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Arman's System of ObjectsJaimey HamiltonPublished online: 03 Apr 2014.

To cite this article: Jaimey Hamilton (2008) Arman's System of Objects, Art Journal, 67:1, 54-67, DOI:10.1080/00043249.2008.10791294

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Arman, Madison Ave., 1962, women's shoes inwood box with glass, 23 x 39 x 4 in. (58,4 x 99 x10.2 em) (artwork © 2008 Artists Rights Society(AR5), New York/ADAGP, Paris)

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I didn't discover theprinciple ofaccumulation: it discovered me. It has always been obvious thatsociety

feeds its sense ofsecurity witha pack-rat instinct demonstrated in its window displays, its assemblylines, its garbage piles. As a witness ofmysociety, I have always been very much involved in the pseudo­

biological cycle ofproduction, consumption, and destruction. And for a long time, I have been anguished

by the fact thatone ofthemore conspicuous material results is theflooding ofourworld withjunk and

rejected odd objects. -Arman

Arman's System of Objects

I ammomentarily thearchaeologist of thefuture. Today I have a vision

ofan impossible tomorrow. -Arman

Jaimey Hamilton

In describing his method of assembling used objects,

Arman often played on the languages of the archaeolo­

gist, 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, Rosicru­

cianism, 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." I 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 tele­

phones, sometimes even in stratigraphic layers. Jammed against the glass, the

objects are locked into a larger, settling mass, demonstrating what Arman ulti­

mately 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, imply­

ing 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 histo­

rians 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 capital­

ism, are not easily reconciled with this methodology. Benjamin Buchloh has

already indicated something of this sort in his groundbreaking essay "Plenty or

The epigraphs are from Arman, quoted in HenryMartin, Arman; or, Four and Twenty BlackbirdsBakedin a Pie; or, Why Settle for Less When YouCan Settle for More (New York: Abrams, 1973), 9;and Arman. quoted in Pierre Cabanne, Arman(Paris: La Difference, 1993). 36 (my translation).The trope of Arman as archaeologist recursthroughout interviews with and articles on theartist and was first articulated in the artist's ownmanifesto, "Realisme des accumulations:' writteninjuly 1960. and reproduced in Denyse Durand­Ruel, Arman, Catalogue Raisonne 1/ (Paris: LaDifference. 1991), 26.

I. Arman. interview conducted by Sevim Fesci onApril 22, 1968. Archives of American Art/Smithsonian Institution. n. p.. available online atwww.archivesofamericanart.si.edu/oralhist/arman68.htm.2. For a summary of the NouveauRealista/consumer debate. see Musee d'art mod­erne de faville de Paris, 1960. LesNouveauxRealistes, exh. cat. (Paris: Musee d'art moderne dela villede Paris. 1986); and Catherine Francblin,Les Nouveaux Realistes (Paris: Regard, 1997). Alainjouffroy, Pierre Cabanne, and Tita Reut have beenthe most incisive of Arman's French interlocutors;nevertheless. they do not venture far beyondPierre Restany's initialproposition of Arman'swork as a manifestation of contemporary techno­logicalsociety. See Alainjouffroy, Arman (Milan:Arturo Schwarz, 1963); Pierre Cabanne, Arman(Paris: La Difference, 1993); Tita Reut, Arman: LaTraversee des objects (Vence: Chateau de Ville­neuve, 2000); and Tita Reut, Arman: De /'inclusiondansI'oeuvre d'Arman ou I'apesanteur immobile(Bordighera: Ardemo, 2004). jillCarrick hasrecently contributed to the English-languagelitera­ture on the artist with "Le Nouveau Reaiisme:

Fetishism and Consumer Spectacle in Post-warFrance" (Ph.D. dissertation, Bryn Mawr College,1998). She ultimately puts forth the claim thatArman is a true critical "avant-gardist."

Iwould like to thank those who have providedvaluable feedback for the material in this article,includingCaroline Jones, Yve-AlainBois, PatriciaHills, Patricia Berman, Mari Dumett, john X.Christ, EmilyGephart, Maura Caughlin, and theorganizers of the "Assemblage, Bricolage, and theObsolete" symposium: jo Applin, Anna Dezeuze,and julia Kelly.

