Ecart is a group of artists, an independent space, and a publishing company, founded in Geneva by John M Armleder, Patrick Lucchini, and Claude Rychner in 1969. An extension of the “non-artistic” activities—ranging from rowing to the “tea ceremony”—of a group of friends, Ecart quickly established itself in Europe as a reference site for the dissemination of artistic practices associated with Fluxus.
Opening with a festival of Happenings, the Ecart “gallery” devoted exhibitions to Daniel Spoerri, George Brecht, Ben, Ken Friedman, Manon, Olivier Mosset, Endre Tot, etc., while Editions Ecart published Genesis P.-Orridge, Lawrence Weiner, Annette Messager, Sarkis, and many others. If we add to this list the organization of Dada and Fluxus recitals, the group’s own artistic activities, and the opening of a bookshop devoted to artists’ books and periodicals, we get some measure of the protean output that made Ecart such an important link in the “Eternal Network” Robert Filliou talked of.
At the heart of Ecart’s activities were a number of clusters of interest, influences, and issues that were crucial to the period: the central role accorded to printed matter in the 1960s and 1970s; the “performative paradigm” that prevailed with Fluxus, i.e. the enactment of a “score” rather than a finished, closed work; working as a collective and all the types of authorial delegation that can result from it; as well as exchange systems such as Mail art and the nodal concept of “information,” made explicit by Kynaston McShine’s eponymous exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (New York).
Ecart was also the “place” where the individual practice of John M Armleder, a central figure in the group, emerged and developed. It is through him that these archives have been built and will enter the museum’s collection.
A retrospective dedicated to Ecart was held in 1997 at MAMCO, the Print Room of the Musée d’art et d’histoire, and Saint-Gervais, curated by Lionel Bovier and Christophe Cherix. Between 2016 and 2019 it was the subject of a HES-SO research project by MAMCO and the HEAD – Genève and conducted by Elisabeth Jobin. It has now found a new place within the museum, as a resource for research, exhibition, and the development of MAMCO’s archives on recent art history.
