arman the collector - Paul Kasmin Gallery

A R M A N T H E C O L L E C TO R
T H E A R T I S T’S C O L L E C T I O N O F A F R I C A N A R T
A R M A N T H E C O L L E C TO R
T H E A R T I S T’S C O L L E C T I O N O F A F R I C A N A R T
The exceptional collection of African art assembled by Arman puts him
at the heart of the history of 20th century modernist practice, that tradition of formalist innovation which shifted culture forever. Arman is an
integral part of a lineage that includes everyone from Picasso and
Picabia to Baselitz and Brancusi, a highly sophisticated club of connoisseurs whose innate understanding of the importance of African art was
central to the radicality of their own work, whether in 1905 or 1955;
these were pioneers all in a different way of making and seeing whose
debt to African form was complex as it was ambiguous, even when
acknowledged.
But the case of Arman is even more intriguing than those standard paradigms of modernism-as-primitivism or modernist-as-visionary, specifically because African art was only one of his collections and
only one of his areas of extraordinary expertise. Indeed Arman, who
at a certain point maintained ten or more collections of equal importance in varied fields, including antique weapons and Japanese armor,
even feared he might be better known as a fabled collector than artist.
But for Arman the two were so deeply and irrevocably linked that on
some level they were almost impossible to separate, the artist-as-collector and collector-as-artist operating as the sort of ultimate bricoleur
or meta-objectivist.
Arman was, after all, known as an ‘accumulator’, a gatherer
of objects who understood the potency they possess when ranged
together, who spent his career exploring the odd poetry, dramatic effect,
generated by the repetition and accumulation of things, thus pushing
their very thingness into an entirely new dimension. Arman ‘collected’
objects all his life; some of apparently little value and some of enormous
expense, some shown individually, in his house or studio, and some displayed en masse in galleries and museums, objects of great historical
importance and objects easily found in every hardware store, a vast
range of things whose accumulation was seemingly hardwired into his
aesthetic nature. And it is precisely the differences and similarities between
all these objects, their gathering, display and dispersal, the intention
behind their accumulation, which makes the work of Arman, in its widest
sense, much more conceptually dense than it may at first appear.
When all distinctions blur between the professional artist and
the obsessive hoarder, between the scholar-expert and the practicing
sculptor, between the aesthete and the practical studio workman, then
the oeuvre itself becomes all the richer in its final complexity.
Even if Arman may have wished to specify that his collections were separate from his own work, eventually it is really up to history to determine
the boundaries of such complimentary creative activities, to possibly
eventually understand the artist’s achievements in a far broader context
and wider practice. For to try and ‘read’ Arman’s art from his life-work
as a collector is not to diminish but to enhance his ultimate importance,
suggesting a far larger corpus, a far more encompassing practice than
has been so far mapped, a territory of dizzying perspective.
Arman knew objects, he knew all about them, how to make
them, to take them apart and retool them, to build and disassemble,
how to order them in massed formation and how to give them the space
to breathe, to gather and conversely grant them singular attention. This
rare double-knowledge, the connoisseur’s expertise and the handyman’s innate sense of how something actually works, are welded
together into Arman’s unique aesthetic.
The broader history and scholastic micro-history of African art
and modernism is a massive topic already with its own groaning library
racks, its internal feuds, counter-theories and contested myths. There is
also, it goes without saying, an entire canon devoted just to the collection of African art, its own relatively short history within the West, and
specifically its relation to the collecting and promotion of ‘new’ forms
of Western art. Indeed there have recently been several exemplary exhibitions dealing with this topic, whose excellence both aesthetic and academic set new standards. These included African Art, New York, and the
Avant-Garde at the Metropolitan Museum, which pleasingly overlapped
with L’invention des arts ‘primitifs’ at the Musée du Quai-Branly. Similar
ambition is evinced by the planned forthcoming show devoted to the
relationship between Surrealism and the ‘primitive’ arts to be hosted by
the Arnaud Foundation in Lens, Switzerland. These exhibitions make
clear the importance of specific figures, whether Alfred Stieglitz, André
Breton or dealer-collector Charles Ratton, but they also enjoyably
ploughed, once again, those still controversial issues which have long
muddied this field. Of these one has received increasing attention due
to larger global cases of tribal restitution and museological misinterpretation, namely the turning of an object of practical magic and supernatural veneration into a ‘work of art’ admired almost entirely for its
formal qualities.