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Arman, Le VII/age des damnes, 1962, dolls inwood box with glass, 20 x 20 x I I in. (50.8 x 50.8x 27.9 em), Collection of Jan and Dagny Runnqvist(artwork © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS),New York/ADAGP, Paris)

3. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, "Plenty or Nothing:Yves Klein's LeVide and Arman's LePlein," inPremises: Invested Spaces in Visual Arts, Architecture,andDesign from France, 1958-/998, exh. cat., ed.Bernard Blistene (New York: GuggenheimMuseum, 1998),86-99.4. Carrick, 163-72. Here Carrick turns to HalFoster's argument of the critical potential of theoutmoded made in Compulsive Beauty (Cambridge,MA: MIT Press, 1993); for other versions of thisargument, see also Marco Menegazzo, Arman:LePlein de I'art (Milan: Mazzotta, 2000); and Janvan der Marek, Arman (New York: AbbevillePress, 1984).5. Arman in conversation with Marisa del Re, "AnAccumulation of Conversations," Arman (NewYork: Marisa del Re Gallery, 1983), n.p.6. Hal Foster, "Artist as Ethnographer," in Return ofthe Real (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996), 196.

Nothing: Yves 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 tran­

scendence" of the historical avant-garde into the ambivalent dialectical engage­

ments of the "neo-avant-garde."! 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 ofArman's entan­

glement with consumer culture. Instead of focusing on Arman's relationship to

the repression of the historical avant-garde and the trauma ofWorld War II (as

Buchloh does), I want to focus on the artist's performatively "systematic" strate­

gy of accumulating in relation to the sociologist-consumer subjective dynamic,

I will argue that Arman attempted to map out a contemporary system of produc­

tion 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 ofArman's works, like LeVj]]age 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 com­

modity fetishes," as described byWalter Benjamin, than to the postwar commod­

ity spectacle, and as such should be seen as a critique of spectacle culture. 4 This

emphasis on Surrealism's critical poetics elides certain complexities ofArman'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 ofLeVilIage des dcmnes, 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 into the present system of signs.On the topic of his titles, Arman cheerfully admitted that coining them was

a game, but in the same breath quoted Ambrose Bierce: "Humor is the politeness

of despair." 5 This mix of seriousness and irony is a hallmark ofArman's working

method as he sought to understand cultural processes precisely by being involved

in them. In this respect, Arman's artistic strategy could be seen as an antecedent

to what, in the 1990S, the art historian Hal Foster identified as the contemporary

phenomenon of the "artist as ethnographer," in which artists, setting out to

deconstruct their cultures, often become their representative subjects. He states,

"The deconstructive-ethnographic approach can become a gambit, an insider

game that renders the institution not more open and public but more hermetic

and narcissistic, a place for initiates only where a contemptuous criticality isrehearsed.:" Arman is in no way consciously or poststructurally "deconstructive"

of consumer culture in the way that the 1990S artists that Foster discusses are.Yet

the comparison still holds in the way that Arman as sociologist and the "artist as

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7. Arman and Otto Hahn, Memo/res occumules:Entretiens avec OttoHahn (Paris: Belfond, 1992), 14.

ethnographer" both exist in seemingly impossible participant-observer posi­

tions, where critique is never entirely disengaged from complicity.

This participant-observer position is evident in the way Arman set out to

"witness" or observe contemporary society by performatively mimicking thecycle of objects in postwar culture as they moved from assembly lines to window

displays to kitchen shelves to waste baskets and eventually to dumps. If we look

broadly at the consistency and interrelatedness ofArman's key series, this becomes

a bit clearer. Between 1959 and 1961, for instance, the artist developed the Poubellesand Coleres series, both of which highlight the end of an object's life, its destruc­

tion and decay, in slightly different ways.The Poubelles focus on the imagery oftrash middens, or what might look like core samples taken from contemporary

garbage dumps. The Coleres focus more attention on the performative, spectacle­driven logic of destroying highly symbolic bourgeois items, such as violins, sidetables, and armchairs. In a related series, the Portraits-Robots (portraits made with

the trash of the "sitters"), Arman explored an earlier stage in the life cycle of

consumer objects. Here the containers point to the process of symbolic con­sumption, as objects literally become stand-ins for personality and social identity.

