Daniel Arsham was born in Cleveland in 1980 but subsequently moved to Miami together with his family. In August 1992 Hurricane Andrew skimmed the coast of Florida and Louisiana, destroying hundreds of thousands of houses and structures. Caught up in the epicentre of events, Arsham watched as the elements pitilessly destroyed man-made walls that had only just now seemed indestructible.
This experience in observing the destructive action of the elements, walls slashed to pieces, and slabs of concrete smashed to smithereens fuelled Arsham’s interest in architecture and changed his attitude to the strict rules on which this discipline is based.
Predictably enough, Arsham planned to pursue his interest by studying architecture at university. The admissions committee at The Cooper Union in New York, however, turned down his application for its School of Architecture, so instead he received a classical art education at this college’s no less well-known School of Art.
Arsham’s student paintings, executed using gouache and watercolours, already show the formation of an individual figurative language: his monochrome studies depict monumental structures that resemble fantastical architectural compositions, natural reliefs chiselled from stone as if from the snow-bound planet in Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar. Here he treated the space of the painting as a place where he could ‘compel architecture to do what it should not and cannot do’. Painting was for Arsham a means by which to create boundless ideas that in the future he was able to scale up and realize in the materials of architecture.
Arsham’s ‘entrance’ into real architectural space came almost immediately after graduating. In 2003 he returned to Miami to design, together with friends, a space called ‘The House’, to be curated by artists. It was during this project that Arsham got to know the gallery owner Emmanuel Perrotin, who began representing him in 2005 and continues to do so to this day through Gallery Perrotin. His second such project was Placemaker, a gallery which is today part of Locust Projects, an alternative art space of which he is co-founder.
In spite of his experience in architectural design, Arsham continued feeling constrained by the need to stick to the rules of this system:
Architecture, it seems, has for Arsham never been an end in itself. But architecture’s figurative toolbox – tools which include manipulation of space and man’s position in space; the legacy of ancient classical architecture; a certain commitment to materials such as concrete, plaster, and stone; austerity and understatement of form – gave Arsham ‘levers’ with which to convey his essential meanings and create special visual effects.
Incidentally, on the subject of effects and the impressions they make. The lack of colour or its minimal inclusion in Arsham’s works focuses the viewer’s attention on form and structure. You might think this clever artistic ‘resection’ is deliberate, but its actual cause is Arsham’s innate colour blindness. The changed way of looking at the surrounding world is directly reflected in Arsham’s restricted palette of colours with its shades of white and grey.
Achromatism that heightens our perception of silhouettes stood Arsham in good stead when in 2004 the choreographer Merce Cunningham invited him to design the stage, lighting, and costumes for a production of eyeSpace. Arsham created a three-dimensional set that was minimalist in its use of colour and consisted of various architectural elements that seemed to have been ripped randomly from their functional contexts and glued together to form a single structure. This was a creative take on the kind of modelling using cardboard done by students. This first stage design by Arsham was subsequently acquired by the Walker Museum for its permanent collection.
Despite his lack of formal qualifications as a stage designer, Daniel Arsham became the youngest artist ever to have worked with Cunningham – joining a list of names which included Robert Rauschenberg, Andy Warhol, and Frank Stella.
Arsham continued working in the field of architecture during his collaboration with Hedi Slimane, creative director at Dior. On this occasion the brief was to develop a design for the fitting rooms at Dior’s flagman store in Los Angeles. Arsham opted to preserve functional elements such as coat hooks, mirrors, and recreational areas. What he created here was an imitation of ruins: mirrors were pressed deep into rough-textured walls covered with cracked plaster that seemed to be in the process of peeling off.
The boutique’s interior was both dried up and melting at the same time yet remained aesthetically attractive. Arsham’s strategy here was not to insert scenery depicting ruined architecture but to make the boutique part of a parallel space that had by some miracle landed in our reality.
After his sensational collaboration with Dior, Arsham was showered with requests from other sectors of the fashion market to transform and design spaces. His new clients included COS (the Swedish brand) and KITH (a Mecca for skinheads). Demand creates supply: Arsham got together with his university friend Alex Mustonen to set up the architecture firm Snarkitecture.
The idea of intervening in space and changing its constituent elements evolved into manipulations with time. A visit to Easter Island in 2011 gave Arsham food for thought. Over the course of a month Arsham observed an archaeological expedition while working on gouache drawings of ancient Moai statues, monuments, and historical remains on the island. Later, his drawings and monochromatic studies were part of a limited-edition guidebook created in collaboration with Louis Vuitton and other invited artists.
Continuing, as ever, to work in the field of architecture, literally and figuratively ‘on the surface’ (and sometimes ‘above’ it), Arsham cast his gaze into the places where architecture has its foundations. He immersed himself in the depths, ‘under the surface’, and began using this stratum as his canvas, simultaneously threading onto it the dimensions of the past, present, and future. The process of excavation throws up, together with ancient artefacts, later objects that have been left behind by other archaeologists or researchers previously engaged on the site. Although these objects relate to various events and periods, they may be described as a group whose fantastical aggregation can only be explained only through an invented archaeology. And this is what Arsham is beginning to construct: he collects from all over the world objects that are congruent with the present epoch, and then ages them using improvisation.
Arsham buys old telephones with protruding antennas, boomboxes, players, radios, and film cameras on eBay or at flea markets and then creates casts from volcanic ash and crystal. These sculptures, which formally depict things from the recent past or near present, acquire the visual traits of monuments: wear, cracks, erosion, chips, pieces of crystallization. It is as if they are objects that have been found on some future archaeological dig.
Arsham does not take part in archaeological digs in the straightforward sense of the word: does not roll up his sleeves and dig in the ground, does not dig archaeological pits (apart from when he created a pit directly in a gallery space and filled it with ‘relics’). What he does is imitate scenarios that might arise when our age approaches its end. The ‘future relics’ become an instrument of fictive archaeology, a kind of portal that Arsham uses to create a future dig in the present, changing the course of time and history in the given space.