John M. Armleder

Born in 1948 in Geneva, he lives in New York and Geneva.

As a major figure in the Swiss art scene and an internationally recognized artist, John Michael Armleder founded the Ecart group in 1969; it was close to the Fluxus spirit, and was subsequently noted for its Furniture Sculpture, associating pieces of furniture and paintings. In making use of every sort of medium, never scaling his work down to any one style, and even criticizing the notion of style, his many-facetted work challenges abstraction, the idea of artwork, the notion of auteur, and the contradictions of modernity.

You're preparing something for les Abattoirs – Musée Frac Occitanie Toulouse with the artist John Armleder. What will it involve?

Christian Bernard: In the present-day exhibition world, a museum that doesn't display the possibilities offered by the contextualization of works is a museum that is suffocating. John M. Armleder has been continually re-inventing the way he exhibits his works, and the works of others. His spectrum is very wide; he can work both in an extremely saturated way and in an extremely rarefied way. So we're going to organize a dialogue with him in the side areas of Les Abattoirs. This will involve asking an artist to take a look at the city's resources in terms of public collections, and present them differently: to introduce a crisis into the actual museum, a crisis of its representation and its way of representing art. From this viewpoint, the artist has a greater legitimacy than the curator or museum director. We're thus hoping to give a foretaste of what might turn into a creative circulation of the various collections.