About the Ulmer exhibition of Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely

The first photos of the exhibition "Niki & Jean" come along in inconspicuous black and white, made in the fifties, that stage and confirm the expectations about the famous couple of artists. Niki de Saint Phalle as Cartier model, Jean as eccentric artist and blacksmith in a scrap metal-filled studio.

Because the second room tells us that both during their first encounter immediately decided for each other, the stereotype of the pearl of artificial worlds, who loves in the most subtle cad realism and secretly his body, seems fulfilled. But is this true? And can Jean Tinguely, who was more pursued by the police than by art dealers, escape the suspect, to have in Niki loved her money and the relationship to the elite of photographers and American art scene?

The exhibition at the Ulmer Museum documented over two floors, strictly speaking, with the shop filled with Niki and Jean articles to perform over three floors, the intensity of a relationship and artistic cooperation, which, by how selfish motives ever, produced a wonderful abundance beautiful works of art produced. Maybe hell is paved with good intentions, then we see now Niki and Jean rightly rest near their paradisesprings and -gardens, because in both life they together worked out simply good works instead of intentions.

The major work for the common public space, the Stravinsky Fountain in front of the Pompidou Centre in the eighties and the Tarot Garden in the late seventies and eighties demonstrate that both artists took apart from each other. Tinguely was, when he met Niki, still constructivist, who used scrap metal, but nevertheless mostly comprised the pack to individual made forms, in other words, despite the kinetical alienation, he not really continued the surreal-conceptual line of the Western avant-garde tradition (eg, Marcel Duchamp and Max Ernst).

In a letter to Jean, documented in the film "Who is the monster", sets Niki, in the style of Rimbaud's and Mallarmé's abyss of hell and enthusing, Tinguely's art in relation to the works of the surrealists emigrated in the United States. Although she awakens in the letter the impression as though just to understand what Jean had produced before, even though he and his scrap action "Le Transport“ from 1960, was, in a certain involuntarily halfway and only in the medium of photography alluded to surreal works such as "L'entracte“ - these components were hardly prepared. Also, not before the sensational "Le Transport“, scrap itself became more than just an usable material in the art production of Tinguely. Subsequently, "Le Transport" is entirely a Tinguely's individual work-related experience of the conscious use of the „object trouvé“, known from Duchamp, Rauschenberg and Fluxus. Indeed, it is closer to see the American-style and Nikis good relations with the American art scene - among other things, to Robert Rauschenberg, who also bought works by her - as a trigger.

In the sixties Jean and Niki employ more affectionately quite ridiculous art actions, in which the sometimes tawdry and muddy assemblages from toys by Niki are combined with minimal technology, every time newly constructed figures, used by the artists as objects of destruction. The Ulmer Museum displays the projects of these years, together with a photographic documentation of the content : "Etude pour une fin du monde" Number 1 and 2 from the years 1961 and 1962. In the framework of these projects Tinguely and de Saint Phalle set up racet-like machines, that were blowed up in the air and exploded. The seriousness of the political action was a little reduced - Tinguely's letters to Pontus Hulton show him as more untheoretical in his approach.

Striking at the photos of these pair of wonderfully symbiotic artists are the invariably good portrait photographs shown at the Ulmer Museum. Almost always, these are no accidental recordings but pictures created by professional photographers like Monique Jacot, Lennart Olson or Harry Shunk (the photographer of Yves Klein's "leap into the void"), and in the exhibition always mentioned as authors of the picture. Unfortunately the very sumbtuous-to-read catalog for the exhibition devotes more in the personal and is held in a work-related gesture, chronologically presenting singular works. Thus, we miss an own chapter about these issues – because the high quality of the available photographs of the pair really builds an essential part of the exhibition.

In these photographs is Niki de Saint Phalle not as an accessory at Tinguely's side but as a real partner, or as the main protagonist of the art projects - eg the „shooting pictures“, her personal projects, are opulently displayed. Even more private scenes, often by Monique Jacot, show really a couple, not an artist and his beautiful accessory or an artist and his companion. Although the presumption is suggested, that Niki had relations with the photographer through their career as model, more contacts came with the Swiss woman Monique Jacot and the Sweden Olson, thus, along with Jean Tinguely and Pontus Hulten.

