BIEL/BIENNE.- An artist who defies categorisation, John M Armleder (*1948) has spent the last sixty years drifting between artistic movements, practices and media. With a background in performance art and Fluxus, he is also a leading figure in the Neo Geo movement. His art is characterised in particular by a constant questioning of the expectations of art, both in terms of its value and its presentation. «Le fantôme de la chance» takes as its starting point two memories, two exhibitions held twenty years ago that left a lasting mark on the Swiss art scene. In 2004, the exhibition «About Nothing» (Kunsthalle Zürich), which presented some 500 works on paper in a particularly dense installation. In 2006, the exhibition «Amor vacui, horror vacui» (MAMCO Geneva), the artist’s first major retrospective, which spanned the institution’s 30 rooms and four floors.
Both an art centre and a museum, situated in a city halfway between Zurich and Geneva, the Kunsthaus Biel Centre d’art Bienne (KBCB) appears to be the ideal venue for a convergence of these two memories, these two essential facets of the artist’s work. The Biel exhibition thus comprises a substantial collection of drawings displayed across a series of rooms redecorated by the artist. On the one hand, it offers a glimpse of how Armleder engages with the setting—the context in which the works are displayed—as a fundamental element of the aesthetic experience. On the other hand, the drawings constitute a formidable collection of forms offering a glimpse into the artist’s formal and conceptual associations. Added to this is a selection of paintings, sculptures and installations, some of which have been created specifically for the occasion.
PARKETT
On the corridor wall, covered in blue polyester film, hang two series created twenty-seven years apart. On one side, there are posters from Armleder’s first major solo exhibition, held in 1981 at the Kunstmuseum Basel. The artist is depicted as a child, dressed in a magician’s costume. The presence of the number 891, whilst evoking the year of the exhibition, is also an allusion to «391», a literary magazine founded by Dadaist artist Francis Picabia in 1917. The repetition of the same portrait, enhanced with paint, cannot fail to evoke the work of Andy Warhol. The lithographs that make up the other series feature ovoid motifs and a few splashes that resemble bundles of eggs and confetti. Entitled Never (2008), this series may recall the artist’s playful fascination with popular celebrations such as Christmas or, in this case, Easter, whilst evoking artists such as the Belgian Marcel Broodthaers or the American painter Larry Poons. This corridor thus foreshadows a number of principles between which the Geneva-based artist’s work oscillates: repetition and singularity, saturation and emptiness, scholarly and popular references, the intimacy of the anecdote and the detachment of geometric abstraction.
The first room in the Parkett is decorated with a motif designed specifically for the exhibition. It depicts the outline of a Black-necked Grebe’s foot: a bird found in particular on Lake Biel, whose feet resemble feathers. Indeed, the drawings on display in this room seem to be flying as much as they are swimming between two waters. This feeling is accentuated by the support struts used as display elements, following a principle borrowed from the important Brazilian architect and designer Lina Bo Bardi.
The wallpaper in the following room features three motifs: The hexagonal polyhedron is reminiscent of the illustrations created in the late 19th century by the German biologist Ernst Haeckel, whilst the pulsating ring is more reminiscent of a cell, and the third form brings to mind a soap bubble. Whilst this wallpaper recalls Armleder’s interest in polka-dot motifs – much like Picabia’s – they also suggest a principle of cultural equivalence between natural and artificial forms, sophisticated and simple, derived from science as much as from illustration. The drawings are arranged here in a grid pattern and face the viewer, as if they had been catalogued.
The third room offers a stroll through a collection of drawings, the oldest of which date back to 1963, when Armleder was 15 years old. In the following years, staging his first performances with the group Ecart, he maintained a daily practice of drawing. Here we find landscapes, geometric compositions, experiments with texture, and automatic drawings. One can sometimes detect the influence of Paul Klee or that of the American illustrator Saul Steinberg. A variety of techniques are also evident: ink, pencil, collage, frottage, stencil…
The next room, draped in dark fabric, displays Quelques objets volants (1967–1975): a series of boxes created for an exhibition at a Geneva gallery in 1975. Based on a principle similar to that of the boxes by the Surrealist artist Joseph Cornell, the boxes could be handled, thereby constantly reconfiguring themselves. Among the elements that make them up, we find some of Armleder’s characteristic traits: his aversion to the army, expressed through these little soldiers covered in multicoloured sequins, or the striking motif of the butterfly, an animal symbolising metamorphosis, transience and symmetry.
The mural in Parkett’s last room features a succession of lines of increasing thickness, creating an upward momentum that echoes the neon light installation Voltes IX (2008), found on the staircase. Here, these lines are conceived as those of an eccentric musical score. Armleder has always acknowledged the profound influence of John Cage, whom he met whilst still a teenager. The American composer remains famous for treating silence, chance and everyday sounds as musical elements in their own right. In the centre, the imposing book «About Nothing», published to mark the exhibition of drawings at the Kunsthalle Zurich in 2004, offers an in-depth insight into the artist’s graphic work.
GALERIES
The three rolls of red carpet at the entrance to the Galeries derive from the Kunsthalle Basel following an exhibition held 1999 by Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan. Cattelan had presented La Nona Ora (1999): a controversial sculpture depicting Pope John Paul II crushed by a meteorite, all set against a backdrop of red carpet. Through a series of coincidences, Armleder, as friend of Cattelan’s, found himself in possession of the rolls of carpet, which he simply went on to present as sculptures in their own right—for the first time in 2006. A way of drawing attention less to the scandalous figuration than to the floor, the setting upon which it stood. True to Fluxus principles, Armleder often worked by favouring materials and objects found in his immediate vicinity. This is particularly the case with the sculpture Saint-Antoine (1968/2006), conceived in the Geneva prison of the same name where he had to spend several months after refusing to do his military service.
In the second Galeries room, it is the world of the street that is evoked. A series of frames displays collections of small shiny bits of rubbish, gathered daily by Armleder with his comrades from the Ecart group in the early 1970s. A pile of scrap has been gathered in Toyama, Japan, for an exhibition held there in 1993. Further on, what was most likely once a child’s playground now resembles a crumpled constructivist monument. Finally, in the last room, the Yakety Yak (2022) polyptych, composed of a variety of materials and sprinkled with glitter, is illuminated by the neon lights once used in a work by the artist Dan Flavin.
These interplays of echoes, reflections and cultural diffractions are reflected allegorically in the numerous reflective pieces scattered throughout the exhibition. Starting with the mirror balls that greet visitors in the Foyer. In a festive spirit, they highlight a fundamental aspect of the work: like any cultural artefact, a work of art essentially serves only to refract the gazes and feelings that lie outside it. Within this particular aesthetic framework, the artist’s intention is merely one factor among many, no more or less significant than any other. Contingency and chance play a particularly crucial role, as the exhibition’s title already suggested.
