| |
 Arman Interviewed by Michel Giroud
Ever since his childhood, until he left art school, Arman never ceased to draw or make sketches. All his future word is already prepared. Like with the old masters, it is outlined and planned out with diagrams, schemes and graphic notes. Such preparation with drawings and texts allows the precision of each project to be understood. A clear approach to the whole work, and a theoretical reasoning, consistent to each piece, predetermined like a musical score “in progress”, leaves nothing to chance while the work is executed by Arman and his assistants. Like Picasso, there have been hundreds of notebooks and sketchpads. Arman’s ideas are not revealed by a theoretical body of declarations, but by a series of drawings. His aesthetics should be considered from the point of view of the systematic in which chance is calculated and controlled. In this way, a veritable set theory is constructed – a combination of his personal taste, his own family context and art of his time. Arman renovates and makes more profound the role of the object in our society, and today he offers a new reading of his work which is part of a general concern with the systematic. The Accumulations have such a breadth and power that it is clear Arman has invented a style and a vision that is among one of the greatest.
In a interview with Michel Giroud, Arman specified the importance of the systematic in his work.“The systematic manifests itself in the way of working, of thinking, of exploring variations of an idea. I cannot begin a series of works until it has been planned out. I continue to experiment with different variations until I reach a certain point of disgust. For example with the paintings, after getting tired of the “all over chaud”, I’ll begin a cold series – the same with the accumulations of the collection. Otherwise the diversity, by its repetition, leads to a warming up. I proceed as with a piano, with chromatic or normal scales. I systematize them by the number of pieces chosen, by the strategy used b y the number of pieces made. My approach is conceptual, rational, not at all instinctive. Chance , despite its appearance, is secondary. Only in two cases does it play a role : when I break an object, like a cello, the pieces stay right where the fell. Otherwise there is chance in the auto-compositions of objects within a volume. But even though they are restricted by the choice of volume and of the object, they are not chosen by chance – they are elected objects, like the coffeepots, the tools, the cameras, the coffee grinders, There is a series of utensils with definite characteristics whose organic aspects interest me, like the irons, the fans, the flytox… In general they tend to be objects of my generation, and not objects with a contemporary, slick design which, for me, lack character. But it’s not impossible that one day I would use a series of sport shoes, like basketball sneakers, because they have a special character, original and surprising – a dynamic asymmetry. That which we take for chance often has a calculated imbalance that follows a rhythm. That’s what struck me about the traditional Japanese composition with its alternation between the void and the full. My taste for systems is related to the notion of filling up. Since I was a child I had a penchant for the quantity. It began as a series of jam jars, and later in 1954, it was the revelation of Pollock’s “all over”.
My passion for the cut, for cutting up, also comes from my childhood; my father loved those world fairs where the technical achievements of the present and the future were displayed. At the expositions where I accompanied my father, there were certain objects (cars, cameras) that were cut open to demonstrate how their mechanisms functioned. It’s from there that I got the idea to of cutting up unusual objects like violins and coffee grinders, and began in 1969 to show the interior of thing, the intestines of objects. The objects are cut up like words and they form hybrids, new words, new objects. The cuts in the cement are like fossils of possible objects to come. It was Picasso, who with Analytic Cubism opened the way to cutting up with a systematic variation of planes. “Coupes et colères” is the outcome of Picasso’s discovery. Van Gogh, Cézanne, the great Japanese woodcuts, Duchamp, Man Ray Schwitters with his collages, Pollock – they all made this approach possible, which is precisely in keeping with the context of art of our century and which traverses my own personal history.”(1) The interviews with Otto Hahn, “Mémoires accumulées”, published by edition Belfond, 1992, reveal Arman’s uncompromising lucidity on art and its milieu, on his ideas and their elaboration. The caltalogue raisonné is published by la Différence and the catalogue raisonné of prints was published by Marval. It is odd that no museum retrospective in France has ever shown the scope of such a work.
source : Kanal - Special Serie Arman - 1993
_____________________________________________  Arman and the Accumulation« I didn’t invent the accumulation, the accumulation found me. »Presentation :
“The objects are first presented in a jumble, piled up, and they organize themselves. It is a sort of autocomposition. They are held together with glue or screws. They could also be in plexiglass. The loose presentation is followed by a more orderly presentation, in compartments (Dual) or shelves (Parade). The ensemble is generally contained in a wooden box, painted white or black. Later, the objects could be hold together by wires or solder. The evolution of these different presentations are fully achieved in Arman’s more recent work (Accumulation of collections).
Objects:
“In the first Accumulations, I used worthless objects often found at the dump, in the garbage or at junk shops. The objects all had utilitarian functions. The Accumulations were made of similar or identical objects and of different models of objects with the same function.” (Arman)
Evolution:
After having accumulated identical objects and different objects with the same function, Arman takes an additional step. The cuts in “Village de grand-mère” or in “Parade” are an example. He has also joined accumulation and crystallization. In 1993, as a continuation of these techniques, Arman will use the cut in certain Accumulations of Collections.