Thus when Australian Aboriginal artifacts are removed from display because they were never originally to be seen by anyone other than
a small initiated elite, or when Native American totems are restored to
their own tribe, to be used again for specific ceremonies, the question
is made moot once more as to whether it is possible to understand such
objects outside of their culture.
For even amongst the many artists who have admired and collected African art there has always been a lingering distinction between
those primarily interested in their sculptural values and those who honor
rather their ceremonial or even occult intentions.
Arman had a comprehensive understanding and a deep reverence for
both aspects of such objects and in his own work he achieved something
entirely akin to the tribal sculptor; the transmutation of basic materials,
a block of wood, a tube of paint, a bicycle wheel, some feathers, into
something rich in associative power, with a potency, a ‘presence’ so
much more than its constituent elements, that everyday magic of artmaking. Arman made his own ‘fetishes’ from the quotidian objects of
modern life, granting them their own aura through transformation, a
‘fetish’ of the gallery, museum and market, worshiped in its own way
for its redemption from reality. One could even compare the steady
accumulation of nails upon the body of the African fetish, each hammered home with its own intention, with the accumulative esprit of
Arman, in which every object becomes loaded with significance through
the dense echo of repeated form, charged with an energy larger than
its maker even.
Arman understands what an object can do, what it can summon, whether by itself or in unanticipated juxtaposition with others, the
psychic charge of heightened materiality that African art embodies. As
André Breton wrote to Ratton in 1935, “one day I will have to elucidate
what is and what isn’t surrealist in primitive art.” This was in the context
of the ‘Surrealist Exhibition of Objects’ in which every sort of item was
posed to speak to its neighbour, everything from what were termed “perturbed objects” to “found objects” and even plain “American objects.”
Essentially what Breton was searching for was some common denomi-
nator between these things, their “impact”, their ability to provoke an
emotion. This belief in a deeper universality, a fundamental form akin
to that Jungian notion of the ‘collective unconscious’ is similar to
Arman’s own conviction that true creativity lies beyond all artificial barriers of race or state. “My dialogue with African art derives from the conviction that artistic creation arises from a common fund of humanity and
that in the discovery of aesthetic solutions the making of masterpieces
supersedes regions, cultures, and becomes part of the treasures from
all places and all times of human creation.”
Whilst Arman’s work, of which we may here consider his African
collection a part, stands square in the high-modernist tradition, it could
also be seen in the context of a more playful ‘post-modern’ practice, in
which the archive, the list, the library, the ordering and categorization
of knowledge becomes the art in itself. In fact the topic of the ‘archive
and contemporary art’ might well rival ‘African art and modernism’ as
a subject of widespread study and research, and the theme of countless
symposiums and shows. Within such a framework someone like Warhol
can be interpreted as the ultimate artist-archivist, a compulsive collector
of the ephemera of existence, his ‘time-capsule’ boxes of daily objects
as worthy of study as his actual paintings, a sort of supra-accumulation
of history in the making, of everything and nothing. Another example
might be the English artist Tom Phillips (like Arman one of the great nonspecialist experts on African art) who has created an obsessive archive
of photographs of the same banal street over the decades whilst simultaneously building major collections of both African weights and vintage
postcards. Such lifelong collectors, who are also erudite and sophisticated professional artists, propose a new sort of aesthetic territory
between acts of ‘original’ creation and the cumulative impact of a
massed assembly of similar ‘types,’ the very territory originally explored
so memorably by Arman himself.