The Accumulations, though, are the richest by far in that they refer to all pointsin the life cycle of a consumer object. As a series, they meticulously adhere to alogic in which all material is treated to the same actions of harvesting and com­

partmentalization, while they simultaneously allude to the factory worker'srepetitive actions of production, the consumer's cyclical act of purchasing, the

garbage man's redundant collecting, and the sociologist's or archaeologist's gath­ering of material evidence. Arman made hundreds of these sculptures between

1960 and 1964, most filled with objects found at the flea market. The artist had a

great affinity for the murche auxpuces in which he had spent much time as a childand young adult helping his father, a brocanteur in Nice who dealt in second-hand

furniture. When Arman moved to Paris, he felt right at home among the over­

stuffed stalls at the Porte de ClignancourtJ (These same stalls had had a specialresonance for the Surrealists of the 1920S, rediscovering the late nineteenth cen­tury through second-hand merchandise.) If we look at all of the objects accumu­

lated by Arman between 1960 and 1964, they indicate a much more diverse view

of the world of the postwar flea market than might be imagined. It was (andnotably, still is) the place to find old faucets, rustic windowpanes, and old dolls,as well as new electric razors, radio tubes, plastic toothbrushes, plastic syringes,even rubber bicycle pumps and machine-gun bullets. In a sentence, the fleamarkets of 1960s Paris were caught between an old system of reuse and a newsystem of obsolescence developing in the context of international postwar massproduction. The Accumulations register this plethora of material and evoke thecycle of desire and destruction that sustains commodity consumption.

Importantly, the Accumulations are also manifestations ofArman's compulsive,repetitive, performative labor. Beyond the choice of objects each contains, onecannot help but reflect on the labor that went into making each Accumulation andthe system of reproduction that made the series possible. Indeed, the relentlessrepetition of the series as a whole especially highlights the effect such performa­tive repetition had on the development of consumer subjectivity.This is where aproductive tension in Arman's participant-observer attitude can more clearly beseen. The cultural critic and artist Pol Bury immediately picked up on this aspect

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8. Pol Bury, "Dictionary of Psychiatry," in AndreBalthazar and Pol Bury, Daly Buf (La Louviere,Belgium)9 (1963), n. p.. trans. from Dutch byAriel van Steinkiste and reproin Carrick, 220-25.9. Carrick, 85--89. Jill Carrick argues for a contex­tual connection between the taxonomic impulsesin sociology in I960s France, but I would like toextend this argument to examine how bothArman's adoption of the discourse and the dis­course itself are part of a larger shift in advancedcapitalist subjectivity.10. Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Ufe in the ModernWorld, trans. Sacha Rabinovitch (1968; New York:Harper and Row, 1971),67.I I. See Alain Drouard, "The Development ofSociology in France after 1945," in NationalTraditions in Sociology, ed. Nikolai Genov (London:SAGE, 1989); for a very brief but important dis­cussion on the development of postwar sociolo­gy, see Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies:Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), 179-92.

ofArman's work. Under the pseudonym "Professor Lodewyk de Groot," Bury

published a parodic "Dictionary of Psychiatry" that described Arman's method as

one of "polymorphic accumulative fetishism":

The patient is a classic repressive. There is a simultaneous mix of prodigality,

avarice, cupidity, and kleptomania, all indisputable signs of emotional back­

wardness, with a tendency towards minor sadism. The most obvious symp­

tom is a mania for harvesting (literally speaking) the most diverse andeveryday objects, gathering them in corners, arranging them in boxes, and

covering the walls with these boxes once they are full.8

Bury's critique ofArman's artistic activity as it performed consumptive

habits is far from serious, but as with Arman's comment on the "humor" of his

works' titles, there is more than a hint of despair in Bury's lampoon. In fact,Bury's humorous reading ofArman's artistic practice as pathologically deviant

behavior captures Arman's own paradoxical subject position perfectly.Armandid obsessively purchase and hoard in a way that performatively produced him

as a consuming subject. He certainly did get caught up in the romance of theacquisition, arrangement, and care of his objects, much as he tried to "witness"

