Executed in 1972, Untitled is an iconic assault on art and culture in the artist’s signature style. We are presented with a cello in shattered parts, suspended in time as if at the point of explosion. Through the act of destruction, or rather deconstruction, and re-ordering of this instantly recognizable object, Arman explores ideas about creation and new perspectives of reality. A technique which echoes the principles of Cubism and Dadaism and was propounded by the movement that Arman was closely associated with – Nouveau Realisme, new ways of perceiving the real. With this work, Arman prompts the viewer to question and re-evaluate our understanding of the world by presenting us with a series of confounding statements: a musical instrument that is deprived of its functional ability to play music; an instrument permanently silenced and frozen in time by Perspex yet presented in a way in which the sound and movement of an explosion is emitted; the deliberate destruction of a classic musical instrument which society has been taught to revere and the role of the artist/creator in this act; the annihilation of aesthetic beauty in a instrumental form only to be repositioned into permanent anarchic splendour.
1972 Broken cello in Plexiglas. 162 × 132 × 19 cm (63 3/4 × 52 × 7 7/16 in). This work is registered in the Arman Archive under number APA 8208.72.088.