This sort of practice, in which the gathering and presentation
of other people’s objects, or even ideas, eventually becomes its own
identifiable, authored work has come to the fore in recent years. In fact
this year’s Venice Biennale celebrated precisely such a way of looking
at the world, to quote the thesis of the main exhibition, The Encyclopedic
Palace, “This process of associative thinking resembles today’s digital
culture of hyperconnectivity. Catalogs, collections, and taxonomies form
the basis of many works….” Such collections on display included beautiful stones gathered by Roger Caillois, endless rows of comic little sculp-
tures molded by Fischli & Weiss and hundreds of rubber Mickey Mouse
toys mounted on a wall by Vladimir Peric, who also provided a 3D wallpaper of used razor blades found in flea markets. Likewise the CzechoSlovak pavilion by Petra Feriancová was full of repeated-forms, whether
a vast pile of old National Geographics or a whole wall of African tribal
artifacts, cut off by an angled sheet of glass. There was also a large
group of model houses made in reclusion by one Peter Fritz and later
found in a junk shop by two artists, Croy & Elser who present these as
their own work, just as Linda Nagler bought a thousand antique photographs of babies, arranging this cabinet-of-curiosities as her own art.
Appropriately, there was even a hypnotic film by Ed Atkins which toured
the private rooms of André Breton, focusing on his own collection of
tribal artifacts and the psychological ramifications of this charged
domestic space.
Here at the Biennale was to be found not merely a distinct visual
corollary to much of Arman’s art, including rooms that might even have
passed for his own work, but further evidence that the act of collecting
is increasingly treated within contemporary culture as its own form of
creative expression, an extension and elaboration of the artistic impulse
in its largest sense and scale. Within such a context one might imagine
an ideal scenario where someone like Arman could exhibit his entire
existence as a single gigantic work, his complete oeuvre, all of his endless collections, everything he had ever made or assembled or imagined, ranged through a sort of boundless museum, a private palace,
an expansive world in itself. Impossible perhaps, to gather back every
work he ever created, to recall them all from private collections, museums and institutions, parks and gardens all over the world, to reassemble the absolute totality of his vast creativity, and to bring this together
with his manifold collections, from the smallest to the grandest, from
matchbooks to monoliths, making clear the connections and contradictions of this fecund existence. Here at last the sheer range and depth of
Arman’s engagement with the material world would be made apparent,
blurring all previous distinctions between objects gathered for their formal beauty and those chosen precisely for their banality, between the
precious and the pedestrian, the revered and the reviled, revealing how
the artist’s own private alchemy could transform, as with the African
totem, the simplest of things into the most potent of symbols.
—Adrian Dannatt
1.
Face Mask: likomba
Makonde
Tanzania
Wood, teeth, fiber
24 x 10 x 9 inches with base
7 x 7 inch base
The Makonde are a population of Bantu farmers that were able
to remain isolated from practically all outside influences until
Portuguese colonial troops occupied their territory in 1917.
They currently reside on the plateaus of southern Tanzania and
northern Mozambique, and are said to have originated from a
region located to the south of Lake Nyassa.
The likomba face mask is primarily seen in the Makonde of
Tanzania, and is used during the secret rite of passage initiation
where young boys are circumcised and take part in diverse
dances, songs, tasks, traditions and customs. The boys wear the
likomba (pl. makomba) face mask on their head, looking directly
through the hole of the mouth; they also wear five large labric
skirts, covering the body entirely so that one can barely see the
fingers and toes, ensuring that their identity is never revealed.
3.
Face Mask: ngo ntang
Fang
Gabon
Wood, polychrome
25 x 8 x 12 inches
The Fang tribe originated in a vast, multi village community in a
large area comprised of south Cameroun, continental equatorial
Guinea, and nearly the whole north of Gabon, on the right bank
on the Ogowe River. The community is very dispersed, with groups
of dwellings that most often include members of single family lineage, resulting in strict tribal rules of kinship and matrimonial
exchanges.
