts to sound, especially music. When it turned five, in 2011, a 50 piece brass band played in the station and generated eletrical fireworks. Alas, NOVA is destined only to reach the age of 6. It is supposed to be dismantled sometime in 2012.

Zurich City

Since 2006 Zurich is consistently rated among the top two cities of the world for its quality of life. The survey is carried our by Mercer consultants of London. The rankings are based on 39 criteria divided over 10 categories, including things like: availability of musical and theatrical perfromances, quality of water and air, access to nature and recreational facilities, level of crime and freedom of expression. Many governments and corporations use Mercer's Quality of Living Survey in order to determine the level of renumration to be paid to those destined for hardship posts. Being sent to Zurich certainly does not qualify as a hardship posting.

In 2011 Zurich was again rated number 2, with two other Swiss cities in the top ten.  Switzerland may not be at the top  when it comes to things like football, but when it comes to making their city's livable, no other country performs so well. This film clip might be a piece of propaganda, but it does give an impression of what makes this city so livable.

Mario Merz's The Philosopher's Egg

At 55,000 square meters, Zurich Railway Station is one of the largest covered spaces in central Europe. Not just a busy terminus, it is a place that is rich in works of modern art.  In a previous post I briefly discussed Niki de Saint Phalles' Guardian Angel.



Mario Merz: The Philospher's Egg

High above the commuters, we have Mario Merz's The Philosopher's Egg. The work is inspired by the Fibonacci progression, that famous mathematical sequence, discovered in the 13th century by Leonardo of Pisa (Leonardo Fibonacci). Fibonacci's infinite progression (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, 144, 233, 377, etc) which is built by adding a number to the following number (1+1=2; 1+2=3; 2+3=5; 3+5=8: etc) apparently reveals the hidden mathematical design that underlies most natural growth, especially spirals. It defines the growth of snail shells, plants and leafs, pine cones, pineapples and the skins of reptiles; it describes the number of petals in a flower, the geometry of seed heads, the arrangement of leaves along a stem, the lumps on a cauliflower, the way a pineapple fits together.  As the mathematician Ian Stewart writes in his new book  The Mathematics of Life (New York, Basic Books, 2011) "Marigolds typically have 13 petals. Asters have 21. Many daisies have 34 petals; if not, they usually have 55 or 89." (p. 39)

Leonardo of Pisa first discovered the Fibonacci sequence when he was studying animals in 1202 - specifically the reproductive rates of rabbits. (Mind you, although it is generally claimed that he discovered the progression, it was known to Indians scientists at least a thousand years earlier.) Merz has chosen to focus on animals in his work of art, composed of spirals of neon tubes punctuated with birds and a large reindeer.

In an obituary for the artist that appeared in the New York Times, Roberta Smith wrote that Mario Merz's work was "permeated with ideas of growth and fecundity and spreading across floors, walls and ceilings -- had an exuberance that could be alternately carnivalesque or spare, pastoral and populist."

It is said (by some) that Merz's construction enhances natural and spiritual energy. I'm not sure. I would describe this work as being spare and populist, without being popular. I must admit, the first time I saw it was one July and, for the life of me, I thought the good Swiss hadn't bothered to remove their Christmas decorations. Perhaps it was the reindeer.

Mario Merz: The Philospher's Egg

I've been looking at The Philosopher's Egg, on and off, for eleven years. I would like to say it is growing on me. Perhaps it is, but only very, very slowly. The increase of my appreciation certainly does not parallel the Fibonacci progression.

Niki de Saint Phalle's Guardian Angel at Zurich's Main Station

In 1847 the first rail connection opened in Switzerland, running from Baden to Zurich. And in 1871 a  new main station opened in Zurich. It still stands, like a Prussian neo-renaissance palace, astride the prestigious (and world's most expensive) main street, the Bahnhofstrasse.

But let us step inside the Hauptbahnhof, and discover the treasure that hangs from its ceiling, protecting the travellers.

In 1997, in order to commerorate 150 years of Swiss railroads, one of the world's leading artists was commissioned to produce one of her easily recognisable gigantic and powerful women.  Over 11 metres long, and weighing 1.2 tons, it was made in the USA, shipped to Rotterdam in three pieces, brought by boat up the Rhine to Basel, then transported by low roader to Zurich and reassembled. And here it hangs, Niki de Saint Phalle's Guardian Angel.

It is, of course, wild and daring in its madness. She sweeps above the tiny, busy commuters, heavy but wonderfully nimble, a gloriously overdressed female Sumo wrestler (which might explain de Saint Phalle's incredible popularity in Japan.)

