Arman - Vicky David Gallery

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Allure, to go beyond the simple arrangement of the ink-coated object rolling or sliding across a sheet
of paper. The Allure was something that could be sampled: at a rubbish tip, on a beach, in a field of corn,
in the air… It became the artistic transcription of fields of force, of currents, of intrinsically ephemeral
phenomena. The procedure opened up perspectives beyond the pictorial domain; the extrapolation of
the modus operandi led Arman to conceive of real and spectacular performances: “I dream now only of
covering a lorry with Indian ink and crashing into a sheet of paper. Salvador Dalí with his snails and
sea-urchins had touched on the truth but his approach is vitiated because he privileged the literary idea
above the concrete pictorial result”. 23 The scale of the action envisaged and the force of the verbal
description indicate the violence that Arman hoped to confer on his gesture, which has to be reconsidered
in relation to the “informal vehemence” of Mathieu, Murakami and Shiraga. 24
Relations between Pierre Restany and Arman were extremely close as the artist’s career began to take
off: it was Restany who wrote the catalogue essay for the show at the Galerie Saint-Germain in 1960, and
then for the show at the Galerie Schmela. He acted as a coach: “He’s got a whole plan for me, and I am
officially on his team, along with Hundertwasser, Bellegarde and two or three others”, wrote Arman. 25
On the other hand, relations between Arman and Schaeffer remained distant and complicated. Arman got
nothing in return for his intellectual commitment to concrete music; although Schaeffer was interested in
cinema and television, he didn’t have much time for painting. Arman never felt as if he had been entirely
accepted by the Schaeffer circle, and felt condescended to by the composer. Given Schaeffer’s refusal
to have Éliane Radigue at the GRM, she chose to go and work with Pierre Henry, also not welcome there.
In October 1959, Arman noted that they could not “travel their roads together” for many complex reasons. 26
Arman was involved with GRM activities in so far as he was making a film with Jacques Brissot, based
on his Allures d’objets, to be filmed and edited by Brissot. Arman and Brissot would have great difficulty
in convincing Schaeffer to allow them to use his composition Étude aux sons animés to accompany their
film, Objets animés. Even though the project was entirely orthodox in concrete music terms, it was treated
as suspect, and it was only through Restany’s intervention that Schaeffer was persuaded to allow his
music to be used. A few months later, the founder of the GRM changed his opinion of the film, boasting
of its success in Les Cahiers du cinéma (see this cat. p. XXX). The film had joined the GRM’s pantheon of
contemporary artistic achievements, yet relations between Schaeffer and Arman had more or less broken
down.
Arman himself offered an explanation for the sudden take-off on his career: “In 1959 everything happened
at the same time. I was like a cannon packed with gunpowder and just waiting to go off. My language
came together, different aspects came together”. 27 He experimented with the Allures by introducing
“accidents” in which objects got broken. He imploded electric bulbs plunged in Indian ink; this produced
a centripetal Allure of a new kind. From now on, Arman would take his distance from the methodology of
the concrete, which privileged structure and with it an object that had no artistic value in itself. Yet in an
Allure-Colère and a fortiori in the later Colères, if the object is now present it is at the conclusion of a
process of disintegration resulting from the deliberate and organised activity of the artist. The Cachets had
marked a first break with abstraction and with painting. The principle of accumulation effects a second
break, with informal painting and with the methodology of concrete music as a way of articulating the
internal language of the object, affirming the object in its integrality but under conditions of multiplication
and of confinement within a given volume. 28 This is the inverse of the principle of the Allure, in which the
object found itself in a situation of spatial expansion, and a return to the all-over composition introduced
with the large Cachets.
When Otto Hahn compared the violence of Gutai to his, Arman responded: “In my case gesture led me to
the object; having broken a saucer on the canvas, I kept the pieces and glued them into the work. I entered
into the logic of the object. I used all kinds, and I had drawers full of cogwheels and radio valves. One day
in 1959, I felt that a drawer full of lamps made a complete work. I fixed a sheet of cellulose acetate on top,
painted the sides black and showed it like that. It was my first Accumulation”. 29
Yet to present the Accumulation and the Poubelle as sudden discoveries is to forget the importance of the
superimposition of different procedures in Arman and the deeper-lying sources that were in fact involved.
The large Cachets were already graphic accumulations. What is more, the artist himself correctly explained
that the world of the Accumulation had been latent in him since childhood, its origin being the principle
of collection, an ancestral family trait, with a grandmother who saved corks and a father who had antique
furniture shops in Nice, where Arman himself worked for eight years of his life. Like some psychic state,
the Accumulation passed from latency to activity in 1959, to become an artistic language.
Indeed, the Accumulation had been patent as early as 1957, in the form of a poetic creation, when Arman
wrote: “Croisons les fers à souder de nos yeux et du chaud métal affectif, coulons l’enclume de nos
passions et de notre rage martelante de ne pas donner plus en notre humain amour” (Let us bring together
the soldering irons of our eyes and of hot metal emotion, let us cast the anvil of our passions, of our