The ngo ntang masks are of ancient origin, with one or multiple
flat, circular faces, decorated with kaolin (a soft white clay). Ngo
ntang is translated to “the young white woman”, and is associated
with certain mythical elements evoking beings from beyond.
Formerly in the Tristan Tzara Collection.
2.
Plank Mask: nwantantay
Bwa
Burkina Faso
Wood
92½ x 15¾ x 10½ inches without base
93½ x 15¾ x 10½ inches with base
14 x 12 inch base
The Bwa (or Bwaba) people are related linguistically and
culturally to other Voltaic speakers in Mali and Burkina Faso,
numbering over 300,000 in population. They are farmers who
grow grain products, especially millet, sorghum and maize, as
well as very large quantities of cotton since the colonial period
post-French inscription in 1914.
This nwantantay plank mask represents nature spirits that family
elders encountered in the wilderness, with hopes that these spirits
will watch over family members. The nwantantay masks are used
by southern Bwa, also know as nyanegay, translated to “scarred
Bwa”, because their faces and torsos are heavily scarred by
patterns applied during tribe initiation rituals to represent moral
code and religious laws.
4.
Headcrest Mask
Bamileke
Cameroun
Wood
38 x 14½ x 20 inches
The name “Bamileke” serves as a generic designation for all the
peoples of chiefdoms in the east of Cameroun, however the
Bamileke tribe is specifically referring to the people in regions
located in the southern plateau. There are over a million people
distributed among sixty of the most important chiefdoms whose,
according to custom, sole responsibility is to respect the traditions
and to unreservedly subscribe to the dominant symbolism
(the chief (or fo), the queens, the dignitaries, the councils and
the secret societies).
The headcrest masks are one of the major expressions of the
secret societies, which must show their power, cohesion, and the
force of the symbols in regular intervals. The masks are made with
wood, although some are beaded and embroidered in fabric, and
are made to represent anthropomorphic figures (most notably,
masks of princes), zoomorphic figures (animals who’s strong
symbolism is tied to the power of the chief and leaders of the
secret societies), or sometimes a hybrid.
5.
Face Mask
Fang-Gaola
Gabon
Crest, inset brass, pigment, and fiber beard
16¾ x 8½ x 5 inches without beard
29¾ x 8½ x 5 inches with beard
The Fang-Gaola tribe is located in the region of Lambaréné
(Najolé), the capital of the political district Moyen-Ogooué in
Gabon; it is based in the Central African Rainforest at the
Ogooué River. Lambaréné is inhabited mainly by Bantu ethnic
groups such as the Fang, Bapounou, Eshira, and Myéné.
There are few Fang-Gaolo face mask specimens in museum
collections, for several reasons: their existence was often kept
secret, due to their association with important initiation rites;
they were little collected during the ninetieth century by travelers
through the region; and they were considered to be gross in form
and satanic in significance, and therefore worth little attention.
7.
Helmet Mask: bundu
Mende
Sierra Leone
Wood
16½ x 9 x 10 inches
6.
Helmet Mask: bundu
Mende
Sierra Leone
Wood
13½ x 7 x 9½ inches
The Mende tribe has lived in Liberia, Sierra Leone, and the
coast of Guinea since the sixteenth or seventeenth century.
They are a society that functions within the framework of a
monarchy with exclusive political power held by those in leadership positions, as well as basing power on the allocation of
land ownership by tribal elders.
The bundu face masks are connected to rites of divination and
healing. The Mende believe in a creator-god called Ngewo,
whose representation in image form is strictly prohibited.
8.
Helmet Mask: bundu
Mende
Sierra Leone
Wood
15¾ x 9 x 11 inches
11.
