In January 1960, Swiss artist Jean Tinguely crossed the Atlantic on the Queen Elizabeth to Manhattan, which he’d never seen before. He spoke little English but immediately started planning and assembling a sculptural homage to the city—a self-destructing machine, actually—that he decided needed to be exhibited in the outdoor sculpture garden of the Museum of Modern Art.
The museum gave him permission and an acetylene torch, then stood back. Tinguely built the machine in part with steel tubing, used motors, a powerful electric fan, an orange weather balloon, 80 bicycle wheels, smoke signals, a car horn, a radio nailed to an upright piano and an address-labeling machine rigged to strike a bell.
Once completed and activated before a large crowd, Homage to New York smoked and trembled. The piano caught fire but continued to play a three-note dirge. A rhythm was tapped out on a washing-machine drum. The labeler thrashed and chattered while the horn shrieked. The crowd loved it and although the machine didn’t fully self destruct, “it managed nevertheless to execute a great many wholly unexpected and startling feats,” according to art critic Calvin Tomkins.
I recalled this tale tonight at the sold-out Sigur Rós1 concert Allison and I attended in the Museum of Modern Art’s Agnes Gund Garden Lobby, which looks out into that sculpture garden through a two-story wall of windows. The sun set over the city as the band began while giant spherical lamps on posts positioned just outside the window-wall glowed with shifting colors and patterns. The band’s music wasn’t as cacophonous as Tinguely’s yet just as unusual, transcendent and loud.
Through interweaving layers of delay, distortion and echo, lead singer and guitarist Jón Þór Birgisson crooned in falsetto—often in a made-up language—and sawed his electric guitar with a cello bow with such ferocity that he frayed the bowstring to a chaotic bundle of filaments, which he then whipped into the audience. Bassist Georg Hólm bounced out a constant rhythm on his bass with a drumstick for the song “Hafsól.” Drummer Orri Páll Dýrason rocked the brushes on more introspective song segments but for the loud bits whaled through several sets of sticks. Most of the band, including keyboardist Kjartan Sveinsson, got a chance on the boards—synths large and small, an organ, a glockenspiel. At times all four band members were playing keys at once.
I’d never seen Sigur Rós perform before now. They’re young guys from Iceland so most publicity shots I’d seen depicted them in cable-knit sweaters, crouching impishly on a caldera, but tonight Birgisson and Hólm were dressed in what resembled crisp, modern versions of Les Misérables-era activewear, accented with a few Adam Ant-style feathers. It seemed strangely appropriate the band shared stage space with Rodin’s craggy bronze sculpture of a robed Balzac.
A string quartet of young ladies dressed like flappers sat behind the band and provided symphonic swells, pizzicato and, for one song, exchanged their strings for cavalry drums. Midway through an early song, a male brass quintet, dressed and gloved in white, uniforms laced with golden braids and buttons, faces speckled with pearlescent glitter, marched down unexpectedly from the second-floor galleries while playing along. Later they emerged unaccompanied, awkwardly clutching sheet music, to play an impromptu and stirring rendition of the Icelandic national anthem in celebration of the country’s independence day as a republic (June 17th, 1944). The crowd was invited to sing along but only the flappers seemed to know the lyrics.
The band played my favorite of theirs, the soaring, eight-minute “Olsen Olsen.” Towards the end of the set, the audience clapped along to the speed-freaky “Gobbledigook” until its collective hands got sore. After the encore and a joint theater-style line-bow from every musician onstage, we exited over the piles of plastic cups and empty Grolsch bottles, strange debris for the stately slate floor of a world-famous museum, though less strange than the burnt machine-remains that once littered its garden.
Bonus Link: Concert photos by Brooklyn Vegan. Note the second shot from the top, in which I appear to be clutching my junk.
1 Pronounced, according to the band, sih-ur rose; roll those R’s and say rose very quickly. [back]