[Audio Guide]
Actual cameras have been tightly packed into a black box that has similar color and dimensions to those of a camera. In the modern day, when we naturally reach for our smartphones to take photos, such cameras are old-fashioned and most likely encountered only in a museum. However, during the 1960s when this work was made, they were not infrequently used in daily life. Arman’s goal is for us to see things in a new light; by collecting a lot of the everyday “objects” that surround us in our ordinary lives, packing them together and surrounding them in plastic and so on, the artist emphasizes their materiality through such excess. It is not the images that cameras produce that are his focus, but the cameras themselves. He presents a “new reality” by focusing on the physicality of the created object, not its function of conveying information through media.
