Arman, object artist, collector from an early age.
By the Trash (Poubelle), the french artist Arman decides that the object can become art without any mediation. With the use of waste in support and at the beginning of the work, he anticipates here a practice that will become that of the arte povera.
Arman delivers a panoptic (idea of being inside society and observe it as a whole, participating in it while emitting a critical thought towards it) negative of the production of industrial societies: it does not not celebrating the consumer society but reveals its epidemic and mortal nature.
The commentators speaking about Arman, under the influence of Restany, have, justifiably, insisted on the quantitative nature of his work. This approach of quantity serves the annulment of all the qualities deemed to be that ones of quantity in our society.
The artwork Les Poubelles (Thrases) exposes degradations and limits, saturation and paralysis. The trash is at the same time horizon and frame. There is immanence of denial in the form of final rejection, vitrification, foreclosure, imprisonment of objects in a combination of concrete, glue, polyester, solder, bronze or any other means to reduce the objects to the metaphorical power of the unusable, the separation, the rejection, the trash. Le plein (the Full) artwork becomes the showcase of the entire Arman’s work: it is actually the showcase of the gallery Iris Clert, treated as a trash. Appears here the seenable coffin of industrial society as a dark masterpiece. The transparent wall and the flat surface used to frame the garbage cans are not a coincidence, the former painter is in fact always one: the frontal perception as it exists on the canvas is associated with the volume, and Arman uses object for denying its use and basic value.
The first Poubelles : Trash of the 60s, Children’s trash, Household trash, Trash from the Ludwig Museum in Cologne are piles of dry garbage in glass parallelepipeds. From the beginning of the 1970s, thanks to the use of polyester resin, garbage became organic (Frozen civilization from the Andy Warhol collection).
In the wake of the Trashes, Arman collects the objects of any person who is the subject of a Portrait. These objects are stacked in a box with the same manner of Trashes and constitute a network of clues revealing with clairvoyance the image of the personality of the person. Portraits such as Klein’s one or Villeglé’s one are the pieces, and certainly the only ones, which in Arman’s production manifest the evidence of a composition derived from cubism. As if to portray in a fair and credible way the Portraits of his friends, Arman needed a composition order by juxtaposed facets, as well as an internal hierarchy of the distribution of collected objects. This kind of composition tells that Arman has an interest in this method, or even a passion, as Hommage to cubism proves it.
The Accumulations are made from a variety of objects: tablet tubes, gas masks, tools, paint tubes. Arman says, “I had - boxes full of radio lamps destinated to end their life mute existence crushed on sheets of paper. By mentally moving the problem, I came to the accumulation as a work of art.” 1 Thus the first of these Accumulations, with radio lamps, was born at the end of the year 59, a year later Arman has made about sixty. Arman is a great grandson and grandson of accumulators (he says that his great-grandfather bought the same machine six times for his factory, although he only needs one). Therefore he started very young to collection or accumulate. However, Accumulation as a work of art differs from the collection principle: the first leads to a negation of the object in its own identity while the second aims to present the value of a type of object. In Accumulation, the object disappears as an “individual” (entity) in favor of its emergence as a species, its reappearance in the universal form of a generic object. However, the Accumulations result from the same collection of identical objects, and transforms, through the multiplication of those, the particular in general. The following principle of the Hegelian dialectic (relation of opposites) finds its illustration, that one asserts the transformation of the quantitative into the qualitative. It is precisely because the accumulated objects are in number or in series that they acquire qualities (at less formal) that they can not have when they are isolated. The passage from singularity to multiplicity is effective for a new aesthetic perception and differentiates the Arman’s practice from the readymade’s object. Accumulations extract objects from the utensils sphere for a purely subjective status (so there is a shift from the objective to the subjective): the object no longer has any real function or else it is abstract and has value only because a subject has decided that.
A dialectic is created between the singular object and its dissolution in a series which excludes his singularity. On the other hand, there is a denial of accounting, with the impossibility of counting the accumulated objects, and dispersion of these objects in a set that tends towards the indiscernible.
Arman produces a lot, which leads to an accumulation of Accumulations: a partial vision of the artist’s work may suggest to the viewer’s thinking that any manufactured object is likely to become one day an accumulated object, this constitutes a new status. In reality, the artist is a (pure) abstract: he conceives objects in the form of an object, works as forming no more than an object, an object able itself to engulf all objects, reduced to be the abstract and definitive object.
François Jost asks : what if from Arman’s Trashes (Poubelles) to the TV-trash — in others terms TV-reality — there is only one step 2? The transition from one to another requires more than one step. More than banality, it is its fall through the end-sometimes forced, since it can be always in well-functionning-of the object that Arman illustrates.
Wharol declared that by his cinematographic work the general public could be closer to the stardoms, because he filmed these celebrities living trivial activities. Through these Portraits, Arman produces a work that could be in the same idea. He drew those of Iris Clert (gallery owner), Pierre Restany, Yves Klein, Daniel Spoerri, Jacques de la Villegle, Andy Warhol, as well as his own. And if the presented objects are from banality, they are nonetheless charged, perhaps of affection, but especially of significations: they represent a trait of the identity of the person put in block.
In the right line of Duchamp, Arman directly used, as pictorial material, manufactured objects, which represented to him the multiple and infinite extensions of the hand of man who undergo a continuous cycle of production, consumption, destruction. Yes, there is a relation to the existence of the object, and its degradation as a function of time passing, of the context in which it is, but also a relation to the human, the person who conceives this object, the person who buys it and uses it, maintains it or not, keeps it or throws it away. The objects, these objects, testify of a fragment of life of human beings that led them to their present state.
The philosopher Jean Baudrillard in The System of Objects observes: “Every object has two functions; one is to be practiced, the other is to be possessed.”3 And if by packing in boxes the objects, Arman created a parade to that, a ruse ? The trick would also be to consider whether objects can have a second technical and material existence, a very current question, which more thoughtful could lead to a slowdown in the excessive production and consumption. Whether the answer is yes or no, art will always be there to take over.
We consider artworks Anger (les Colères): Arman breaks objects, Cups (les Coupes : Arman cuts objects, Combustions (les Combustions): Arman burnts object. It seems the artist settles his accounts. But suddenly, the object, which is no longer trivial — can we really say that a piano or a cello are so common- shifts into the register of performance. These projects combine the gesture with the object, in a rage, a human feeling of course, which expresses itself in an exceptional way: it is not every day that we break instruments. However, these actions may be small revolutions against the thoughtless servitude of the middle classes armed and defended by their collections of fetishes, poor expression of a silent mass where dominant idea is that the world of objects “would be a reserve of attributes and arguments whose litany declines the being because it is the sum of having”. Does Arman reproach to his contemporaries for not using enough ruses? Or does he finally understand that he is helpless face to a system he is obliged to accept, so that to express the fact that he understands that but can not act against it, he expresses his anger by the only way it is found, as an outlet, and in a primitive way.
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notes
1-Lamarche-Vadel Bernard Arman La différence, collection Mains et merveilles, 1999 2. Jost François, Le culte du banal, De Duchamp à la télé-réalité, Paris, Éditions du CNRS, Collection Biblis, 2013 see Preface “The previous century because of the projection of the common object in museum, claiming use the common and ban of garbages and trashes, is it not logic that tv of the end of the 20th takes the same values?”3. Beaudrillard Jean Le système des objets, (1968)
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