Dadachat
John Armleder talks to Parker Williams
Parker Williams, the long-term alter ego of the artist, interviews John M Armleder.
Parker Williams: John M Armleder, your work has in these past couple of years been staged extensively again, giving it a renewed visibility and above all describing a critical platform where your art seems extremely influential on today's scene according to many younger artists and critics. Your exhibits appear in venues of different types, all over the world, and in many forms. Just to name a few, your disco-ball installations (Global Domes, Liberty Domes) have been seen at the MoMA in New York, in the opening show of the Contemporary Arts Centre designed by Zaha Hadid in Cincinnati, and the «ein-leuchten», the inaugural exhibition of the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg. Your wall sweeping kinetic neon pieces where first at Caratsch de Pury & Luxembourg in Zurich, before being at the last Lyon Biennale, also at the Museum der Moderne in Salzburg and at the GAMeC in Bergamo, your most recent wall-paintings have as well gathered critical attention as they cover the premises of many galleries and museums such as the ICA in Boston, the Mamac in Nice, the ICA in Sydney, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Le Magasin de Grenoble, or again the MoMA in New York – all announcing the publication by Lionel Bovier of the catalogue raisonné of these works (1966 – 2005). Then there are those huge walk-in diorama-gardens like the ones you did in the «Flower Power» exhibition in Lille or condensed at «Art Unlimited» in Basel, or the scaffolding towers one has seen at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Kunsthalle Baden-Baden and so on, including your new videos, new Furniture-Sculptures, some incorporating classic original design by Prouvé, Aalto, Jacobsen, Niemeyer and the such (also for those work is a catalogue raisonné, 1979 – 2005, in preparation) new dot-paintings and other abstract paintings, the continuing series of Pour-Paintings which have lately gained wide appraisal…
Now this turns out to be a full cornucopia stuffing enabling all of us to re-evaluate what we believed to know about your art. Then, as we are about to set up the largest ever show of your works on paper covering over 40 years of work, you choose to call the exhibition «About Nothing»…
John M Armleder: Yes, that’s about it!
PW: As a matter of fact, many people are not aware that your very first personal museum show, initiated by Dieter Koepplin, was an exhibition of works on paper («981 and other pieces») at the Kunstmuseum in Basel in 1980.. Some of the exhibits are back on view here at the Kunsthalle in Zurich, including early pen and ink drawings that have a definite Wols or Klee touch, some Picabia style gouaches and colour pencil works that recall your para-suprematist and para-constructivist paintings that will end up defining you, after being a Neo-Dadaist and Fluxus linked artist, as a postmodernist deconstructionist, an appropriationist and a neo-geo leader. Your full body of work though, as revealed by the comprehensive display of all these "work-stains" that somehow tell a hidden story and write a subtext to your art, we might say does not live up to such identifications. It rather spreads a range of strategies that exclude only exclusion. Some will see this as some kind of encyclopaedia, especially in this paper format, but with a scrambled lexicon. You do relish in going on with things, as opposed to a progressive stylistic continuum. You might as well tomorrow do your first drawing again. It’s like if it has passed the birth-test, it will never stop coming back to life again. You add layers of the various and the same. It’s a club sandwich!
JMA: I might as well be a pop artist after all.
PW: Well, you smear it all up then, the coats above coats, in this overload theory you developed ad nauseam after a Larry Poons quote. But then you end up with cleaning up and keeping psychotronic effects…
JMA: …and an op artist too …
PW: …and then going the Zen way and making formal plastic displays…
JMA: …and a minimal… oops !
PW: Oh! Forget it! You're just a B-movies addict and probably an UFO believer.
JMA: Now don’t start, because we might still be here in 500 hundred years.
PW: I wont ask why. My point is that this show is about everything.
JMA: As long that it is “about”. Now, this must be understood both ways: just about, almost, and à propos. It’s also the kind of thing you find on the spine of a book. Now, how far the spine and the collated trims are related is always questionable. There are different processes leading to different events. Spine reading is very enriching. I recommend such use of libraries; second best being back page lure-texts. And this is what this present interview is about to become, I guess.
PW: So let me say this. I believe this show, beyond your permanent reliance on John Cage’s open-end gateways, might give a chance to enjoy some magic you seem to tumble around in whatever you do, and, although you don’t seem to give any thoughts into or weight on this, will confirm you, through the manuscripts, and the notations, as a major player in the art world of the last forty years. These works could seem esoteric, or simply too knowledgeable, and less breathtaking than your recent neon bravados, or your blends of artificial and living nature, but they tell an essential story about your unique position, and how it has turned out to be a possible way, as you would state. And somehow, a drawing of yours of 1964 performs as one of 1978, or 2004.
JMA: Well, it’s all paper, after all.
Parker Williams, Shanghai, October 2004