Daniel Arsham’s “Various Thoughts” at Perrotin Is an Adventure in Futurist Classicism
The artist’s new autobiography Future Relic and his new show time travel between Hurricane Andrew and the ancient world
In recent years, Daniel Arsham’s name has appeared as much in connection with his collaborations as with his creations. He’s helped design shoes, luggage, and jewelry for major brands like Dior, Pharrell Williams, Adidas, Rimowa, and Tiffany & Co. And despite having grown up mostly in Miami, he considers the Cleveland Cavaliers his team, having reimagined the logo as the NBA franchise’s creative director.
Yet Arsham remains an artist at heart, and has demonstrated an aptitude for transcending medium his entire career. As a student at Cooper Union, he worked across painting, sculpture, photography, architecture, film, and—thanks to interest from Merce Cunningham—set design. For Arsham, things are fluid, not fixed. He favors evanescence and immutability, time lapse and history, memory and imagination, and the present as cosmic plaything under his distinguishing rubric “Future Relic.”
Future Relic is also the title of his autobiography, launching March 14 at his New York gallery, Perrotin, where his new show, “Various Thoughts,” is on view through April 11. The trauma most persistently present in his work is Hurricane Andrew’s obliteration of his family’s home when he was 12; writing the memoir and the concerted act of remembering it is a form of catharsis.
Insistently articulated in Arsham’s deconstructivist works is his soft spot for classical antiquity. He applies its myths and morphology, its architectural types and representative tropes, its artistic expressions, to his thinking about the psychological consumption of existence. At the show’s center is Classical Speaker Sculpture, in which an aluminum cast of a time-fissured statue in white bismuth patina hefts bookshelf amps emanating birdsong and the chirping of crickets.
The cracked-open sculptures in Arsham’s Labyrinth series—made from ancient-looking sand, marble, and bronze—reveal scaled-down, half-ruined staircases to and from nowhere with introspective tiny figures. In contrast to mazes, which, Arsham says, “are about confusion,” labyrinths, and the kind of dark journey undertaken by Theseus, end in spiritual rebirth. Figures emerge at the top of stairways into the light.
“Many of my sculptures deal with archaeology of the future, with objects that seem to exist outside linear time,” says Arsham, a Galerie Creative Mind. “The labyrinth works in a similar way.” By implication, “the question underneath it all is how our moment will be interpreted centuries from now. What values will be visible in the artifacts we leave behind? Sometimes imagining the future looking back on us helps us see our present more clearly.”
In Arsham’s mindscapes, architecture in ruins and its associations with memory are Earth’s gifts. In reality’s present, he says, modern figures like Tadao Ando and architecturally inclined artists like Donald Judd “are very present for me. My work sits somewhere between sculpture and architecture.”
Arsham has over a million followers on social media. Many come for his streetwise archaeology of the future. They stay for guidance out of the labyrinth of a confounding present.
Daniel Arsham, “Various Thoughts,” is on view at Perrotin New York through April 11.