Daniel Arsham – Ground Breaker
Written By: Michael D. McClellan | Daniel Arsham is a busy man. The multidisciplinary artist is also prolifically multithreaded, his work ranging from his Future Relic series of mini-movies to his Rules of the Game stage collaboration with Pharrell Williams and choreographer Jonah Bokaer, to his ever-expanding universe of installations and exhibits. His fascination with modern-day objects, specifically with how these objects might be perceived as if unearthed on some future archeological site, has captivated imaginations worldwide. Arsham reimagines basketballs, cameras, teddy bears, and boom boxes as future relics, collapsing and expanding time by injecting decades of wear, neglect and abuse into familiar items from popular culture. Nothing is off limits: An eroded American flag, tattered an worn; an eroded DeLorean, in the color of volcanic ash, scarred by the passage of time; Pharrell’s 1980s Casio MT-500 keyboard and drumkit, a fossilized relic of a bygone past. Arsham explores all of it, playing with conventions of time and space in installations that infuse architecture and archeology with a surreal, paradoxical flavor. That the items are uniformly white or grey and crumbling is in itself a paradox, given that the the man behind the art is equal parts Average Joe and Andy Warhol.
“The further you get from a moment in time, the more closely things connect,” Arsham says, “so, 500 years from now, an iPhone and a phonograph will seem much closer together and relate more. I try to think about all the objects in the show as if I could forget what they were, what they were used for, and try to imagine approaching them like an archaeologist would.”
While Arsham gets plenty of critical love for his work, he’s also developed some serious street cred. When your films star actors like James Franco, Juliette Lewis, and Oscar winner Mahershala Ali, and you’re designing shoes for adidas, there’s little doubt you’ve transcended the traditional art world and cross-pollinated with pop culture. Not an easy ask, especially given the art world’s tendency to snub its nose at other mediums.
“Pop culture is in some ways far more egalitarian than the art world,” Arsham says. “I’m trying to investigate our current moment in time and the big ideas within our civilization. I’ll do that through as many mediums as I can.”
The Miami-raised, New York-based artist graduated from Manhattan’s Cooper Union in 2003. While the private college at Cooper Square helped fuel Arsham’s inquisitive nature, his fascination with time crystallized when, at the age of 12, Hurricane Andrew destroyed his house and much of the community around him. The disaster forced him to think about impermanence, the idea that everything is transient, that we are all essentially fossils or artifacts in waiting.
“Seeing architecture in a state of flux and movement, and in a state of decay and rebuilding after the storm, has influenced much of my practice – both in Snarkitecture and in my own work.”
Snarkitecture, a design studio co-founded in 2008 by Arsham and architect Alex Mustonen, reflects the artist’s appetite for interdisciplinary collaboration. The name is drawn from Lewis Carroll’s The Hunting of The Snark, a poem describing the ‘impossible voyage of an improbable crew to find an inconceivable creature.’ The aim of Snarkitecture is to subvert existing materials within a space to find a new and imaginative purpose for that space.
“Snarkitecture fills a personal artistic need. There are some artists out there that can sit in a room and work and not care who ever sees it, but I am not that kind of artist,” Arsham explains. “I want to make work that people can engage with. The work is completed by people engaging with and experiencing it.”
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Interrogating, disrupting, and transcending time is key to Arsham’s mission with 3018. The show’s items, each selected for its tie to a particular era or moment, have been dislodged from the past and projected into an imagined future – the eroded DeLorean from Back to the Future, the ‘60s Ferrari from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, a pile of random objects which includes electric guitars, microphones, cell phones, cameras, tires, phones, and more – hallmarks that have become a defining characteristic of his practice. For Arsham, his sculptures are ‘future artifacts,’ each appearing to be in a state of erosion, with wound-like craters disrupting their pristine facades. A ball rack of basketballs made out of glinting crystal? A McDonald’s sign cast in obsidian? A pyramid of baseballs, each ball formed from a different material (volcanic ash, steel, and glacial rock dust, much of which he orders on eBay)? It’s all part of Arsham’s authenticity.
“It’s not a trick,” Arsham says. “Let’s say a camera gets calcified over a thousand years in crystal. It would look just like the one I made, and the materiality will be the same.”
Arsham’s fascination with time is the strand that connects his multidisciplinary art. His production company, Film the Future, is home to a nine-part series of short films collectively titled Future Relic. Future Relic 01 was scored by hip-hop producer Swizz Beatz and has costuming by fashion designer Richard Chai. Future Relic 02 stars actor and director James Franco, who plays the role of a worker who spends his days underground indexing and destroying objects from past society. Future Relic 03 premiered at the 2015 TriBeCa Film Festival with music by Alexis Georgopoulos, and stars Juliette Lewis in costuming by Richard Chai. Other projects include a short film for Hennessy 250, and a short film for Jefferson Hack’s MOVEment series, shot in collaboration with fashion designer Calvin Klein, choreographer Jonah Bokaer, and ballet dancer Julie Kent.
