Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs. Daniel Arsham (born in 1980) is the contemporary illusionist who has us all fooled. With his undeniable talent for transforming the present into fictitious archaeological relics and his obsession with architectural manipulation, he offers us a vision of the future that dangerously flirts with the present.
Arsham has established himself as the undisputed master of what he calls “fictional archaeology”. A practice that consists of creating contemporary objects as if they had been discovered in a distant future, crystallized, eroded, fossilized. He transforms our electronic gadgets, sports cars, and cultural symbols into precious relics. It’s both masterful and terrifying. These works confront us with our own mortality, the fragility of our consumer-driven civilization. As Walter Benjamin wrote in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, every epoch dreams the next, but Arsham goes further: he makes us dream of our own end.
Take his “Future Relics”, a series of everyday objects transformed into archaeological remains. A Nintendo game console, a Polaroid camera, a 90s mobile phone – all frozen in a state of crystalline decay, as if time itself had solidified around them. It’s a scathing critique of our consumer society, but also a perverse celebration of its icons. These objects, treated with the same reverence as Greek or Roman antiquities, force us to question our relationship with material culture. As Jean Baudrillard pointed out in “The System of Objects”, we live in a world where objects have become signs, and Arsham pushes this logic to its absurd extreme.
Architectural manipulation is Arsham’s other obsession. His interventions in built spaces challenge our perception of solidity and permanence. Walls seem to melt, surfaces deform, architecture itself becomes liquid. These installations echo Paul Virilio’s theories on “dromology” and the acceleration of time in contemporary society. Arsham’s structures do not merely occupy space; they devour it, digest it, transforming it into something strangely organic.
His walls, appearing as if struck by natural disasters, his human figures emerging from architectural surfaces like living fossils, all create a profound sense of destabilization. These works remind us that we live in a world where, as Marshall McLuhan put it, “we drive into the future using only our rear-view mirror” – we can only understand the present by seeing it as already past.
But don’t be mistaken. If Arsham plays with the codes of archaeology and art history, it’s to trap us in our own present. His works are distorting mirrors reflecting our obsession with technology, our fetishism of objects, our pathetic desire for immortality through material culture.
This approach echoes Roland Barthes’ reflections on photography in “Camera Lucida”. Just as photography captures a moment already dead as soon as it’s taken, Arsham’s sculptures freeze our present in a state of perpetual decay. They are both memento mori and celebrations of pop culture, social critique and virtuoso exercises in style.
Arsham’s use of materials is particularly revealing. Crushed glass, crystals, volcanic ash, bronze – each material is chosen for its ability to suggest both permanence and fragility. As Rosalind Krauss noted in “Passages in Modern Sculpture”, the very materiality of a sculpture can convey meaning, and Arsham exploits this idea to the point of obsession.
His collaborations with luxury brands like Porsche, Tiffany & Co., or Dior might seem contradictory to his apparent critique of consumer society. But therein lies Arsham’s perverse genius: he uses the very mechanisms of late capitalism to disseminate his dystopian vision. It’s as if Andy Warhol decided not to create silkscreens of Campbell’s soup cans, but their archaeological relics.
Arsham’s installations force us to confront our own temporality. In a world obsessed with the present moment, with perpetual novelty, he offers us a vision of the future already in decay. It’s a conceptual tour de force that leaves us deeply uneasy, as though we were witnessing our own extinction.
This tension between the present and the future, between creation and destruction, permanence and ephemerality, lies at the heart of Arsham’s work. As Georges Didi-Huberman wrote in “Confronting Images”, our relationship with history is always anachronistic, and Arsham plays precisely on this fundamental anachronism.
Lucy Lippard, in “Six Years: The Dematerialization of the Art Object”, spoke of how conceptual art questioned the materiality of the art object. Arsham does the exact opposite: he rematerializes our concepts, desires, and fears into objects that appear to have survived their own destruction.
Perhaps the most fascinating aspect is how Arsham creates a sense of uncanny strangeness, what Freud called “das Unheimliche”. His works are both familiar and profoundly alienating. A fossilized Leica camera, a crystallized sports car – these objects are recognizable but rendered strange by their transformation. It’s as if we were viewing our own culture through the eyes of a future civilization trying to decipher our rituals and fetishes.
John Berger, in “Ways of Seeing”, reminded us that the way we see things is affected by what we know or believe. Arsham plays on this principle by presenting familiar objects in a state of future decay, forcing us to reconsider our relationship with these same objects in the present.
Arsham’s practice aligns with a lineage of artists who have questioned our relationship with time and materiality. But where Robert Smithson created works that naturally decayed, Arsham accelerates and freezes the process of decay, creating instant ruins that seem to come from an impossible future.
His work is a meditation on planned obsolescence, not only of technological objects but of our entire civilization. As Marc Augé wrote in “The Future of Ruins”, ruins have always had a prophetic function. Arsham’s ruins don’t speak of the past but of a future that is already here, staring back at us through the crystals and cracks of his sculptures.
This approach is not without risk. By playing with the codes of fictional archaeology and pop culture, Arsham could fall into the trap of repetition, of formula. But so far, he has managed to maintain a precarious balance between formal innovation and conceptual consistency.
Daniel Arsham is more than a mere creator of aesthetic objects. He is a chronicler of our present viewed through the prism of an imaginary future. His works are inverted time capsules, messages sent not to the future but from the future. And the message they carry is both seductive and terrifying: everything we create, everything we cherish, everything we consider permanent is but dust in the making, crystals in formation, ruins in waiting.