that behavior. But it is also important to recognize the ferocity with whichArman took up his task, the irony with which he attempted to emphasize the

horrible beauty of his fetishistic consumption, the sheer consistency of his pro­gram as it articulated a system of production and behavior-a consistency that

could indicate a social scientist collecting data as much as a consumer organizing

his hoard.Arman was not alone in highlighting cycles of production, consumption,

and destruction. His activity could be seen, in fact, as part of a larger effort by

postwar sociologists to study the increasing systematization of objects under

capitalism.t The French sociologist and philosopher Henri Lefebvre best summedup the broad concern with this question: "Are we heading for a world-scale

homogeneity that would foster or reveal a Single absolute system?" 10 Coming

up with an answer preoccupied a whole generation of French (not to mentionAmerican and German) sociologists, critics, and historians. As a result, many of

these intellectuals directed their research toward the regularities, repetition, and

naturalization of culture. Their goal was aided and shaped by some general refor­mulations in the humanities in postwar France under the influence of Ferdinand

de Saussure's semiotics, the structural anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss, the

scientific sociological method of Emile Durkheim, and a Marxist resurgenceaided by the teaching and publications of Lefebvre.II Some of the noted younger­generation sociologists to emerge from this reformulation include AlainTouraine,Roland Barthes, Jean Baudrillard, and Pierre Bourdieu. Each of their projects hada particular agenda, but they all shared a focus on everyday life and negotiationwithin the cyclical rhythms of culture and commerce, rather than on the soaring

ideals and philosophical concepts of an era. They sought to describe the largerinfrastructure of culture, not its revolutions.

Barthes and Baudrillard in particular were intent on making visible whatthey increasingly recognized as an insidious naturalization of a system of con­

sumption. In 1957 Barthes published Mythologies, a collection of essays on massculture that he had written for the journals Esprit, Fmnce-Observateur, and Les Lettres

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Arman, Malheur aux borbus, 1960, electricrazors inwood box withglass, 39 x 23 x 4 in.(99 x 58.4 x 10.2em), Collectionof RotrautKlein-Moquay, United States (artwork © 2008Artists Rights Society(ARS), New York/ADAGP,Paris)

12.Roland Barthes,Mythologies, trans. AnnetteLavers (1957; New York: Noonday, 1972),11-12.13.Jean Baudrillard, System of Objects, trans.

James Benedict(1967; New York: Verso, 1996),3. Baudrillard carried thiswork forward with TheConsumer Society; Myths and Structures (1970;London:SAGE, 1998).

Nouvelles, and which sought to explain this system as a process of mythification­a naturalization of objects into a network of signs. 11 Between 1962 and 1963,

Baudrillard, who had been studying to be a Germanist, was introduced toLefebvre and Barthes. Under their influence he quickly shifted gears and beganwork on his doctoral thesis, "System of Objects" (eventually published as a bookin 1967), in which he set out to trace the proliferation of the commercial worldas it naturalized urban civilization. On the first page of System ofObjects he asked:"Could we classify the luxuriant growth of objects as we do flora or fauna, com­plete with tropical and glacial species, sudden mutations, and varieties threat­ened by extinction?" 13 His rhetorical point was not that we need to classifyobjects, but that their diversity and sheer volume now demanded classification-and

not just by genus (make or model), but also by symbolic value.Arman materialized much the same phenomenon with a forthright expres­

sion of frozen repetition in the Accumulations. Interestingly, by placing these

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14. As Henry Martin brilliantlystates, "'Todestroy,' 'to accumulate,' 'to preserve,' and 'todiscard' seem to be equivalents in Arman's worknot because we no longer know the dictionarydifference between these actions but becauseArman's actions are never very clearly either oneor the other," Martin, Arman, 31.15.Arman, Arman:33 Accumulations (Amsterdam:Stedelijk Museum, 1969),n.p.16.Baudrillard,Systemof Objects, 42.17. Ibid., 155.

