John Armleder

Installation views John Armleder, AGAIN, JUST AGAIN, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai
© John Armleder
Courtesy Rockbund Art Museum

Curated by Larys Frogier and Billy Tang, John Armleder’s solo exhibition Again, Just Again at the Rockbund Art Museum is a unique project gathering seminal historical pieces as well as an ambitious series of onsite newly produced works. The show brings into fruition an on-going, intensive and generous exchange between the artist and the Rockbund Art Museum following his visit to Shanghai in 2019. The result is a brilliant project, where each floor of the Rockbund Art Museum is permeated with an unexpected and expanded new connections to the meaning of painting, engaging the audience with a multi-layered experience of perceptual, emotional and critical encounters.

John Armleder has been defining figure across many different fields and discourses related to art through an influential career that has continually involved interchanging fluidly between the roles of painter, performance artist, sculptor, archivist, collector, curator, and editor. There is the initial impulse of our museum to give access to historical materials related to the Ecart archives, a collective artistic adventure active between 1969-1982, which featuring gatherings organized by John Armleder and his friends to develop daring experimental actions, statements, publications, films, and the creation of a self-managed gallery. Ecart means “gap,” “interval,” “divergence” in French, is emblematic of the group's unique collective economy of shared cross-disciplinary experimentation, influencing how they actively contributed in the 1970s to aesthetic practices of freedom, the hybridization of artistic movements, from conceptual to action-based art, from individual poetics of each contributor, and to the sharing of different forms of authorship that blur into one another.

Hanging between the 4th and 5th floor, a large disco ball mirror fragments is suspended in the atrium of the Museum, shining and sparkling dots of light across the reflective floor. Here, an ensemble of different materials are dispersed into an impressive ambient experience produced by reverberated patterns, immersion, scintillation, fragmentation, duplication, and ways of contracting or expanding the exhibition hall through a series of visual games and interventions. In the center part of the exhibition hall, mirror panels are placed on the ground, fragmenting the architectural elements and bodies present in the exhibition hall, where the entire floor of the gallery is covered with a sea of reflective silver film. A module of a changing room constructed of mirrors stands mysteriously in the back of the room, creating an chain of internal reflections, an endless mise an abyme of a repeating image.

Because our experience of art is always shaped by language and culture, John Armleder artworks do not pretend to convey any fixed truth, story or meaning, simply because life and art are based on going and continual fluctuations from one moment to another, between individual and collective lives, and from one historical and cultural context to another. This observation is brilliantly evoked on the 3rd floor, where the Rockbund Art Museum and the artist have invited the renowned Shanghai based photographer Leslie Zhang with a open proposal to conceiving of an entirely new environment for experiencing a display of artwork selected by Armelder. The proposal by Armleder to designate a collaborator with full authorial control to design an entirely new scenography forms an important conceptual component to the experimental idea of an open-ended artwork functioning as an instruction or score to produce or embrace chance and unpredictability into the process of artmaking. In response to this “carte blanche” invitation, Zhang has designed a fictional hybrid park made of different elements connected to his personal memories of popular cultural references found in public spaces related to the evolution of gardens, public parks, leisure activities in 90s era China.

The 2nd floor of the museum is a subtle presentation of compositions involving processes of dripping, splashing, and pouring paint. There are also puddles, monochromatic elements, glitter paintings, as well as furniture sculptures and a large pink neon installation. 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.

Last but not least, before entering the galleries on each foyer of the museum, the visitors bump into a different accumulations of objects: plants, clothes, packaging, crates, and Christmas trees. They each appear as piled objects consisting of flotsam, decorative ornaments, cheap copies and everyday detritus assembled into a delicate poise between appearing incongruous to their immediate environment or as left-behind objects, soon to be taken away at any noticed. You might also notice a strange intervention in the elevator. This is another extension of Armleder’s open approach to art making in collaboration with his son Stephane Armleder. Together with his son and artist Sylvie Fleury, they established a niche record label called Villa Magica in 2002, specialising in mixing and revisiting esoteric music genres and styles such as Christmas music, sample songs from Haiwaii, and collaborations with pioneering musicians such as Genesis P-Orridge and Christian Maclay. Playing soundtracks in the elevator, the artwork takes the readymade concept of art into the dimension of muzak, an overlooked, but ever present use of music in public spaces, which is used as a sonic backdrop to enhance the feeling of seasonal change, influencing the collective mood and memory of a location, and is often used in in-between places such as corridors, hotel lobbies, and restaurants to transport audiences into an imaginary exotic location elsewhere.

Video trailer exhibition John Armleder, AGAIN, JUST AGAIN, 2021, Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai
Courtesy Rockbund Art Museum