In the sixties, the friendship with Pontus Hulten for the artist couple fruited. Hulten was a founding director of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm since 1958 and knew Tinguely and de Saint Phalle since 1956. In the Mid-60s he invited them to develop a project for the Moderna Museet. The idea for "Hon" and the draft are from Niki, dealing with this walkable, ironically equipped and opened women's body. With „Hon“, Niki de Saint Phalle also inscribed herself in the vanguard of feminist art: The female body is staged as experience without the symbol projections of surrealist art or the instrumental view of the pornografic. "Hon" is thus a prototypical works of the nouveau réalisme, according to Yves Klein, Daniel Spoerri, Tinguely and others who signed the Manifesto in 1960 a "new rapprochement of the perception of reality.".

Preparatory for Niki de Saint Phalle's monumental sculptures were her so-called "Nanas", colourfully painted giant women, which show "Hon" as a logical evolution of the work. Jean was in this and the following sculpture projects especially responsible for the technical realization and the internal architecture. For the artists anyway, it is undisputed that it was community work. All the more regrettable if the accompanying text in the exhibitions tends - with the usual rhetorical means seemingly harmless - to attribut the joint projects to Jean Tinguely: „This biggest object Jean Tinguely ever made is 22.5 m high [...]", „Niki de Saint Phalle , from the model and the outer skin of tiny mirrors accompanied all stages of formation." Although neutral formulations or specifications of the shared responsibilities are sometimes stressed, this seems rather superficial and is more grounded in the approach to representation of something conventional than to a real analysis of this community work and its genesis.

The following works and projects, monumental sculptures like "Hon" (1966), "Le Paradis Fantastique" (1967), "Cyclop" (from 1969), "Golem" (1972) and "Dragon" (1973), but even the subsequent, very famous works from the eighties (such as the Stravinsky Fountain for the Centre Georges Pompidou 1983) are aesthetically in the tradition of Niki's Nanas - not just on the colorful surface painting but also significantly in the unity of surfaces and the figurative aspects.

In Tinguely's constructivist-kinetic metal work came - as the exhibition of the works clearly demonstrates - through Niki's access and influence figurative structure and color. Tinguely has thus generally taken over - what seems such good for his work like de Saint Phalle's takeover of Tinguely's sculptural principle. The destruction of the assemblages of her early phase, that retransforms objects into image, was thus a kind of "self-permission" - albeit 'critical on patriachality' with the words "I shoot on men, fathers, [a.s.o.] "- she gave herself for the takeover of Tinguely's sculptural principle.

The many semi-private documents – enthusiastically designed postcards and love letters, painted and written as for the public - invite to view this relationship and its special problems infinitely precise, perhaps almost as a therapeutic remedy for the two parties openly expressed tensions and competitions, that went along obviously with the intensity of cooperation but not with social overdetermination that permit any 'right life in the wrong'.

At least in respect to the catalogue, that simply navigates the beautiful aspects of life, love and art projects, one desires some more artistic depth, ideally from the self-critical perspective of the museum's collectors and concerning the art historical principles of appreciation. We find an essay by Dr. Andres Pardey, vice director of the Museum Tinguely in Basel – that is not much more than a chronological short description of the exhibited objects and projects-, but Niki very personal childhood memories of Bloum Cardenas from the board of the Charitable Art Foundation in San Diego. We miss an art-historical assessment by the curator of the exhibition, Dr. Brigitte Reinhardt, director of the Ulm museum or the two institutions who care about the artists' complete works.

The exhibition is thus in total visually opulent and, as the catalogue, also in her documental aspects beautiful because of the high quality of the photographs. Furthermore they also stage superficiality, almost decadence, what is not really fair against the difficult, clearly avantgardistic and critical of conventions work de Saint Phalle, Jean Tinguely and even their friends stand for.

Niki & Jean

Exhibition: L'art et l'amour _ Art and Love

Niki de Saint Phalle and Jean Tinguely

30 September 2007 to 06 Januar 2008 January 2008

Ulmer Museum

Marktplatz 9

89073 Ulm

Tel 0731 161 4312

Catalog: Prestel Verlag, 29, - € (hardcover)

Opening hours: Tue-Sun 11-17 Uhr, Thu 11-20 Uhr, Closed on Mondays

Admission: € 6, - / 4, -