 |
|
Arman: “Chopin’s Waterloo” (1962). © ADAGP Paris 2010. Photo: Adam Rzepka. Collection Centre Pompidou, Dist. RMN |
I went to the Arman retrospective at the Centre Pompidou with every expectation of not enjoying it. Wasn’t Arman one of those publicity-hound artists who was always making such dramatic gestures …
|
|
|
Arman: “Chopin’s Waterloo” (1962). © ADAGP Paris 2010. Photo: Adam Rzepka. Collection Centre Pompidou, Dist. RMN
|
I went to the Arman retrospective at the Centre Pompidou with every expectation of not enjoying it. Wasn’t Arman one of those publicity-hound artists who was always making such dramatic gestures as encasing garbage in Plexiglas, blowing up cars and burning furniture and so on? Well, yes, he was, and yes, he did all those things and more, but the exhibition demonstrates that there was serious artistic intent behind what might have seemed to be just attention-getting stunts and also shows him to be a precursor of many of today’s mega-stars of the contemporary art world, who don’t look nearly so original once you have seen that Arman, who was born in 1928 and died in 2005, was there before them.
Sure, somebody had to think of encasing a formaldehyde-preserved cow or shark in Plexiglas, as Damien Hirst did in the 1990s, but would he have thought of it if Arman had not encased putrid garbage in Plexiglas in the early 1960s? Christian Boltanski is a clear descendant of Arman, and Richard Prince’s “Car Hoods” seem even less interesting when you see Arman’s car parts series. And there is nothing new about designer Maarten Baas’s scorched furniture – Arman was there first.
But then Arman (né Armand Pierre Fernandez) had his antecedents, too, as can be seen clearly in this show, among them the Dadaists, the Surrealists, Kurt Schwitters and Jackson Pollock. And so the artistic cycles turn.
The first impression you get from this show is of a young artist joyfully experimenting with different techniques and inventing new ones, sometimes in collaboration with another great experimenter and showman, his friend Yves Klein. Arman quickly left behind abstract painting (there is only one example at the beginning of the show, and it’s not bad) to try other things, such as using rubber stamps to repeat patterns on a canvas or dipping various objects in paint and trailing them across the canvas, with appealing results. He soon started moving away from the canvas and into the three dimensional, however, first by integrating objects into the paint and then by leaving the canvas behind altogether.
The second impression you get is a distinct feeling of queasiness when you see what he got up to next: the garbage. It is both fascinating and revolting to see boxes full of such 50-year-old relics as used cotton balls or Tampax boxes and holders and other consumer detritus. The queasiness gets worse when Arman starts encasing organic garbage in a fast-setting polymer. One large piece in the center of the room, “La Grande Bouffe” (1973), seems about to burst and spread what indeed look like the half-digested contents of a stomach around the room, an impression enhanced by the sign warning visitors to stay away from the “fragile” work – no worries there.
You also have to respect him for always moving on and trying new things rather than repeating himself throughout his career, as so many artists do. His next phase involved slicing up objects and arranging them in handsome compositions on boards or smashing them and then nailing the pieces to the board where they fell. One of his favorite object-victims was the bass fiddle, because, as he says with a smile in one of the many films and videos scattered around the exhibition, “My father used to force me to listen to it when I was young.” There seems to be a lot of playful Oedipal father-killing stuff like this going on in his work, although Arman was also influenced by his father, who owned a second-hand shop (whence Arman’s taste for junk?) in Nice and taught his son how to paint.
His destructive acts were not random, however. Before attacking a standup piano, he studied it for a few days, and when the moment came, three well-placed blows were enough to get the effect he was looking for. He called this “planned destruction.”
When he wasn’t destroying objects, he was accumulating them, as in the garbage pieces mentioned above, or the 110 works he made when Renault gave him access to its auto parts. As he became more famous, the objects and gestures took on greater dimensions. He could now blow up an entire car and display the resulting carcass (“White Orchid,” 1963).
Arman was a clever guy: he called his boxed-garbage pieces “Archeology of the Future,” and most of his works, even the grimmest, have punning or otherwise funny titles, like “Swiss Tantrum” for a smashed cuckoo clock, “Contre les Basses (Black Strings)” for a smashed double bass (contrebasse in French) or “La Vie à Pleines Dents” (from the expression “croquer la vie à pleines dents,” meaning “take a big bite out of life”) for an accumulation of false teeth.
In the 1960s, Arman took another radical step when he went back to painting (“I’m a born-again painter,” he said), but he did it his way, incorporating the paint tubes themselves into the works. He returned to painting again in the 1980s.
While he was a conceptual artist whose work commented on mass production, consumerism and wastefulness, with environmental implications, Arman also produced pieces that were almost always pictorial, and sometimes even lovely to look at.
Centre Pompidou: 19, rue Beaubourg, 75004 Paris. Tel.: 01 44 78 12 33. Open 11am-9pm. Closed Tuesday. Métro: Rambuteau. Admission: €10-€12. Through January 10, 2011. www.centrepompidou.fr
Order books on Arman from Paris Update’s Amazon store at no extra cost. Click on your preferred Amazon location: U.K., France, U.S.
Support Paris Update by ordering books from Paris Update’s Amazon store at no extra cost. Click on your preferred Amazon location: U.K., France, U.S.
Reader Reaction: Click here to respond to this article (your response may be published on this page and is subject to editing).
More reviews of Paris art shows.
© 2010 Paris Update
Favorite