Arman - Vicky David Gallery

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precise context in connection with the Cachets, the encounter with this milieu and the exchanges that
followed with reference to the sonorous object would lead to a new type of work and a new practice in the
Allures d’objets of 1958, and a personal advance for Arman into the world of the object. The Allures are
based on the calligraphic trace of the object under the constraint of the artist. The object rolls, skims,
scrapes, rubs, swivels or spins on the surface of the paper or canvas. The Allure d’objet is not an impression
properly speaking, the result of an imprinting, like the Cachets or the Lyrical Surfaces that would be
produced in 1974 through the repeated contact of an object with the paper, but rather the organisation of
the spatio-temporal displacement of the object across a surface – Arman would use the word “catalysis” –
whose graphical trace the artist “captures” on the inscriptible surface. Arman had very great hopes
of these researches, writing to Éliane: “I really have an immense territory here. Christopher Columbus
discovering America is small beer”. 11 In an unpublished text of 1960 he explains his approach in the
Cachets and the Allures, considering it under its anthropological aspect: “Man has carved the spear-thrower
from bone and now at each throw the image of élan will have to rejoin its vital embodiment to provide
nourishment. In the caves, hands are magic stencils. Possession and exorcism are the goals of art whose
weapons and hunting grounds change with the ages; whether it is a ponderous still life or a portrait of
the Infanta the path is the same, and now in Age Zero the scouts, all eyes, flush out the materials on
which we nourish ourselves, the battle is situated in the unconscious, in objects, in inanimate, mechanical,
worlds, and in those that we animate with a precisely calculated and splendid gesture”. 12 This language of
the spear-thrower and the gesture makes reference to Man the hunter, whose contemporary avatars are
found in certain sports whose practice is based on the trajectory; they require disciplines of bodily control
in which every muscle of the body has as its object the achievement of an ideal trajectory by the object
to be despatched through space. “The fate of the object is decided between two series of very conscious
factors, from the moment of selection to the moment of projection”, 13 Restany would write for an exhibition
of Arman’s Allures at the Galerie Saint-Germain in 1960. Discussing the Allures, Sacha Sosnowsky (called
Sosno) and Pierre Restany will repeatedly speak of the “projection” of objects: “Arman, a projection,
because both projected and projected”, 14 writes Sosno, iteratively and even accumulatively, very likely
alluding to the throwing techniques employed in the martial arts, reliant on balance and the deflection
of the opponent’s momentum to one own advantage. The term is characteristic of the age, being used also
of Georges Mathieu’s Tachism, 15 to music – “Every object has a potential consciousness whose intent
is the projection of its image,” Luc Ferrari writes 16 – and also to cinema, obviously. Restany speaks of the
artist’s intention but also of the autonomy of the object in the making of the Allures. 17 Arman takes his
place in the great Duchampian problematic of the deliberate use of chance, but – to paraphrase Pontus
Hulten on Tinguely – it isn’t a matter of chance preserved but of chance in action. 18
The Allures share with Pollock’s drip-painting the nature of “pulses of…disembodied energy”, 19 as Michael
Fried described the American painter’s work. In fact, Arman lets go of the object, granting it its autonomy
at the very start of its trajectory and during the whole period of its contact with paper or canvas.
The artist’s bodily engagement goes no further than the preparation for the Allure. What contribution did
Schaeffer’s researches make to Arman’s slow, indirect advance toward the object? Schaeffer’s theory
argues for the autonomy of the object: “it is the object … that has something to say to us if we know how
to get it to speak”. 20 We have just seen what the principle of autonomy means in terms of the artist’s
involvement in the Allure. Given varying perceptions of its structures over time (Schaeffer and Arman
would speak of anamorphoses), the sonorous object – whose cinematic equivalent would be the principle
of the animated object – could be quickly summarized in terms of its inscape, its intrinsic rhythm, its
“gait.” This consideration of the different states of the object led Schaeffer to the phenomenological
thinking of Husserl, for whom the reality of the object derives not from its being perceived as an immediate
unity but from a series of different approaches: “We tend towards a pole of identity immanent to particular
lived experiences (Husserl). These lived experiences are the multiple visual, auditory and tactile
impressions that succeed each other in an endless flux, through which I tend towards a certain object,
I ‘intend’ it”. 21 This immanent pole of identity defines, in other words, an average value of the object.
If Arman had abandoned the paintbrush since the Cachets – though he would return to it later by using
it as a pictorial material, in accumulations of paintbrushes, embedded paintbrushes etc. – in the Allures
he effects a delegation of gesture to the object that in some ways recalls not only Tinguely’s painting
machines but also Klein’s use of living brushes from 1958 on. We may note that there are here three
modes of delegation that underlie the characteristic procedure of each artist: to the machine, for Tinguely;
to the body of the human model, for Klein; and to the object, for Arman.
Among the friends from Nice – Arman, Éliane Radigue, Yves Klein and Rotraut Uecker – the Allures
represented a common practice; each would make them, and Arman even appropriated some of
his friends’ when he found them to his taste. 22 Arman very soon sought to extrapolate the principle of the