“Working with film is similar to dance in some ways,” Arsham explains, “but film is infinitely more complex because you can watch it over and over again. You can pick things apart.”
Arsham’s collaborative spirit is reflected in a recent project, Rules of the Game, a multidisciplinary production with Pharrell and Bokaer. Two years in the making, Rules highlights three mediums; art, music, and dance, all of it working and interacting with one another to assault the viewer’s senses. Painstakingly ambitious, Rules of the Game is loosely based on Luigi Pirandello’s 1921 absurdist play Six Characters in Search of an Author. It combines Arsham’s explosive visuals and design with Pharrell’s music, and dancers choreographed by Bokaer. As grueling as it might be to get three distinct creative visions to work cohesively in one production, Rules is another example of Daniel Arsham’s cross-platform domination and resolute fearlessness.
“We worked on this project a very long time, so we had the time to experiment to see what might work and what wouldn’t,” he says. “We all understood that this project would be a risk, but that’s part of creating art.”
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Arsham’s profile leveled up with his Past, Present, Future adidas collaboration, moving him closer to pop culture icons Usher, Kanye and Swizz Beatz. The first release – a pair of trainers designed to look like they were chipped away at during an archaeological dig – were hugely successful, and coveted by collectors. The shoe features frayed sections, while the rubber sole appears to have been chipped away and left with jagged edges. Its white laces are finished with painted metal tips. The final installment in the series – the adidas Futurecraft 4D, which reveals hidden lettering under black light – generated a flurry of pre-release buzz, the hype culminating with a launch event, scavenger hunt, and the release of Arsham’s Hourglass Part III: Future short film.
“Working with the adidas design team, we went back and forth on a number of iterations, slowly honing and simplifying the design,” Arsham says of the Futurecraft 4D. “My studio made a large contribution in the design of the packaging, socks and gloves as well as the sealing of the actual box.”
Now that the Past, Present, Future series with adidas is complete, will Arsham fill the hole in his busy schedule with some well-deserved R&R?
“I enjoy what I’m doing to much to take a break,” the multidisciplinary artists says with a smile. “I don’t look at what I do as work. Whether it’s sculpture, stage design, film, or footwear, I’m most content when I’m working on the next big thing.”
Good news for the rest of us. And spoken like a man who has no interest in becoming a relic himself.
You grew up in Miami.
I was born in Cleveland but moved to Miami a short time later. Miami was a great place to grow up, because I like to swim in the ocean. And to this day I really like Disney World. I try and do a regular pilgrimage to Disney World.
Who – or what – has had the greatest influence on your work?
Architecture as a general overarching theme is something that I am very interested in. Film has played a big part in my work. In terms of people I have been fortunate to work with many different talents across multiple disciplines. Choreographer Merce Cunningham is someone I worked with when I was very young. He gave me the chance to explore theatre, which is something I hadn’t worked in previously.
How did you meet Merce Cunningham?
Merce had seen an exhibition that I did at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Miami. This was like right before I left for New York. It was an exhibition of paintings, which is why it came as a complete shock that he would ask me to do a stage design. He got my number from the museum’s director, called and said, “I’m Merce Cunningham, are you familiar with what I do?”
From a practical standpoint, how did the two of you collaborate?
Merce had this very unique way of working. He would separate each portion of a performance into their own respective parts, allowing each person to work independently. He would make his choreography, I would make the set design, an artist would make the costumes, a musician would make the score, but none of us knew what the other was doing. I never knew what the dance was going to look like before the premiere. I could basically do anything I wanted. It was amazing and sort of terrifying at the same time. Also when I first started working with him, I was 24. He was 84.
You’re a multidisciplinary artist. What’s it like to venture into areas where you might not be completely comfortable?
When Merce asked me to work on my first stage design, he kept encouraging me. It was a large scale project, the largest I had done up to that point, but Merce gave me the confidence to pursue it. A lot of other things I’ve worked on, the creation of the films, working with architecture, all of these things, they seem difficult from the outside – and they are – but often, the things I’ve pursued outside of my own practice are in collaboration with other people. In dance, stage and film, I’ve been able to find people who really know what they’re doing, and they’ve allowed me to make these things.
You mentioned film. Let’s talk about your Future Relic films.
Film for me encompasses all the things I’m interested in – architecture, performance, sculpture, and photography. People kept asking me questions about the work I was making, and that was really the trigger point, so I wrote a treatment for a film titled Future Relic, with nine different parts. The stories are all linked, but it feels like they’re very disconnected. The story jumps around in time and spans about 500 years. Each segment takes place in a different time period. It’s intended to be disorienting, but in the end it will all make sense.
I’ve watched the first four. These films have a big-budget feel.
