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Rainey Knudson

5. Jean Tinguely, Furs

Jean Tinguely, Fourrures (Furs), 1962. Sheet steel base, steel rods, fur pelts, horsehair, and electric motor

The MFAH owns a wonderful cache of Jean Tinguely’s 1960s mechanical sculptures, which are on display with a video showing how they work. I’ve written about La Bascule VII (The Rocker), but the most intriguingly odd is Fourrures (Furs), which dangles fox stoles that fashionable ladies wore back in the day. In the video, the furs jerk up and down, “whether in a frenzy of mating or attacking is left for the viewer to decide,” the text says. Comical and macabre, Furs is meaningful for its studied disavowal of meaning, for riding the postmodern wave that wanted to demolish “art.”


 

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