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

“In this Artforum Dossier, we have gathered texts that focus on artistic practices that reflexively engage with the specific materiality of celluloid—the transparent plastic that served as the most common substrate for moving images before the advent of analog and digital video. These practices typically focus less on storytelling than on the aesthetic possibilities of directly manipulating celluloid film stock, creating sequences of celluloid film frames, or running celluloid film strips through projectors. The results usually emphasize our perceptual experience of light, color, sound, pattern, movement, and space—that is, those elements that provide the language of all moving-image experiences.”
—Tina Rivers Ryan