People often think that if an artist is making a film that it’s going to be some sort of art film with no story or very abstract. There are elements of Future Relic that are like that, but there is a story that is closer to a Hollywood style thing.
How difficult is it to create these cinematic vignettes?
It’s definitely a learning experience. Film, more than anything, is the most difficult thing I have ever tried to accomplish. If I show work in a gallery or museum I can easily control everything from the light, the way people enter, and obviously what the work looks like. In film, you have to control everything, every last detail. Everything that you place on the screen means something. To achieve the mood or emotion that you’re trying to create is far harder than it looks.
Give me an example.
The creating or building of light. Light, in the Future Relic films, is as much of a character as the actual characters themselves. Trying to make light work in that way is far more difficult that it appears. There’s a scene in Future Relic 04 where the characters are in an airplane cockpit. We constructed the entire cockpit, and lighting was placed on the character’s faces to make it appear as if they are moving through clouds. Pulling that off was extremely difficult.
What inspiration did you draw on in order to create the world within Future Relic 01?
The visual language draws from Lawrence of Arabia. The film was shot entirely at dawn, which is the same technique that was used in the 1962 film, which helped us achieve this day-for-night quality. So we shot everything in the day and then the color was adjusted so it appears like moonlight.
Hip-hop artist Swizz Beatz did the score for the film.
This was something that was very outside of his normal way of working, but I think he really made a beautifully subtle piece that was very much in key with what I was looking for.
Future Relic 02 stars A-List actor James Franco. How did you end up working with Mr. Franco?
I’ve been fortunate to develop some great relationships through collaborations with my work. I wrote the entire treatment with a colleague of mine named Timothy Stanley. Most of the actors so far have come through my relationship with Al Moran, who is the co-founder of the OHWOW Gallery in Los Angeles. Al Moran has worked with James many times, so we were introduced. I spoke to James about our project and explained that I felt he was perfect for the role, and it turned out that he was interested. The role is challenging because there’s no dialogue at all. Everything is conveyed by the expressions on his face, and his movement.
Future Relic 03 stars the lovely Juliette Lewis.
I’m friends with her brother, who convinced her to see the film with James. She liked it a lot, and agreed to sign on. Having those connections helps, but there are still challenges that come with putting a film together. Being sensitive of their time was a prime driver; it was much easier to shoot these as vignettes because all the actors and talent are friends and are donating their time. I’m working around their schedules. And having the films made in short bursts is easier than dedicating months to work on it.
Let’s talk about your art. When did you become interested in the concept of being an “archeologist from the future?”
The summer of 2011. I was in Easter Island, which is a very small island in the South Pacific, and I was there making paintings that were later made into a book published by Louis Vuitton. There were also some archeologists working there at the same time. They were excavating some of these famous statues and found objects left behind by previous archeologists that had excavated the site about 100 yeas ago. Looking at this gave me the idea of collapsing time within those two separate objects—the sculpture from 1,000 years ago and the more contemporary pool of artifacts. When I returned from Easter Island, I started making fictional archeology objects from our present – cameras, phones and things like that – that looked as if they had been reformed with geological material and uncovered at some point in the distant future. The decision was made to use geological materials, like volcanic ash, crystal, to convey this sense of time.
What does the idea of “fictional archeology” means for you?
When I take a simple object – a Walkman, for example – that we all have, or used to have, and make it look like a fossil or an artifact, this makes us rethink our inscription in time. It challenges the ideas we have we constructed about time. To what extent do we believe, unconsciously, in progress, and linear development? It’s towards these kinds of questions that I want to lead my viewers. In placing them in the future, where the familiar objects of their everyday lives appear to them as though from an ancient moment. I want them to experience what Freud called the Uncanny.
Give me an example of your work that reflects this.
My 3018 exhibition at the Perrotin Gallery in Paris is based on a notion of fictional, archeological objects – objects more or less directly related to music. These are familiar objects presented as though they’ve come from another era, in the past. Although they would normally pass by unnoticed, they take on a new consistency. It’s the idea of the flow of time that is being called into question, because most of the objects I’m using are things that don’t exist in our everyday lives. They are things that are just slightly past, yet they already feel like they are from the past. That bridge in time is important in order to imagine these things as relics. This archeology is based on a simple principle: Take a familiar object and make it undergo a treatment, and then finish the object so that it appears as something strange, something surprising.
Tell me about your treatment of these objects.
When I started these works, I could have taken a camera and painted it to look old, but something about this kind of alchemy—this shift of material—gives a greater weight to the objects, and gives a kind of truth to them that is more powerful. It was the only way to achieve a true authenticity.
Do you have a favorite material to work with?
Materials are always as important to the concept as the visuals they create. When you look at the car and it’s made of crystal, it isn’t as if I painted it to look degraded. Its material is something we associate with a geological time frame.
