Jean Tinguely’s Study for an End of the World No 2

Widely regarded as the first historical fine art “installation” in the greater Las Vegas area, Jean Tinguely’s Study for an End of the World No. 2 (1962) marked a pivotal moment in the region’s cultural history. In that year, Swiss painter and kinetic sculptor Jean Tinguely was invited by NBC to create an artwork in Las Vegas for David Brinkley’s Journal, a nationally televised news feature.

Rather than producing a traditional sculpture, Tinguely collected scrap materials—bicycle wheels, shopping carts, and other debris—from the Las Vegas city dump and constructed a series of sculptural machines in the Flamingo Hotel’s parking lot, which had been cordoned off to serve as his open-air studio. On March 21, 1962, Tinguely transported these sculptures in a colorful caravan to Jean Dry Lake, a playa located roughly fifty-five miles south of Las Vegas. There, he arranged seven sculptures on the lakebed and, at precisely 4:51 P.M., detonated them using dynamite, firecrackers, and smoke bombs in an explosive spectacle witnessed by an audience of journalists and photographers from outlets including LIFE magazine and The Saturday Evening Post. Brinkley noted on the broadcast that it “was the biggest collection of reporters since they had the atomic bomb tests out here fifteen years ago.”[1]

Tinguely’s partner and collaborator, Niki de Saint Phalle—herself an emerging art star renowned for her “shooting paintings” created with a .22 rifle—helped assemble the plastic explosives in their Flamingo Hotel room. The resulting destruction on the dry lakebed unfolded over the course of an hour, amid a chaotic array of wires and a makeshift control booth.

Study for an End of the World No. 2 was more than an art happening; it was a pointed critique of material excess and the absurdity of consumer culture, delivered with the humor and theatricality for which Tinguely was known. The piece anticipated later art-machine destruction spectacles such as those by Survival Research Laboratories and the large-scale installations of Burning Man in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert. Tinguely’s project also carried undertones of Cold War anxiety, playfully echoing the nuclear tensions that loomed over the Nevada Test Site and its downwind communities.

As art historian Emily Scott writes in her 2012 essay “Desert Ends,” Tinguely’s event was “thoroughly infused with the military-technological” and melded “the theatricality of Hollywood and the media savvy of a Madison Avenue advertising executive.”[2] She observes that the choice of Jean Dry Lake as the venue was far from accidental. The stark playa visually echoed Yucca Flat, the infamous Nevada Test Site roughly ninety miles to the north, where 739 aboveground and underground nuclear detonations were conducted during the 1950s. “Jean Dry Lake operates in this piece as a double for Yucca Flat, a nearly identical-looking playa on the Nevada Test Site… ground zero for dozens of atomic tests, many of which wererelayed to the public via the mass media and in elaborate propaganda campaigns by the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FDCA) throughout the 1950s,” Scott explains.[2]

Through this pioneering act, Tinguely effectively inaugurated the concept of large-scale, site- specific installation art in Southern Nevada—a radical gesture that not only foreshadowed future artistic interventions in desert landscapes but also wove together spectacle, media critique, and geopolitical commentary in the stark vastness of the Nevada desert.

Footnotes

1. David Brinkley, quoted in David Brinkley’s Journal, NBC News Broadcast, 1962.
2. Emily Eliza Scott, “Desert Ends,” Art Journal, 2012.