objects in one glass case Arman expressed the speed and integration of various

production, fantasy, and consumption machines that were described by Barthes

and Baudrillard. His visualizations, unlike the sociologists', tended to abstract

out national agendas, cold-war politics, and other historical specifics, but the

sculptures nevertheless captured the generalized concept of the late-capitalist sys­

tem perfectly.The title of the series itself articulates a general conflation of the

mechanics of capitalism: there first is the accumulation of capital that makes pro­duction possible, then the accumulation of raw materials, then the accumulation

of goods as they are displayed, next the accumulation of items by the consumer,

and finally, the evident and disturbing accumulation of detritus in the streets andin landfills.14

Within each Accumulation, the notion of what Arman called"critical mass"

became a key formal strategy for enacting this systematization as reification.Each Accumulation, made up of similar parts, began to signify the ideal of com­modity abundance. His 1960 Malheuraux barbus (Bad Luck to the Bearded), for

instance, achieved a point of critical mass when the multiplication of slightly dif­ferent models of electric razors-some rounder, some sleeker, some light green,

some yellow--created a density of sameness. With the pile-up, focus shifts fromthe singularity of each item to the way they all add up to the ideal of "plenty ofrazors." 15 In their accumulation, it did not matter what the electric razors were

for, so much as how they amassed as an image and evoked a generalized idea of

plenitude, surplus, and affluence. Sameness overrules the mystique or aura thatany individual thing may have within the strata of an Accumulation. Along with the

purmed title, the strategy mimicked a new era of the capitalist spectacle in whichthe commodity was married to mass media and marketing hype.

The vitrines played a major role in achieving this cohesion. Glass was amagical barrier, establishing both proximity to and distance from the objects

that Arman accumulated. Baudrillard noted its function in consumer displays inSystem ofObjects: "Glass works exactly like atmosphere in that it allows nothingbut the sign of its content to emerge." 16 In their display cases, things started to

become images of things, and the accumulation of images of things become

one self-sufficient, self-producing, self-referencing network integrated intothe larger capitalist system. The amazingly excessive variety of mass-produced

objects (and the false choice represented by the slight variations of the sameproduct) that could be catalogued by Arman's method of accumulation also indi­

cated that the vertiginous movement of the capitalist machines was achieving

a state of culture in which objects were settling into a system of meaning. Theirony of this system is that the evident mobility of capital, people, and thingscame together, as many lamented at the time, into a smoothly integrated andincreasingly homogenized, international consumer culture, in which everythingbecame paradoxically static. "For all its increased productivity," Baudrillardwrote, "our society does not open the door to one single structural change." 17

This is exactly what is fascinating about Arman's objects. They conceptualize thedifferent aspects of the consumer system, yet they do not express movement.In fact, their inability to move articulates more forcefully the coherence andhomogeneity of the "system of objects."

So Arman's vitrines, in their performative fetishism, "sociologically"enacted this process in a fashion that makes the viewer aware of the disturbing

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Arman, Le Plein,1960, exterior view and detailof exterior view, Iris Clert Gallery, Paris (artwork© 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), NewYork/ADAGP, Paris)

18. Arman dutifully recorded everything that wentinto the gallery for the installation. The list isreproduced in Durand-Ruel, 46.19. Pierre Restany, Arman (New York: Abrams­Horay, 1973), repro in Durand-Ruel, 48.20. Francoise Choay, "Lettre de Paris II: 'Culturede debris,' ala Galerie Iris Clert,' Art International4, no. 9 (December 1960): 36.21. Iris C1ert, Iris-Time (L'Artventure) (Paris:Denoel, 1978),214.22. Guy Debord, Societyof the Spectacle, trans.Donald Nicholson-Smith (1967; New York: Zone,1995), 138 (italics in orig.).23. Guy Debord, "The Situationists and the NewForms of Action in Politics on Art," repro in TheSituationist International, 1957-1972: Ona Passageof a Few People through a Rather BriefMoment inTime, ed. Elisabeth Sussman (Boston: Institute ofContemporary Art, 1989), 151.

homogenization of consumerism. But they still participated in it; most obviously,

they too became consumer items of the most desirable type (despite their repeti­

tive nature). The Accumulations could be purchased as art, a further sign of postwar

abundance, thus becoming integrated into the sedimenting cultural assemblages

that they so clearly describe and even lament.This is evident, although in a roundabout way, in the commodification of