“For each fabricated object there is a corresponding series of precise operations which are all contained in its form and destination, multiplied by the number of chosen subjects, theses operations find themselves liberated in accumulative surfaces. (…) Recall the historic phrase :: a thousand square meters of blue is bluer than a single square meter of blue. I say then, that a thousand droppers are more dropper than just one dropper.” (Arman. 1960)
After my void, the full-up of Arman. In the universal memory of art, there was lacking this mummification of a decisive quantification. All of nature, finally reassured, will again, just as in ancient times, speak to us directly and clearly from the present. After the Void, the Full-up of quantification and of all its consequences mummified forever by Arman today. Soon we will no longer have need of amounts, of more of less, of scarcely more, of enough, of too much! Finally real liberty in art is approaching.” (Yves Klein, 1961)
Arman “accumulates real objects. They are not transcribed nor drawn, nor reproduced, but borrowed from the real world.” (Pierre Restany, Paris, November 1967 – September 1968)
source : Kanal - Special Serie Arman - 1993
_____________________________________________
 Arman Galerie Beaubourg
Daniel Abadie (extrait de cimaise Nº 137) - 1977
The Iron Age
And it’s Monuments
That which unites, that which separates: each of these terms, in turn, gives rise to a different reading in the history of art. The inscription of the atists therein is something else again: the group – that classical means of setting up beacon lights – is revealed to be a heterogeneous agglomerate born of circumstance, to which rejection and refusal alone have, the most often, lent meaning, an inspired mountebank repeating ceaselessly that what separates these artists from others evidently invites them is sometimes sufficient in the eyes of a good-natured public, dazzles by novelty, to justify its existence.Thus Pierre Restany was the tireless artisan of the New Realist. A vague formula serving as a manifesto: “New Realism equals new perceptive approaches to the real” proved itself to be broad enough to collect under one banner the diverse approaches of Yves Klein and Raymond Hains, those of Tinguely, Christo, Raysse and Spoerri, as well as those of César and of Arman. The accent placed by Pierre Restany upon the non-pictorial materials, the predominance of the object, the relationship with Dada and the parallelism with Pop Art, then in its infancy, tended to underscore the singularity of these artists in an age almost entirely given over to informal art and post-cubist abstraction, Of these artists outside the norms, Arman then seemed to be a sort of robot-portrait. Even more than the iron-mongering of Tinguely (who is linked by some to the tradition of metallic sculpture inaugurated by Gonzales) or the posters of Raymond Hains, assimilated for their part and by mistake, with an avatar of the collage, Arman’s garbage cans seemed, beyond any possible recovery, the very negation of pictorial matter. If Schwitters saw himself accepted and honored, as Pierre Restany himself pointed out, “…for modulations of matter and subtle play of tonalities,” the garbage cans affirmed radically, beyond any transposition, the direct appropriation of the real, the baptism of the object. The aggression against easel painting constituted by “this decisive modification” (Yves Klein) – it was thus then that it was perceived –assured the solution of continuity with the traditional problems of the painter: composition, the values and the matters, the colored orchestration. It would be difficult today to continue to argue in this direction. The presentation, in 1969, at the Museum of Decorative Arts of the “Renault Accumulations” made evident – the components dominated and reduced to the prefabricated values of forms and of colors – that the problems of these works stood out as the same type as those which then presented themselves to the painters of Arman’s generation : a refusal of composition in the space of the picture, repetition of the act…Certain of these works, not without humor, transposed even, as if to better underscore the relationship, by means of electrical wires, the linear sheaves of Hartung and the networks of Riopelle.
