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John Armleder talks to Bob Nickas - '80s Then - Interview
ArtForum, March, 2003
BOB NICKAS: You've been coming to the Basel art fair since the early '70s, using your little corner spot to promote artists you like. And you do this through Ecart, which is more of a publishing activity than a gallery. So it's a certain philosophy that's led you to participate in something so commercial?
JOHN ARMLEDER: When Ecart started back in the '70S, we had a gallery space in Geneva and an offset print shop, and we would publish books, which we brought to the book fair in Frankfurt. One day I thought, "Maybe we should go to the art fair in Basel," and I asked for a table to show our books. In the beginning, a booth was beyond our budget. But we were also slightly reluctant to be part of this kind of art-market event.
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BN: As the '70s passed into the '80s, did you notice an increased buzz around the fair?
JA: Of course. The audience radically changed at some point in the early '80s. That transformation corresponded to the explosion of interest in "wild" painting, maybe around 1983, and to a period of rapid economic expansion. Before, the audience had been art lovers, people who knew the artists and galleries. There was a club of people who followed what was happening on a daily basis. There were only five big shows a year, so it was easy to do. Then, the coverage of art changed completely. Art became available to more people because that kind of money was suddenly available to them. Art was not just in a few specialized magazines, but in fashion magazines, sports magazines--and the people who read them did whatever those magazines suggested. And they came to the fair to buy things.
BN: Around this time you began to get more attention as an artist, and although you didn't hang your own work on the wall in Basel, it was all about your endorsement.
JA: People would pay attention just because, as you say, I was sitting there. It's true, and we always ended up selling works even though I certainly made no effort to sell anything. What happened in the '80s is that people presumed that if I had an eye on someone they would become the next hot artist.
BN: This is where people saw Sylvie Floury for the first time.
JA: That's probably right--at the Basel art fair certainly. (She was showing at Philomene Magers in Germany and Postmasters in New York around that time.) We showed Karen Kilimnik probably for the first time in Basel, Christian Marclay, Thom Merrick, John Tremblay, and Pipiotti Rist early on, and Herbert Hamak. Everything of his was sold before the opening.
BN: Even if you're thought of as an '80s artist, your history goes back to collaborative Fluxus-oriented events in the late '60s and early '70s and to completely noncommercial situations mostly in and around Switzerland. Then you enter people's consciousness in the mid-'80s, showing in galleries in New York, London, Paris, Munich. You showed at Barbara Gladstone in '86 alongside the painters Helmut Federle and Olivier Mosset, also Swiss, and Gerwald Rockenschaub from Vienna. Neo-geo seemed to be in all the galleries at the time, but I knew when I saw something at Gladstone that it was in fashion and had been confirmed. So what was it like to already be in the stream, so to speak, to have a history, but only then have people take notice?
JA: What happened in my case is that, of course, I had been working before my "discovery"--and would go on working. I've always made different types of work in different formats. But in the mid-'80s, because of this neo-geo thing, that aspect of my work was picked up as a label for the period. So it has very little to do with me. It has to do with the times. Also this side of my work-abstract paintings and furniture sculpture--entered the market at that moment.
BN: Did collectors change?
JA: A lot of collectors like to enter the artist's private world, purchasing their notebooks and so on; they feel that much closer to something unique. To them, having that kind of work gives them entry into the private confessions of the artist. There are people who have this relationship, which is cute in a way. But in the '80s there was a more "open door" situation where collectors would say, "Look, I bought the work of so-and-so, and I have the biggest, or the one from Documenta." I'm not being critical about this attitude. It's a very human way to react. It's always the case that the earlier collectors think that whatever is coming up is trivial, while the new ones don't have any idea what happened before, or they don't care. Critics and curators aren't so different.
BN: Imagine that having come out of Fluxus and been around a bit, you didn't see this time as your big chance, but rather as a moment in which chance played a big part.
JA: Certainly I have a different perspective from artists who emerged as instant success stories, which in my time didn't really exist, or not on the same scale. And I was never ambitious in the sense of caring about these things. In a way, whatever happened happened. Many people thought about career strategies in those days, but I didn't try to get into major collections or shows--it just happened. On the other hand, I totally benefited from this exposure. It's something you can't invent. And it gave me another reading of my own work.
