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ARMAN = Conscious Vandalism (1975) documentary photos of the happening at the John Gibson Gallery, New York (.in artnet.com/magazine)
in Catalogue Premises Invested spaces in Visual Arts, architecture and design from France, 1958-1998
extrait
"The obsessive collector's instinct evident in ARMAN's early work quickly became the pathological frenzy of Les Colères, his fascination with the objet d'art turning to fury. In this work, ARMAN carefully crushed and dismembered, then often reconstituted such cultural objects as musical instruments.
Conscious vandalism represents a logical extension of Les Colères but instead of targeting a single cultural object, ARMAN launched this attack upon a whole environment: the petit-bourgeois interior.
Conscious Vandalism was performed by ARMAN at the John Gibson Gallery in New York in 1975. Aside from a video recording of the event, debris is all that remains of the work.
The action captured in the video has been described as a three act drama, with the first act setting the scene. ARMAN moves along the stores of Chinatown and Little Italy in New York, carefully selecting a range of household objects; he deliberately chose to shop at local stores offering bourgeois living at wholesale prices in the form of abundant imitation goods, rather than at fancy department stores. In act II, the cheap bourgeois scenery, ARMAN selected a carefully set up within the gallery space in a manner that underscores (souligne) the built-in artifice of the performance... In act III, ARMAN unleashes (déclenche) his final act of fury as he takes a hatchet to these objects- and to their concomitant myths. With each random blow of his ax, ARMAN relinquished his artistic autonomy. The inherent artifice of the event is aligned with the artifice of middle class living. The detritus of the living room remains inside the gallery. It points to world beyond.
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