Abstract
Beginning in 1957, two years before his breakthrough assemblages, Arman experimented with found objects in another manner: he inked them and then stamped, dragged, rolled, and tossed them onto and across a support. The results were the Allures d’objets, conceived as “object traces,” or records of each item’s kinetic behavior. What looked like gestural abstract paintings were in fact indexes of the paths traveled by small objects like beads, eggs, shells, and shattered glass. Pierre Restany, Arman’s critical champion, argued that these traces were “objectified” in that the artist’s intentionality was superseded by the will of the objects themselves. This article questions the notion of an “objectified” gesture and considers the implications of the commingling of agencies in the indexing of objects. I argue that Restany’s attribution of self-determinacy to the object reflects his desire to fit Arman’s Allures d’objets into his own developing theory of a new realism. That theory, which would soon be codified as Nouveau Realisme, insisted on the direct appropriation and unmediated presentation of “the real.” As such, it necessarily de-emphasized the artist’s gesture. In this article, I contend that Arman’s work resists this classification, and I recast the Allures d’objets as evidence of Arman’s own vision of realism, one that reveals the impossibility of pure objectivity.
Highlights
What looked like gestural abstract paintings were indexes of the paths traveled by small objects like beads, eggs, shells, and shattered glass
In a review of Arman’s 1960 exhibition at the Galerie Saint-Germain, an unnamed critic for the journal Combat touched on the collaborative aspect of the artist-agent and object-agent in the making of the Allures d’objet: “It is the object that intervenes between the canvas and the painter and
The Cachets and Allures d’objet that Arman produced over the course of the first five years of his ambitious artistic practice represent a nuanced exploration of the complexities of indexicality, agency, subjectivity, and representation
Summary
ISSN: 2647-6754 Publisher: Université de Bourgogne, Université de Paris, College of the Holy Cross Printed version Date of publication: 1 July 2018 Number of pages: 139-153 ISSN: 1164-6225. Electronic reference Jennifer Watson Wester, “Objectified Gestures? Index and Agency in Arman’s Allures d’objet”, Interfaces [Online], 39 | 2018, Online since 01 July 2018, connection on 05 January 2021. Les contenus de la revue Interfaces sont mis à disposition selon les termes de la Licence Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
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