Artist, John Armleder: My process of coming up with a piece is using a lot of chance elements and is playing around with them. This is most probably because my real background and the philosophy of my work would be more like coming from John Cage, Dadaism, Fluxus. And of course what interests me is to combine that with a very constructed image. The whole process in making it was done from a distance which I very often do in the process of multiple works. I decided on format, together with the publisher and gave them elements for production such as the design and how many pieces should be involved. I gave variance of colors but I didn’t check the process further on. So basically I gave them a script, more or less precise, where possible mistakes could be involved and I let them carry ahead. And, as a matter of fact, in the process for this piece, the printer was very disturbed because he thought he didn’t follow the rules. And my feeling is the way of not following the rules give the real rules.
The piece came by just looking at the TV program and there was a visual jingle. What interested me in the jingle is that it was kinetical. It was like a zoomed image into a target which was then blue and red rings. And I liked the idea that this very plain image was used in a dynamic way. That jingle reminded me of course of other things from the Jasper Johns targets to the Marcel Duchamps and so on.
The range of colors I use is of course about the history of color in a way or another. If you use gold and you go back to middle age paintings it has a very specific significance. If you use fluorescent colors which are modern colors, they will reflect to the context of when these colors have been introduced, and they also have this very edgy kind of optical effect
The design of the target is like an unfinished target and you don’t know if the target is larger than the sheet and would end just out of it or somewhere around or would be like rings in a puddle when you would throw a stone the rings on the surface moving in and out. And they give this dynamic to it. And, of course it does refer to the fact that it’s not a finished aimed target but also something which expands beyond the work of art itself.