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Article Excerpt
I didn't discover the principle of accumulation: it discovered me. It has always been obvious that society feeds its sense of security with a pack-rat instinct demonstrated in its window displays, its assembly lines, its garbage piles. As a witness of my society, I have always been very much involved in the peudobiological cycle of production, consumption, and destruction. And for a long time, I have been anguished by the fact that one of the more conspicuous material results is the flooding of our world with junk and rejected odd objects.--Arman
I am momentarily the archaeologist of the future. Today I have a vision of an impossible tomorrow.--Arman
In describing his method of assembling used objects, Arman often played on the languages of the, anthropologist, and sociologist, noting how his Accumulations "recorded" society's window displays, assembly lines, and garbage piles. Arman's interest in urban archaeology is now the stuff of legend. In the summer of 1947 Yves Klein, the poet Claude Pascal, and Arman (still going by his given name, Armand Fernandez), hitchhiked across Europe practicing judo, Zen Buddhism, Rosicrucianism, and astrology. In their youthful, nineteen-year-old exuberance, they decided to divide the world into three parts. Klein famously declared that he would make art about the live natural world, Pascal took the inanimate natural world, and Arman announced his dominion to be "the manmade." It took a while for Arman's announcement to manifest itself, but by 1960 he turned his attention toward his now-signature glass (and later, plexiglass) vitrines piled with alarm clocks, corkscrews, old Kodak cameras, shoes, coffee pots, and telephones, sometimes even in stratigraphic layers. Jammed against the glass, the objects are locked into a larger, settling mass, demonstrating what Arman ultimately saw as the "flooding of our world with junk and rejected odd objects."
But even as Arman declared himself an "archaeologist of the future," jibing quite acidly at society's destructive impulses, he also seemed to want to revel in his culture's excess, or at least to acknowledge his complicity in it--as "very much involved in the pseudo-biological cycle of production, consumption, and destruction." Arman describes himself in two contradictory ways: "witness" and "participant." How can his position as a scientific observer who records industrial forces be reconciled with his role as an "involved" consumer of mass-produced items, not to mention his role as a producer of highly specialized, luxury, industrial-age art objects? The approach to understanding Arman's practice has generally been to argue for one of these positions as it trumps the others, implying their mutual exclusivity, as if one part of his practice must be truer than another. (2) Arman could not possibly be detached observer, fetishistic consumer, and engaged demystifier of capitalism all at once. Or could he?
In fact, this kind of contradiction has been a core problematic for art historians interested in issues of subjectivity for quite some time, as they often try to place an artist's work on the axis of political engagement in which critique is positioned at one end and complicity at the other. Arman's complicated attitudes toward consumer culture, as revealed in the quotations above, as well as in his ambiguous appropriation and assemblage of materials and methods of capitalism, are not easily reconciled with this methodology Benjamin Buchloh has already indicated something of this sort in his groundbreaking essay "Plenty or NothingrYves Klein's LeVide and Arman's Le Plein," in which he urges us to take into account the way that spectacle culture had transformed the "radical transcendence" of the historical avant-garde into the ambivalent dialectical engagements of the "nco-avant-garde." (3) He implicitly argues that we need a broader model for artistic subjectivity that concludes less often with declarations of the political intentionality of the artist and more often with an exposition of how subjectivity is assembled to the discursive assumptions of an historical moment. I agree with him that we have to see Arman's work as operating within the shock tactics of spectacle culture. But I also want to shift the focus from his dialectical model of history to more performative and fungible aspects of Arman's entanglement with consumer culture. Instead of focusing on Arman's relationship to the repression of the historical avant-garde and the trauma of World War II (as Buchloh does). I want to focus on the artist's performatively "systematic" strategy of accumulating in relation to the sociologist-consumer subjective dynamic. I will argue that Arman attempted to map out a contemporary system of production and consumption, laying bare its regularity and vertiginous power for all to see. But I will further contend that his systematic description, ironically, is what ultimately made him a "subject" of the system he was describing.
Just a brief example to start: Many of Arman's works, like LeVillage des damnes (Village of the Damned), 1962, an accumulation of old-fashioned dolls, are often read in relation to the Surrealist objet trouve and its appeal to the outmoded. Jill Carrick, for one, has argued that the aesthetic of the Accumulations was related more to the horror vacui of nineteenth-century window displays of "failed commodity fetishes," as described by Walter Benjamin, than to the postwar commandity spectacle, and as such should be seen as a critique of spectacle culture. (4) This emphasis on Surrealism's critical poetics elides certain complexities of Arman's system of display that I think need to be taken more fully into account. Whatever type of objects Arman chose to encase (sometimes old, sometimes new), from whatever era (sometimes obviously outdated, sometimes technologically rather cutting-edge), he packaged them in the same way--behind glass and with clever but overzealous puns that mimicked culturally savvy techniques of marketing. In the case of LeVillage des damnes, the title references a near-contemporary British science-fiction film of 1960, indicating the ease with which a nostalgic prewar France (the dolls) could be brought...
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