3018 has some very recognizable pieces.
Two of the pieces are cars. I always look for multiple entrance points so viewers can recognize them, and these two happen to be props from films: The DeLorean from Back to the Future and the Ferrari from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
Pharrell Williams is a friend. How did you meet?
Emmanuelle Perrotin, who represents me in Paris, invited me to dinner at Pharrell’s house a number of years ago. There was a lot of conversation, and at some point he had someone from his team pull up my website. We were in his kitchen at the time.
It seems like the two of you hit it off.
Pharrell’s an amazing person on so many levels. I see someone who is engaged in so many disciplines, so there are some direct parallels with what I’ve pursued in my own practice. I would see him at Art Basel in Miami, and I would immediately notice that he wasn’t just content to be there. He was engaged. He would talk to the artists and designers, and not at a superficial level He would intently listen and ask questions, so that he understood what they were doing.
What’s the first thing your worked on together?
I asked him to tell me about something that was really important at the beginning of his music career – something that he made music on but didn’t have or use anymore. He then described his first keyboard that had these drum pads on it. I did a bunch of research and found out it that it was a Cassio MT NT500. That became the first piece, a relic of the original machine he made music on, and then I was fortunate enough to bring him into my world to create music for Rules of the Game.
How did you approach the stage design for Rules of the Game?
As an artist, if there are rules, I’m going to figure out how to break them. This project was heavy on the idea of mythology and legend, and so much of my work relates to archeology and history, so I set out to integrate those two things. Having objects shatter and then come back together is a play on the stretching out of time, and doing it with Greek and Roman masks and busts helped to heighten the effect. That’s what I was trying to get to with the scenography.
On Rules, you collaborated with Pharrell and the incomparable Jonah Bokaer. Did you work together, or independently from one another?
Both. With Jonah, I would usually present him with an idea: “There’s going to be thousands of balls, or a giant roll of paper, and I want it to form these giant icebergs on stage.” Then he develops the choreography and he uses the material as a way to motivate movement. The rolling of the balls, the masks, the shattering of these things as content in the work. So I’d throw out an idea and he’d come back and say, “I like these things,” or “Maybe this would work better if we did this.”
Let’s talk Snarkitecture. How did your partnership with Alex Mustonen come about?
Snarkitecture started when I was making pieces in public space that manipulated architecture. In a museum or gallery, I usually have carte blanche but my gestures are temporary. Public space requires a different knowledge base, so I hired Alex to help realize my pieces on a larger scale. We discovered an area closer to architecture than my own practice, so Snarkitecture emerged from that. It ultimately became its own entity with its own language.
Your latest exhibition, Moonstone, wrestles with concepts of space, exoplanets and time, all of it woven into Japanese gardens.
I was invited to spend some time at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where I was allowed into a creative studio whose mission it is to communicate to the public some of the more complex discoveries they make. That could be anything from ice on Mars to exoplanets with multiple moons. So I started to integrate some of the forms I saw there, one of those being these exoplanet moons, which are kind of like invented planets.
You’ve spent some time in Japan. How did this inspire your exhibition?
I’ve spent a lot of time in Japan over the last decade, and this repetitive act of raking the sand has always fascinated me. These gardens are fixed in time, in that they have been generally unchanged for hundreds of years, and yet they are remade every day. As I approached the exhibit from an early conceptual position, I envisioned the moons like some distant solar system or collection of planets, and the sand representing space-time or a ripple in a plane of space.
Japanese architecture has a certain timeless quality to it.
There are many buildings and temples that have remained unchanged for hundreds of years. The tea houses or temples look the same now as they did five hundred years ago, and maybe will five hundred years from now.
You recently released a monograph through Rizzoli.
My Rizzoli book reflects on the last 20 years of my work, all the way back to my thesis exhibition at Cooper Union. It’s one of the earliest things I created using architecture as a medium to play with –manipulating and creating a disconcerting, uncanny architecture.
Tell me a little about your Futurecraft collaboration with adidas.
When I approached the design of the Futurecraft sneaker, I was thinking more about the tools and materials that we use within the studio. The outfits we wear and the equipment that is related to the production of artwork. The tonality of the shoe is based on the green color that is used in the branding of the studio. This color is derived from many of the works that I was making, which use crushed, broken glass that becomes green – if you look at the edge of a sheet of glass, and you’re staring across it, you can see this greenish color. This comes from iron impurities in the actual glass, but if you look at the glass straight on it is completely clear.
Final Question: If you had one piece of advice for other artists, what would that be? There are no shortcuts. Following your passion means doing the hard work and seeing your art through to its inevitable conclusion.
- Mario Andretti – Full Throttle - February 4, 2024
- Tim Russ – Star Trek: Voyager - July 25, 2021
- Maeve Press – Everything’s Gonna Be Okay - May 23, 2021
