Arman

I did not discover the principle of accumulation; it discovered me.

It has always been obvious that this society demonstrates its need for security by its mania for piling up, as can be seen in its store windows., its assembly lines, and its garbage heaps. As a witness to the society in which I live, I have always been involved in the pseudobiological production cycle of consumption and destruction. And for a long time, I was anguished by the fact that is most obvious material result is the invasion of our world by rejects and discards.

My great shock was Dadaism and Surrealism and the use of the object as directly integrated into the work of art.

The violin is a very easy object to reproduce because the violin is a finished form that has not been improved upon since the eighteenth century and which shall not be improved upon; the violin as finished product, charged with identity and with correspondence, is final.

The art object: a trompe l'oeil, Arcimboldo's head made of vegetables, nineteenth-century trompe l'oeil, or, for instance, an explosion--because an explosion becomes an object in a church by Monsu Desiderio--are for me objects because they escape from the formal conditions of their era and of plastic dimensions, to present either an event or an object out of context.

As a canoe is an extension of the Eskimo, the car is an extension of its user, as if it were an orthopedic device, like a thing that grows on him and which he can get rid of easily.

The inside of a coffee grinder is a divine thing: You can lose yourself in the meanders of a simple but efficient architecture; it is the hidden side of the moon that has remained unchanged--it is the same thing as the other side.

I show the inside simply to show the inside.

I have never been able to keep myself from collecting things; everything that falls into my hands, from plants to stamps to seashells, primitive art, and even modern paintings, even books, everything that falls into my hands--I conceive of it as a whole; I have always been suffering from a sickness that could be called the squirrel syndrome; the appetitive value a well-filled showcase has for me--I redo the showcase that I admired in my childhood.

When my father took me to exhibits such as a Paris Trade Fair or a World's Fair, I was extremely fascinated seeing the inside of an engine, the inside of a very complicated electric device to be used for a boat, any cross section, I found incredible things, marvelous entrails that would explain to me the workings of everything, therefore of God.

The artist is an informer.