"I wish I’d been there. On the night of 28 November 1970, in front of the Duomo in Milan, a sheet of purple drapery was removed to reveal a ten-metre-high golden penis, with a pair of massive golden papier-mâché balls on the plinth at its base. When darkness fell, a firecracker went off, and then another, as sparks and smoke issued from the tip, with louder explosions following, rockets shooting out everywhere, until the whole thing was a tower of flames erupting into the sky. Somewhere in the crowd a man sang ‘O Sole Mio’; within half an hour the structure had burned down.
This was Jean Tinguely’s self-immolating sculpture La Vittoria, or ‘Suicide of the Machine’. It was the culmination of a series of events celebrating, or mourning the death of, Nouveau réalisme, the movement founded in 1960 by the art critic Pierre Restany along with Tinguely, Yves Klein and others. The Nouveau réalistes were Europe’s answer to Pop Art, dedicated to the ‘poetic recycling of urban, industrial and advertising reality’ through collage, assemblage and Dadaist performance. It was also a giant fuck-you to whatever you like: the patriarchy, the Church, the sanctity of museum-bound art. As part of the festival, Tinguely’s wife, Niki de Saint Phalle, executed one of her Tirs, firing a gun at capsules of paint which exploded over an altar."
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