PRESENTATION: John Armleder-Again, Just Again
John Armleder consistently rewires presumptions about what art can be in the wake of the modernist and postmodernist revolutions of the last century. His early association with the Fluxus movement has provided the springboard for an ever-evolving array of projects and conceptual approaches each of which leaves room for the operation of chance and the eruption of humor and pathos alike.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Rockbund Art Museum Archive
The exhibition “Again, Just Again” is a celebration of John Armleder’s influential five decades of work and inspired by the many inter-disciplinary detours in art throughout this journey. The exhibition features an ambitious display of new and existing work such as painting, ready-mades, works created on-site, works on paper, site-specific wall drawings, and archival material. With each floor of the museum, the spaces inside and outside of exhibition halls have been transformed through a unique scenography assembled to guide the audience through a choreography of unexpected encounters and visual experiences. Taking the spirit of the artist’s embrace of chance, open-endedness, and collective experimentation, the exhibition is also proud to include collaborations between the artist, the museum, and other practitioners to intervene, translate, and ultimately to extend new associations and meanings in response to different elements of Armleder’s wide-ranging oeuvre. With Armleder’s multi-sensorial repertoire of different art-making rules and techniques, compositional questions such as improvisation and order serve as an underlying concern in many works, connect to the artist’s longstanding interest in the history of painting and the evolution of its form. Many of his works push, short-circuit, or collapse the specificity of painting through challenging the conventions that connect the paint, canvas, and stretcher. Actions such as pouring, splashing, and chemical reactions loosen or heighten the level of authorial control by the artist. His connection to experimental painting is often in dialogue with other mediums and influences outside of the field of art; sometimes they are traces created from a performance, or arranged together like a visual score, allowing works to be repeated using different materials and in circumstances that create further variation, blurring the separation between the before and after. Rather than isolated objects, his paintings and other series of works are regularly presented with other objects, such as furniture, to highlight or contrast their formal qualities, textures, color, or symbolic function as they collide with other media. Therefore, the emphasis of chance takes on a new dimension as a path to go beyond what is expected or easily predicated, giving the chance to escape an arbitrary limit. This approach defines Armleder’s consistent refusal to stay within the margins of one singular style, format, or rule. He joyfully skates between different boundaries of an eclectic range of genres and artistic influences: from Modernism to Constructivism, Op-Art, Pop, Fluxus performances, and abstract or gestural painting. Likewise, the flux between art and everyday life is constantly utilized as a creative energy to cross-fertilize with other influences outside of the field of artworld: from high and low design, avant-garde music, and Hollywood B-movies. In many ways, art is an imitation of life, and perhaps poetically this influence extends the other way into another potential ecology, where life begins to simulate the beauty of forms created by art. If art can exist anywhere or be activated in any place, the accumulations series by Armleder is perhaps the most playful version of the readymade by the artist. On each exhibition floor, there are different orders of piled objects consisting of flotsam, decorative ornaments, cheap copies and everyday detritus assembled into unexpected spaces in the museum building. Held in a delicate poise, they appear incongruous as a random displacement, or as left-behind objects, soon to be taken away at any noticed. A beauty exists in how disparate materials gravitate towards one another into accidental sculptures, without the prompt to look more carefully, these are the moments in daily life that often pass us by unnoticed.
Photo: John Armleder, Untitled, 2021, Site specific wall-drawing, acrylic. Courtesy of the artist
Info: Curators: Larys Frogier, Billy Tang, Rockbund Art Museum, 20 Huqiu Road, , Huangpu District, Shanghai, China, Duration: 16/10-19/12/2021, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, www.rockbundartmuseum.org