Maternity Figure
Sakalava
Madagascar
Wood
37 x 6 x 6¾ inches
Sakalava-Mende country extends along the west coast of
Madagascar, in a region of forested savanna with a dry tropical
climate. The Mende Kingdom, founded in the seventeenth century,
began to get progressively larger after contact with the Europeans,
who traded the tribe firearms to assist in their conquests; this territorial expansion was accomplished in five stages, which corresponds to the five kingdoms of the Mende dynasty.
This maternity figure is carved from hazomalagny, a false
camphor material that resists rotting and is not prone to termite
attack. The woman is carrying an infant on her back, with the top
of her head as the remaining base to symbolize one of the
principle tasks of fetching the water from the river.
9.
Helmet Mask: bundu
Mende
Sierra Leone
Wood
16½ x 9 x 10½ inches
10.
Bowl Figure: arugba
Yoruba
Nigeria
Wood
34½ x 16½ x 15½ inches
The Yoruba are a people of approximately 25 million individuals
located in the southwest of Nigeria and the south of Benin; the
name Yoruba is a general term for this large group, a name that
was given to them by missionaries from the middle of the nineteenth century. Prior to this, the Yoruba referred to themselves by
their different sub-group names.
The arugba bowl figure represents a kneeling figure holding a
ceremonial bowl on her head with her hands; arugba is translated
to mean “(s)he who carries a bowl”. The arugba bowl may refer to
rituals for Osun, a type of medicinal water, where initiates’ participating in the ritual collect water from the river using the bowl.
12.
Power Figure: nkondi
Kongo
Wood, nails, mirror
27½ x 14 x 9½ inches
The Kongo are present in three countries: The Democratic
Republic of Congo, Angola, and the Congo Republic, occupying
a region at the mouth of the Zaire River. When the Portuguese
arrived in the fifteenth century, the Kongo population had already
amassed a huge kingdom with a centralized power system, and
the Kongo kings were among the first African converts to go to
Europe to receive a “civilized” education from Christian
missionaries.
The nkondi (pl. minkondi) is a particular type of nkisi, a spirit
from the world of the dead, and are usually anthropomorphic or
zoomorphic sculptures spiked with nails, iron blades, and diverse
knots, all symbolic of the pacts and promises exchanged between
the nganga, the ritual specialist, and his client. When the contract
has been concluded and the matter is resolved between the
nganga and the client, the nail is removed from the sculpture,
a sign that judgment has been delivered.
13.
Fang Reliquary Guardian Head: byeri
Fang-Betsi
Gabon
Wood
55 x 18½ x 6½ inches
Fang groups, a multi-village community, are all people of the
savanna in the eastern regions of mid-Cameroun and the confines
of the Central African Republic. The 300 different meyong (clans)
became people of the forest under various pressures of social or
historical order from outside influences.
The byeri sculpture is aimed to protect the Fang peoples from
the deceased, as well as to aid matters of daily life. They also
serve purpose in therapeutic rituals, and most importantly for the
initiation for young males during the great so festival.
15.
Mother and Child figurines
Wood
16 x 7¾ x 8½ inches
The Luba Empire is historically said to have originated from a
migration led by the tyrant, Songye king Nikongolo. At one point
the Luba peoples geographically, made up one of the most widespread kingdoms in Africa.
14.
Janiform Figure
Ijaw
Nigeria
Wood
80 x 14¾ x 12½ inches
The Ijaw (also known as Ijo or Izon) are a collection of migrant
fisherman indigenous mostly to the forest regions of the Bayelsa,
Delta, and Rivers States within the Niger Delta in Nigeria; they
were among the earliest settlers of the delta region. As maritime
people, many Ijaws were employed in the merchant shipping
sector in the early and mid-20th century, pre-Nigerian
independence; with the introduction of oil and gas exploration
in their territory, some Ijaw are currently employed within those
respective industries.
Such figures as this one, depicting a female kneeling or sitting with
a bowl, are traditionally used in Luba culture during pregnancy to
appeal to the spirits for good health. Neighbors seeing the figure
in front of a woman’s hut will fill the bowl with ceremonial offerings to help her avoid hardship during pregnancy.