 This ambiguity of reading, was felt by all those who commented upon Arman when, evoking the period of the “Stamps” (1955-1959) they agree to underscore therein the influence of Jackson Pollock in the progressive invasion of the surface, the use of the repetitive gesture to a far greater degree than the identity of the material utilized. With the eruption of the object, the tree hides the forest : the “Allures”(1959), underscoring the critics, are the fact of the projection of different utensils, first coated with paint on one surface, The process of fabrication to which all are attached makes one forget the very near result in fact of the run-of-the-mill aspect to the works of lyrical abstraction which are contemporary to it. The extreme logic of Arman’s work, the articulation of its different phases, the particularly short lapse of time from 1959 to 1963 during which the ensemble of the vocabulary which has remained his was established are all elements which have lent themselves more to the analysis than to the nature itself of these works. Jan van der Marck alone points out, concerning the new series of Arman “Garbage Cans” that “the effects of the compressed garbage in polyester may be less personal or conductive to speculation on life’s fragility and transcience, but they are more varied in color and texture ; two of the artist’s more important recent concerns:” Arman, in effect, today, beyond the technique and the materials utilized which seemed to isolate his work among the creations of his contemporaries, appears, for the same reason as the abstract artists of his generation, as one of the standard bearers of the epoch. More than in the rupture that all new solutions show, it is in the insistence of the question posed to the artists of a same epoch that the permanent movement of art is explained, the disparity of its forms and the accent temporarily placed upon such or such of its aspects. The quasi-simultaneous explosion, for example, of Fauvism, cubism and abstraction responds to the different modes at the ultimate point of impressionistic painting, that of the quasi-disappearance of the object in the palpitation of light. Also it is a reply to the exhaustion commonly felt of the resources of action-painting and the concern with the conservation of the acquisitions which the forms of expression elaborate for themselves from the end of the Fifties: the new realism or Pop Art, matteristic painting and New Figuration, as well as the individual cases such as Hantai or Cy Twombly, all come from the same concern with founding painting upon a controllable base, beyond gratuitousness. The object was, for Arman, the instrument of his new painting. It is in the expressive qualities of the latter that Arman finds the basis for his work. He himself explains in this way : “There are the qualities of objects. The perfect knowledge of the visual impact of objects is a part of my work.” He says as well, “I have a very simple theory. I have always pretended that objects themselves formed a self-composition. My composition consisted of allowing them to compose themselves” Otto Hahn notes, for his part, that, “To the canvas covered to the extreme edges corresponds the box filled to the top”: So true is it that for this objector, questions present themselves in terms of painting. As voluminous as may be the matters composing then, Arman aims, in fact, in his “Angers” his “Cups”, his “Garbage Cans” and his “Accumulations,” at an effet of surface, which is further accentuated, in a number of them, by the glass which holds then or the polyester in which they are enclosed. The color, the texture and the size of the object dictate as well the definitive dimensions of the work as the type of intervention practiced by Arman: crushing, burning, accumulation, cutting… The relation of the object passes, in a characteristic fashion, into the work of Arman by means of the destruction of its identity and the safeguarding of certain of its intrinsic qualities. Burned, the remain of “Ulysses Armchair remain no less, incontestably, those of an armchair of which all that has changed, freed of all pragmatism, is the prehension. It is at this stage of existence that the wok establishes for itself the notion – ambiguous – of critical state as Arman defines it. I had at the time (that of the first accumulations) invented a term which was called the critical mass. But I lied to myself and to others, involuntarily. Because the critical mass of a violin can only be two thousand violins in order to no longer see the violin, but it may also be the moment when one sees the violin enough, it all depends upon what one wants to say. I would speak rather of the critical state.” This conception of the equivalence of the objects is, in reality that of the classical pictorial tradition in which the manner must be of value as an individual factor and yet blend in as an element of the composition. As volumetrical as they may be, the works of Arman, like those of a number of his contemporaries, play with the notion of relief, a term midway between painting and sculpture, affirmation of the physical reality of the picture profoundly allied to the notions of frontality and the fixed position of the spectator. Some rare accumulations in the form of sculptures, realized by Arman, are sufficient to measure the distance between the two conceptions, the axis of gravity changing position, then, from the wall to the base. So it is for the “Fetish with Nails” (1963), Sonny Liston” and Stele to an Unknown Housewife” realized the same year, for example, and the “Egotists.” As Otto Hahn remarked, “his artistic language set, Arman comes back to his beginnings to deepen his changes into an approach. The aggressiveness of the first works changes into an affirmation of style.” It is not surprising, therefore, that Arman today, after having taken up again the principal phases of his work, going so far as to reduce them to the process of fabrication alone, should have turned toward this prole- gomena of the sculpture work which, until then, had no suite. In his repertory of attitudes faced with the object, Arman has utilized, for this sculptural ensemble, the principle of accumulation. The series object, a gardening tool or some other tool for the most part, in no way grows out of that principle of “visual difference” in which Marcel Duchamp saw one of the bases of ready-made art. The economy of form of thatched heads and spade or hoe blades have placed them, and for a long time, in the glass cases of museums of popular arts and traditions as rivals to modern sculpture. It is a question for Arman, then, of counter-balancing, by the accumulation, the intrinsic beauty of the object to better display the “fracture” of the sculptor. Thus, in turn orderly or lyrical, these heaps of matter are first interesting for their sculptural mass, the matter and its covering. Rediscovering the tradition of the soldered assemblage, Arman opens onto a problematical question close to that of Kemeny, thus also affirming his classicism and the ability to integrate, beyond the first appearance, the elements of a modern world into the grand tradition of sculpture. The limited number of Arman’s types of intervention– accumulations, destructions by various means, cuttings – have not delayed the revelation in his work of the problem of repetition. If, as Pierre Restany says in his preface to “Organic Garbage Cans”, one cans see in the latter the very image of its relationship to the real and “recognize in it the full merit of not having ceded to the temptation of renewal,” it is nonetheless true that little by little Arman approached an impasse. With these new sculptures, he has found an opening into the only domain in which his work seems henceforth able to progress: that of quality.Daniel Abadie
|
|
|
HIS WORK 
