Jean Tinguely and Michael Landy's Kinetic sculptures

Jean Tinguely is a Swiss Kinetic sculptor, he emerged in the 1950s from the Dadaist tradition and best known for his sculptural machines. He created the 'Meta Mechanical' sculptor and then 'Credit card destroying machine'. He was most praised from the credit card machine because it created abstract expressionist drawings for visitors to take away.
Tinguely's machines are funny, subversive and cobbled together from junk, they were deliberately dysfunctional, with a subtle social critique underlying their apparent whimsicality.

Landy was struck by the expressions and responses of the visitors when they came to see the 'Credit card machine' "Everyone had smiles on their faces", he recalls. For a young student, from a background where art was not a consideration, the idea of gallery visiting was something for other people, the show was a revelation. Landy took away with him from this exhibition a so called 'meta-matic' abstract drawing produced by the drawing machine. It could be argued that this one experience set his life on a trajectory that it would otherwise not have taken.

Tinguely did design and make various kinetic sculptures that then inspired Landy to create the 'Credit Card destroying machine' 2010 because the public could interact with the sculpture which moved so people were entertained.

Landy's idea of combining he's newly discovered interest in the stories of the saints with his well established admiration for the works of Tinguely began to form after he had been working at the National Gallery for almost a year. The selection of what saints to work was not immediate, although the first three, Jerome, Catherine and Francis, were decided upon very quickly.