16.
Bird: sejen
Senufo
Ivory Coast
Wood
22 x 7 x 7 inches
The Senufo are established across Mali, Ivory Coast, and Burkina
Faso, with a population of approximately one and a half million
people. They are constituted under matrilinear lineages, with
villages operating under the authority of a chief that descends
from their maternal side.
Bird figures, such as this sejen, are one of the many art forms
associated with the Senufo Poro, a society with the Senufo tribe
of initiated men. Senufo bird figures refer to both physical and
intellectual aspects of life, combined to assure the continuation of
the tribe; these themes serve as moral instructions, referring the
initiates’ to the wealth of knowledge embodied by the Poro society.
17.
Face Mask: ngblo
Baule
Ivory Coast
Wood
21 x 7½ x 8 inches
Present day Baule represents a complex mixture of populations
that have arisen to power over the course of centuries. The rituals
that fall under the power of tribal elders highlight previous
autochthonal relationships with neighboring ethnic groups such
as Guru, Senufo, Taure, and Mwan.
Ngblo is a generic term for masks that are created solely by men
in the community; these masks are ritualistic and conserved in the
Baule sacred forest. Ideally, when the mask is produced, the person that it evokes must hold it close and perform a ritual dance.
19.
Helmet Mask: bundu
Mende
Sierra Leone
Wood
19½ x 7½ x 14½ inches
18.
Songye Bifwebe Mask
Songye
Democratic Republic of Congo
Wood, white, brown and black pigment
29 3⁄8 x 10 x 12½ inches
The Songye occupy a territory in the Democratic Republic of
Congo, and are culturally and linguistically related to the Luba.
They have never had a united kingdom endowed with one ruling
monarch, however the Songye have chiefs who undergo a ritual
investiture and must observe a series of prohibitions that endows
them with a status on par to that of a sacred king.
The bifwebe (pl. kifwebe) mask serves as one of the most powerful
collaborators between reality and supernatural forces in the form
of magic or sorcery in the bwadi bwa kifwebe society, which
functions as the organ of control in the ruling elite. The kifwebe
masks are claimed to exist in a place beyond the normal order of
the universe.
20.
Helmet Mask: bundu
Mende
Sierra Leone
Wood
18 x 83⁄4 x 9 inches
21.
Mask, Democratic Republic of Congo
Wood, 20¾ x 14 x 12½ inches without base
22¼ x 14 x 12½ inches with base
93⁄8 x 91⁄8 inch base
Pende Mask (Katundu Chiefdom), of the Yaka tribe, representing
the chief (Fumu) at caricatured dances.
23.
Bakota Janiform Reliquary Guardian Figure
Copper and brass overlaid, with steel strips on one side
13½ x 25¼ x 4 inches without base
13½ x 29½ x 63⁄4 inches with base
7½ x 4½ inch base
The Bakota or Kota are a network of related peoples occupying a
vast zone bordering Congo and Gabon in present day Central
Africa. The term Kota is a collective name, as each cultural group
that occupies this region and is referred to as Kota, bears a more
specific name.
Kota reliquary figures are created for the worship of ancestors.
Sculptures would have been installed atop a reliquary basket or
box containing the remains of clan founders.
22.
Figurine, Democratic Republic of Congo
Wood, pigment, shells, beads. 28 x 6½ x 8½ inches without base
31½ x 6½ x 8½ inches with base
7¾ x 8 inch base
Songe Power Figure, of angular proportions, with a horn at the top
of the head, and the eyes inset with cowrie shells, the face covered
with copper and brass tacks and the head with skin.
N OV E M B E R 11, 2 013 – J A N U A R Y 11, 2 014
PAU L K AS M I N GA L L E R Y
2 9 3 T E N T H A V E N U E N E W YO R K N Y 10 0 01
T. 212 . 5 6 3 . 4 474
PA U L K AS M I N G A L L E R Y.C O M