Arman's most "abject" accumulation, Le Plein. Arman proposed the idea of Le Plein

right after his friend and fellow Nouveau Realiste,Yves Klein, had staged his

1958 show of LeVide. In LeVide Klein had literally emptied the Iris Clert gallery,exposing art as a product of capitalist marketing and art-world consensus build­

ing. Arman tried to convince Clert that his project was as spectacle-worthy, butshe resisted the idea of filling her gallery with foul-smelling detritus for two

years. On October 25, 1960, Arman finally convinced her to present a "full-up"

gallery that included two hundred and fifty pounds of pure garbage, two hun­dred pounds of old records, one hundred and eighty bird cages, and three cubic

yards of used light bulbs. 18 The gesture of accumulation, as Restany noted, was"elevated to an architectural dimension." 19

A gallery filled with trash at first seems like the perfect mockery of the art­

commodity system. But what one could not sell, one could make into a marketingevent. After witnessing the exhibition from which "no collector could profit," as

the art critic Prancoise Choay rightly claimed, patrons could purchase a smallerversion of it as a Poubelle or Accumulation, on display in Clert's office.20 This market­

ing strategy is an important aspect of Le Plein that often goes unacknowledged,but one that Clert and Arman both realized straight away. 21 The"critical mass"

of trash indicated in the invitation became an image and concept, which wasfundamental to the sale of more discretely packaged Accumulations, like Malheur aux

barbus. In comparison to the scale of Le Plein's detritus, they begin to look rather

aesthetically pleasing and not so trashy.Though Arman did not consciously play up all of these contradictory aspects

of the production, display, and eventual sale of his work, it is consistent with hissociological position of witnessing through literally enacting the way that the system

of objects had become so pervasive that it could successfully incorporate garbage

into its logic. Guy Debord eventually took this kind of sociology to task forbecoming subsumed in the system it ostensibly critiqued: "A new division of

tasks occurs within the specialized thought of the spectacular system in responseto the new problems presented by the perfecting of this system itself.... Modernsociology undertakes a spectacular critique ofthe spectacle."22 There are two lines of

attack here that I do not want to get lost: More obviously, Debord saw Arman'sexplorations of spectacle as turning the "radical" Dada past into a "reactionaryadvertisement.T" More subtly, Debord identified the sociological position Arman

adopted-one that studied regularities of capitalism-as itself a new kind ofsubjectivity produced by the compartmentalized efficiency of capitalism.Arman'sperformative sociological methods were too mechanized and repetitive, his methodtoo scarily systematic.What Debord obliquely points out is that Arman's ironicattempt to distance himself from the processes of capitalism was exactly the way inwhich he was becoming their subject.

Given that Arman's peculiar sociology was embedded within a capitalistlogic, Roger Shattuck's description of the practice of assemblage, in his lecture

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24. Roger Shattuck, transcript of the 1961 Art ofAssemblage symposium, in Essays on Assemblage,ed. James Leggio and Helen M. Franc (New York:Museum of Modern Art, 1992), 131 (italics mine).2S. Gilles Deleuze and FelixGuattari, Anti-Oedipus:Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurleyet al. (1972; Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1998); and A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalismand Schizophrenia, translated by Robert Hurley etal. (1980; Minneapolis: University of MinnesotaPress, 1987). See in particular A Thousand Plateaus,8 and 22. Bythis juxtaposition of Deleuze andGuattari with Shattuck, 1do not mean to equateShattuck's brief statement with the philosophers'extended analysis, but to merely point out the dis­cursive force of this metaphor. For more on therecent use of the term "assemblage" in sociology,see George Marcus and Rekan Saka,"Assemblage," Theory, Culture and Society 23, nos.2-3 (March-May 2006); 101-9.26. John Phillips, AgencementlAssemblage,"Theory, Culture, and Society 23, nos. 2-3(March-May 2006): 108-9.27. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 90.

for the ArtofAssemblage symposium the year after Arman exhibited Le Plein, is

suggestive:

We are, as the old comic might say, "assembled into the frameless work that

frames us." The painting is no longer a separate entity with internal relation­

ships upon which we can comment from afar. It comes to life asa machine toimportune us, to disturb relationships outside itself, to project its field of

force around and beyond us. We have, in a very real sense, been framed.

