Press
release
John Armleder
18 February – 13 May 2001
John Armleder has been active on the Geneva art scene since the late 1960s.
He was a founding member of the Fluxus-type Ecart group there from 1969
to 1980. Its activities revolved around various time-related issues such
as the nature, function and meaning of exhibitions, authorship, the artist
and the group, and the production, dissemination and modes of presentation
of art.
Armleder’s own practice in this context centred on performance.
In the years that followed, he retained from this an approach involving
the subverting or fitting into the venue. This relation to the exhibition
space was developed with the series of “furniture sculptures”
which destabilise the relation between purely “artistic” geometrical
forms and real-life objects. The same process was at work in the Wall
Paintings, to which category we can attach the work produced by MAGASIN.
In his premier étage exhibition of 1980-81, Armleder used
the flaws in the surface of the wall of an abandoned flat to guide his
painted extension of the random compositions left by the different activities
of the former occupants (stains, marks and “ghosts” of furniture).
This “dirty” wall enters into contradiction with the pristine
white cube, that ideal, conceptual exhibition space. From the simple covering
of a surface with a white dispersion (Linéaments 1) presented
in Geneva in 1967 as part of a public exhibition by the group of artists
that would later become Ecart, to the system application of a geometrical
pattern taking up the principle developed in a series of canvases of the
1980s (Galerie Art & Public, Geneva), via coating the wall of a cellar
with transparent varnish in front of an audience during at the Ecart
Happening Festival, (Geneva, 1969), or the use of a set made from
wooden panels to accommodate a para-Constructivist composition of El Lizzitsky’s
paintings cabinet (in the annex of a hotel, during the Niklaus von
Flüe exhibition around the countryside near Sachsen, Switzerland),
Armleder set out to challenge viewers’ cultural expectations, confronting
them now with the appropriation of avant-garde references, now with the
pseudo-radicality of the monochrome or the decorative aspect of painting.
At MAGASIN, Armleder is taking over the walls of the central area (La
Rue), some hundred metres in all, covering them with silk-screened paper
whose sole motif is a deformed, ovoid target. The ground is always orange
but the colour of each respective ring, yellow or blue, changes with each
printing, and the motif is glued down in blocks of four so that in one
block the flattened central rings point inwards and in the next outwards,
and so on.
Monumental both in size and in its relation to its setting, this ensemble
constitutes a kind of box within the space, delimited by the colour orange.
The visual uncertainty resulting from the way it has been applied and
the optical instability of the graphic system perturb perception of the
space, which becomes the support for a “decorative wall painting”.
Biography
John Armleder was born in 1948 in Geneva. He lives and works
in New York and Geneva.
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