Blue Paint Tubes 1990

Arman made this accumulation of blue paint tubes and oozing trails of pigment. I wonder about the life of this piece. It looks like it was made with the same kind of blue paint you might see on a delft tile, or a Yves Klein monochrome. I feel that Arman collected these tubes, emptied them, and then arranged them in a grid, letting their contents cascade down. I imagine him squeezing the tubes to get the very last bit of color. I imagine him thinking about Piero Manzoni canning his own poop! But Arman’s taking these objects and abstracting them. He's making an action. And the action is about art-making. It's a record of that expenditure of energy. Ultimately, making art is about seeing what happens when you put things next to each other. We make things and then other people see them, and then they make things back.