Juxtaposition has brought us to this. Insofar as the arts of assembly succeed,

they stage a frame-up that catches us in the picture. We are challenged tomake something of it, and in that position we do not know how to behave.24

In Shattuck's description of assemblage as an art form that defied the frame

to seek out connections and extensions, there is an implication that assemblage

art was already participating in the extensive, excessive relations of capitalism.Moving beyond the usual formal and iconographic readings of the form, we cansee assemblage as a machine for negotiation, inhabiting capitalism's immense

industrial network of other assemblages. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari pre­sented an analogous argument about ten years later. In fact, Shattuck's descrip­

tion of artistic assemblage is uncannily similar to their theorization of capitalistassemblages. In Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari speak of

advanced capitalism as an assemblage of assemblages-a dynamism of machin­ery: some of it steel, some of it organic, some of it discursive, and some of it

artistic, which keeps all kinds of meaning flowing." In the original French text,they term the structure agencement-adopting its traditional meaning of arrange­

ment to articulate the more active alternating and penetrating composition ofmaterial and thought in a cultural structure. The adoption of "assemblage" as the

English translation of agencement has been questioned, but I think this term cap­tures both a sense of arrangement of material and discourse as well as a sense of

the "machinic" or systemic that is important to the authors' understanding ofagencement,26 Deleuze and Guattari's fundamental point is that "tools exist only in

relation to the intermingling they make possible or that make them possible....A society is defined by its amalgamations, not by its tools."2? In other words,

assemblages are not simply discrete collections of things, but should be under­stood in terms of their active exterior relations. These relations can settle into

. predictable patterns of circulation that can read as homogenizing (as evident inArman's frozen accumulations), or they can possibly lead to disassembly andreconfiguration (as evident in the ironic humor and excessive performativity ofArman's actions). Often these relations are operating at the same time, even asthey are in tension with each other. This subtlety would be lost if we only lookedinside the frame at the objects as tools. Instead, we need to focus on what hap­pens beyond the frame, on the way that Arman's assemblages are part of largerassemblages, and in particular on how the logic of each Accumulation is dependenton an understanding of the function of the series, on Arman's shifting andmultiple subjective positions within a postwar consumer context, on the artmarket's embrace of such spectacular critiques of spectacle, and much more.An Accumulation might reflect a certain stability of the capitalist system, but itsmotion in relation to the larger capitalist assemblage may be more tenuous.

Although I do not have space to detail the nuances of such an assemblage

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28. See Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 235.29. Arman, quoted in Paris-New York, ed. PontusHulten and Alfred Pacquement, exh. cat. (Paris:Centre Georges Pompidou and Gallimard, 1991),612 (my translation).

theory here, I would at least like to suggest that this structure of movable negoti­ation could usefully address the practice of assemblage's complicated economy

of objects, desires, and situations in a more subtle way than pinpointing its posi­tion on a linear axis of critique and complicity. This model attempts to show

that one of the most useful ways of understanding the social and political signi­

ficance of assemblage is to see the objects and the artist (and ourselves) as partsof a larger conglomeration of shifting forces of meaning. In this light, artistic

assemblages are read as part of larger social assemblages, and the subjectification

of the artist-assemblage is seen as part of this network ofintermingling negotia­tion with noouter limit. To put it bluntly, Deleuze and Guattari's theory reminds us

that the flexibility and contingency ofArman's assemblages allow unimpededness

and the positivity of thought, action, and material to happen within a system, butalso compel those same performative excesses to be successfully recuperated intocapitalism's own assemblage.28This theory also allows us to see the fluid logic

behind the ostensible paradox ofArman's participant-observer position. His soci­

ology followed sites of production, consumption, and destruction wherever theytook him. He seized the opportunity to create trashy, excessive sculptures that

still hold critical power. But this means also that we have to acknowledge the way

that Arman positioned his engagement with culture on an increasingly horizon­tal continuum, sampling a bit here and a bit there, witnessing this phenomenonand that. The anthropologist slides into the subject position of a consumer: even

as Arman was ever more mobile within the frameless assemblages of capitalist

relations, he was also increasingly caught up within the plane of expanding capi­

tal, becoming a nomadic sampler of social phenomenon.This type of movement led the artist in 1963, inevitably, to New York, the

center of what he called the "empire of production."

