Arman - Vicky David Gallery

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hammering rage to give no more in our human love). 30 In fact, as he created the first of his accumulations,
Arman claimed filiation with the monochrome, locating his work in the conceptual overlap between Klein
and himself: “I want to see my propositions captured in the optics of a surface… . In surfaces whose single
element of choice proves to be a proclamation monotypical despite its plurality, and so very close to
the monochromaticism of Yves Klein”. 31 The artist recalled the fact that Iris Clert had rejected his plans
for the “Plein” when he put them to her in the aftermath of Klein’s “Vide,” and that she had come round
to the idea only two years later after the success of his exhibition at Alfred Schmela’s gallery in Germany.
One might well wonder what that exhibition would have been in 1958, when neither the concept of the
Accumulation not that of the Poubelle had yet been formulated. In 1960, Arman would present “Le Plein”
as the acme of his quantitative approach, adopted the previous year: “Iris Clert invites you to come and
contemplate in “Le Plein” the whole force of the real condensed into a critical mass”. 32 This last notion,
borrowed from physics, casts light on the status of the object within the Accumulations: loss of identity
and of its functional and semiological aspects, the reduction of characteristic form to an effect of
granularity, to a reduplicated presence that “sensitizes” the surface as many times as the object is repeated
in it. 33 To legitimate what might be considered a fourth dimension of the object, in which it disappears
as a unit in itself to become no more than the elementary particle of a plural representation, Arman
speaks of the “expression of the collective consciousness of that same object”. 34 While in Schaeffer’s
phenomenological approach the object had been individually perceived in terms of an average of
impressions, the Accumulation shifts from the convergent inner experience of the subject to a collective
tropism on the side of the object. That Arman should have used the notion of critical mass in connection
with the exhibition “Le Plein” is most likely connected to his personal strategy. Conceived in 1958 as the
antithesis of “Le Vide”, “Le Plein” was first imagined in terms of an “architectonic” principle analogous
to that of “Le Vide”, 35 involving the “affective conquest” of a space; such an approach was by nature
conceptual, sur-real, as it proposed to radically transform the viewer’s phenomenological and behavioural
relation to a place by saturating it with material presence, answering to his friend’s immaterial void.
In such a project, the objects are not the constitutive elements of a work of art but only the cause of –
the means by which he will provide – the conditions for an entirely novel experience of space. In this respect,
“Le Plein” may be referred to the famous agreement to divide the world among themselves made by
Klein, Claude Pascal and Arman in 1947, an agreement that Arman would recall a few months before the
exhibition, as a sort of permanent blessing on his enterprise.36
Arman’s retrospective judgment on “Le Plein” indicates the whole scope of his project: “And now, even,
the Poubelles, the Allures, the Colères seem to me a little skimpy. That was a wild animal with an age-old
wisdom and knowledge. I would like to do some more Pleins in the world and in what is for me the supreme
maieusis to bring to birth these gentle, extraordinary animals huddled into a confined space and ready
to devour barley-sugar. Hands stretch out everyone takes away what they like and despite these little
amputations it is always very full and beautiful”. 37 “Le Plein” marks a radical development in the readymade
or the Surrealist paradigm of the found object, on the one hand on account of its architectural scale,
and on the other because it contains within itself, as an intrinsic feature, the entropic principle of its selfdestruction.
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Leo Steinberg talked about the strangeneness of the objects painted by Jasper Johns, paradoxical objects
without any shadow of human presence. 39 After the letting loose of the object in the Allures, in which the
presence of the artist’s hand is still detectable, Arman advances, in the Accumulations and afterwards,
to a double abandonment. The abandonment of the principle of aesthetic making in favour of appropriation
of the real through an object that will have the function of an icon; and the abandonment that is the condition
of the object, a condition significant for us, and terrifying. A New Realist? Arman has in fact entered into
the contingency of the real, but by way of the pessimistic philosophy of Schopenhauer. Arman offers a cold
reading of his age, making metaphors of its industrial modes of production, consumption and waste. In
declaring to Daniel Abadie, “In reality, I am always performing the same act of conservation, showing
catastrophe”, 40 he has only confirmed this.