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Get to know futuristic designer Daniel Arsham



How does a creative know when they’re allowed to call themselves an ‘artist’?

When I ask Daniel Arsham this, perched on the edge of the sci-fi set of his latest creative campaign, Future Fantasy, he doesn’t pause for thought. He cites the day his whole life fell apart at just 12 years old. ‘I lived through a terrible hurricane in Miami. My childhood home was completely destroyed, right before my eyes.’ Hurricane Andrew arrived on 24 August 1992 and devastated the Bahamas, Florida and Louisiana, causing almost £22 billion worth of damage. 

Holing up in a reinforced concrete bunker, Arsham and his family made it through unscathed. Their house, on the other hand, did not. After a hefty insurance payout, the teenager watched as his entire home was rebuilt, exactly as it was before. 

‘Typically, when you’re a child you have a different understanding about space,’ he says. ‘You think about it less as it was constructed and more about the way it makes you feel or what it means. But that process enabled me to see through the walls. All of the architecture and plumbing was exposed. I could see how these things are designed. I made a whole series of photos following the demolition and reconstruction of the house. I think that was my first gesture of trying to understand life through a medium.’

Looking around the gallery-like set buried in a corner of the Old Selfridges Hotel, it’s clear this outlook continues to inform Arsham’s work. And it is an aesthetic that has served him well. Currently in London for a pop-up and all-round creative collaboration with Selfridges named The House, which opens this Monday, he has redesigned everything from the Selfridges bag to the Heinz tomato soup can (which you can pick up for a bargain £1.50). He is also showcasing one of his most famed works: a fully functioning Porsche from the year 3019. 

Daniel Arsham wears a Dior coat and shirt (Sebastian Nevols)

With more than 500,000 Instagram followers and Jay-Z, Usher and Pharrell as admirers, Arsham has turned an obsession with design, decay and construction into multi-million-dollar brand, Arsham Studio, which serves as an outlet for his every artistic calling. There’s also his architectural practice, Snarkitecture, where he collaborates with architects on larger-scale projects. He’s crafted everything from crumbling cassette tapes to giant teddy bears in need of some major TLC, and futuristic films starring Mahershala Ali and Juliette Lewis. Institutions such as New York’s New Museum and the Carré d’Art in Nîmes are grappling for his exhibitions, and the fashion lot can’t keep out of his DMs. (There have been collaborations with Cos, Adidas and others.) Early in his career, Arsham was asked by Hedi Slimane to design the fitting rooms for Dior Homme’s Los Angeles shop. And more recently he teamed up with the same label’s current creative director, Kim Jones, on his SS20 collection.

The pair, who met through ‘mutual friends’, drew upon Dior’s esteemed history, showcasing archaeologist-inspired silhouettes and a reimagination of some of the brand’s most iconic pieces — such as John Galliano’s newspaper print inverted on a frosted jacket. And Jones can’t sing Arsham’s praises enough. ‘I really like that Daniel sees the present as the future. I like his idea of legacy,’ he tells me. ‘I loved how Daniel looks at the present in the future context, and I thought, let’s look at the collection as if it were made of things that might be shown in a Dior exhibition 50 years from now.’

‘My concept is based around fictional archaeology, something that’s from our present that’s been pushed into the future,’ Arsham says. ‘I’m actually remaking [modern objects] with materials that we associate with a geological time-frame. I’m fascinated with the idea of a collapse of time that can happen with that. You’re in the present, you’re looking at this object that’s from your life but it’s something you might find in an archaeological site in the future. And even though [my work] looks like it’s falling apart, parts of it are made of crystal, so it could actually be growing to a kind of completion.’ 

Apple crumble: Quartz 1982 Desktop Computer, 2019, by Daniel Arsham (Sebastian Nevols)

Arsham’s own artistic growth began when his parents, who worked in law and banking, were told to move their son to a specialised architecture school after a teacher spied a hidden talent. Then after a slight bump in the road, he went on to study art at Cooper Union in New York. ‘I wasn’t accepted to study architecture [at university], so I did art instead,’ he explains. ‘It was a pretty broad education which didn’t focus on one discipline, so I did sculpture, film and painting. I focused on painting which is a bit ironic because most of my work today is in sculpture.’ 

After graduating, Arsham returned home. To his surprise, it was a much more exciting place than when he left. ‘I moved back to Miami right around the time that Art Basel had started. There was a lot of attention on the city and the artists from there. It was this unique moment when people coming from the outside were interested in what was happening locally.’ There, he and a group of friends gutted a space near the exhibition and created their own gallery named The House. 

A few years later, he received a note from the late legendary choreographer Merce Cunningham who spotted his work at Miami’s Museum of Contemporary Art and asked if he would be interested in working on a stage design. ‘I didn’t study stage design, I’d never been on a stage, so it was an interesting experience,’ says Arsham. ‘He was 60 years older than me and had a unique way of working. He started in the 1950s with artists like Rauschenberg and Warhol [in the 1960s], and he would create an evening of dance where an artist would make the set, he’d do the choreography and a musician would produce the score, but none of them would know what the others were doing. You’d just make it and bring it, sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t.’ 

(Sebastian Nevols)

Around the same time, Arsham founded Snarkitecture with creative partner Alex Mustonen, an architect friend from school who had helped him out with a couple of projects. ‘I was making these works that manipulated the surface of architecture. There were instances when the works were going to be in a public space or on the exterior of a building and I didn’t have the knowledge to execute such projects. So I got Alex on board. I started to see this place in between art and architecture that was a little more functional, so we founded Snarkitecture as a way to execute some of those ideas. It has developed its own language, it uses a reductive palate in a similar way to my other work, but we have a big focus on materials and lights and things like that.’ 

Back in the not so fictional present, the artist treasures moments between his homes in Brooklyn and Long Island with his wife, Stephanie, and sons Casper, six, and Phoenix, three, where he artistically rakes his driveway daily (check his Instagram) and tends his growing collection of bonsai. 

In the professional realm, he’s currently exhibiting at the How Art Museum in Shanghai, debuting a shoppable furniture exhibition at Design Miami in December and flogging futuristic cans of soup right here until January. All of which, like the artist himself, presents a pretty exciting vision of the future.

The House by Daniel Arsham opens 21 Oct, Selfridges Corner Shop (selfridges.com)



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