I land and find myself in the center of my dreams, vitrines of vitrines, a pro­

fusion of windowed crystals on the rock of Manhattan. So I say to the past,

au revoir, bye-bye to archaeological harvesting in public dumps and anemicbuys at the flea market. The empire of production stretches out before thehands and eye.29

Here Arman is not so much laying claim to the landscape as he seems to be

swearing allegiance to New York as the capital of accumulation, vowing citizen­ship not to America, but to the abstract operations of the capitalist system. Theartist set up a studio in New York,where he lived and worked for at least part of

every year for the rest of his life. By the end of the 1960s, he was creating morecalculated and pristine accumulations with new machine parts purchased at thediscount stores on Canal Street-embedded at regular intervals in polyester­that clearly articulate factory production.

Arman's complicated maneuvering to keep capitalism "framed" while itwas framing him became ever more problematic as his own artistic productionbecame more aestheticized, regularized, and sought after. Capital flow, for

instance, led him back to Paris for periods of time from 1967 to 1974to collabo­rate with the French car manufacturer Renault. Wearing a factory jumper whiledirecting his assistants while making avant-garde art while attempting to "wit­ness" the factory process indicates the multiple mental compartments acrosswhich Arman increasingly had to shift. In the Renault series, he finally concretized

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Arman working at the Renault Factory,ca. 1967 (photograph © 2008 Artists RightsSociety(ARS). New York/ADAGP. Paris)

Arman, Le Murex, 1967, RenaultAccumulation # IOJ,ear fenders. 49 x 68 x63 in. (124.5x 172.7x 160em) (artwork© 2008Artists Rights Society(ARS). New York/ADAGP,Paris)

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30. See Peter Berger, Brigitte Berger, andHansfried Kellner,TheHomeless Mind:Modernization and Consciousness (New York:Vintage, 1974), 33-34, 82.

the allusion to factory production seen in the earlier Accumulations. His collabora­

tion with the corporation was turning out objects that did not now directly

expose the stasis of commodity consumption, but naturalized the beauty and

sleek polish of factory production. The sculptures began taking on organic­looking shapes more akin to the high-modernist photographs of Edward Weston

than to trash dumps. Le Murex (The Nautilus), 1967, for instance, constructed

by incremental repetitions of white fender parts, is one of a series of singular,monumental objects that achieved a whole new level of "artiness" not found in

his earlier Accumulations. By 1968, the pace ofArman's art practice had quickened

as he was shifting constantly between his various series-from the RenaultAccumulations, to Canal Street Accumulations, to Poubelles, to Coleres-e-moving along the

flows of production, consumption, and destruction more and more fluidly For

the most part, his work had become its own stable and complete art system inwhich small variations played themselves out endlessly and became ever more

aestheticized.

This is finally to say that Arman's deliberate articulation of the full system­atization of capitalist accumulation did not necessarily develop along the fine

line between total absorption in these activities and a totally overstated "perfor­

mance." Instead, I think it is better to see these"conflicting" aspects of subjectiv­

ity as a movable assemblage of sorts in which Arman played artist as sociologist,consumer, worker, and manager. Ultimately, I see these roles not as dialectical,

but as aspects ofArman's subjectivity that operate in tandem within systematiccapitalist structures. In many ways, Arman's various performative positions sug­

gest a correspondence to the mental homelessness that capitalist subjects experi­ence as they rely more and more on objects to construct their sense of identity

and place, something that in turn makes them more dependent on their materialattachment to the system. 3° This perspective takes the focus away from" discover­ing" Arman's motivations and forces us to come to terms with his complicated

and evolving attachments to consumption, and perhaps, through this, we cancome to terms with our own.

Jaimey Hamilton is assistant professor of contemporary art and theory at University of Hawai'i at Manoa.She is currently completing a book, tentatively titled Strategies of Excess, about the relationship of postwarcapitalism to assemblage artists in Europe, the United States, and Japan.

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