I was first introduced to the work of Niki de Saint Phalle by a girlfriend during a trip to Paris in 1985.  We sat in a cafe near the Pompidou Centre, at the Place Igor Stravinsky, listening to the rain and laughing at de Saint Phalle's wonderfully cheery fountain. I fell in love and married the girl.

Today de Saint Phalle's angel of the station still casts her protection over us.

Winter Tales

Paris, 2012

I've certainly noticed some weirding of the weather in recent months.  First there was Europe's seemingly endless mild autumn, with balmy temperatures that ran right into December. Even Switzerland experienced a drought - seven weeks without precipitation. Then, suddenly the great freeze descended on most of northern Europe, enveloping the continent in sub-zero temperatures for seven or eight weeks - literally, a cold that killed. I don't think I ever experienced such a prolonged period of sub-zero temperatures in my life. It was followed by what seemed like an early summer in March.  For weeks we dined on our patio every evening, enjoying temperatures of over 20 degrees. Spring had been skipped.  And then, along came now - a reversion to early spring - in late April!  Some sunny spells, lots of scattered showers, and I'm wearing my overcoat again. Of course Chaucer had written of this over 600 years ago:

                                   Whan that aprill with his shoures soote
                                   The droghte of march hath perced to the roote

And T.S.Eliot, writing in the shadow of the 20th century's Great War, had warned us that:

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.

But neither  mentioned that March is hot, and late April is cold.

In February, during the great freeze, I took the train to Paris for a history conference.  It was so cold, they even had to cancel the Ireland-France rugby match because the pitch was frozen - no joke for the 10,000 Irish fans who had made the journey.  But what struck me were the homeless in Paris and the soup kitchens on the street.  The Canal Saint Martin looks pretty when it is frozen, but the homeless huddled in blankets in doorways showed how brutal urban life can be. On a Saturday night I mixed with the revelers on the Place de la Bastille and noticed an entire family, mother, father and two children, huddled inside a telephone box, wrapped in sleeping bags.. As I returned to my hotel that night I shuffled past a couple of dozen muffled and silent men and women eating soup that had been handed out by volunteers; the temperature was around ten degrees below zero.

Paris, 2012

A couple of days after returning to Zurich I visited the exhibition in the Kunsthaus "Winter Tales". The exhibtion has been organized in collaboration with Vienna's Kunsthistorisches Museum. I enjoyed it immensely.  Not only can the exhibition boast of a number of startling and surprising works, but it possesses a great narrative power that carried me along.  Winter was once a time to be feared, with freezing temperatures and food supplies imperiled, but this exhibition lets us see how the dark season was tamed and, especially among the democratic Dutch, how the winter became a time for all, rich and poor, high and low, adult and child, to hit the ice and enjoy skating, either as a participant or just as an observer enjoying the spectacle.

Pieter Brueghel the Younger, 1601

During the Enlightenment the act of skating had become a symbol of freedom. The bourgeois citizen could enjoy his leisure time, but it is with the onset of the French Revolution (that brings the middle class burgher to power), that he can really swing his arms in freedom as he skates away on the thin ice of a new age, like a living, dynamic and daring statue of liberty, top hat and all.

Pierre Maximilien Delafonteine, 1798

Of course the spectacular ferocity of the Russian winter that ravaged Napoleon's army ignited the interest and retained the attention of the romantics for some decades.

Boissard de Boisdenier, 1835

However, by the end of the 19th century winter seemed to have been tamed, providing Monet simply with an excuse to challenge himself and create a study in white, a study of the act of painting itself - white on white, with the single black object, "The Magpie".

Monet, 1869

And winter provided Munch with the opportunity to paint, well, what else, but Munch (did he ever paint anything else?); the gnarled Norwegian winter landscape as a self portrait, a mirror of the anguished state of mind of the self-obsessed artist.

Munch, 1900

Of course history is never linear. No true narrative travels in a straight line. Winter had not been tamed for everyone. Winter had not become simply a playground, or or an excuse to experiment in painting or to indulge in self-analysis.  As always, they still had the poor.

Fritz von Uhde, 1890

In Fritz von Uhde's painting "A Difficult Walk (Walking Towards Bethlehem"), we are reminded that in late 19th century Europe, after decades of industrial progress, Mary and Joseph still walked the streets of winter looking for a place at the inn. 

And the poor are still in our midst in the glitzy, consumerist and technologically smart 21st century. In many of Europe's large urban areas this winter, like on the streets of Paris, places at the inn were limited.