Daniel Arsham Debuts ‘Various Thoughts’ at Perrotin, ‘Future Relic’ Book

Daniel Arsham is passing along the myth of his art career. And like all enduring myths, there are lessons embedded along the way.

His memoir “Future Relic,” out March 17, traces that story from childhood to the present, offering creatives a blueprint for how he built his career. It wasn’t without persistence and “a lot of failure” along the way. 

“People only really see the final works, which are a success in that they’ve been made,” the artist, 45, says. “They don’t see how many times I did this and it didn’t work, or opportunities that I thought I was gonna have that didn’t come through.”

Arsham has been with Emmanuel Perrotin through it all, working with the gallerist since he was a 21-year-old recent Cooper Union graduate. In the two-plus decades since, Arsham has expanded beyond the insular art world through collaborations with fashion brands like Dior, Hublot and Tiffany & Co., as well as cultural figures ranging from Pharrell Williams to Merce Cunningham.

“There’s a lot in the book about how I went to art school. I learned how to make things, I learned how to make ideas. I didn’t learn anything about how to make a career out of all of that,” says Arsham, who started writing the book as he reflected on his journey during the COVID-19 shutdowns. “The book in the end is almost an entrepreneur’s journey, of how I built this thing,” he adds. “It’s kind of an unusual practice that evolves through art and the automotive world, fashion and product.”

Arsham’s also refreshingly critical of the machination of the art world, even as he recognizes the vital role it plays. “ I’m critical a little bit of the system, but I also show why it’s necessary,” he says. The book pays tribute to his longtime gallerist, who is revealed to have purchased all of the work in Arsham’s first solo show with the gallery as a supportive investment in his career, which the artist only learned many years later. 

While the book illustrates his past pathways, Arsham is still shaping what comes next. Its publication arrives shortly after the opening of “Various Thoughts,” his latest solo exhibition in New York. The show occupies the top floor of Perrotin’s Lower East Side flagship, reflecting a fine art practice that spans drawing, sculpture, painting and audio works. 

“In the studio, even when all these works are in there, it’s full chaos,” Arsham says, surveying his new work installed around the white-walled room. “So seeing them spread out like this, it’s a really cohesive scenario in some ways — more than I anticipated.”

He describes the title of the show, “Various Thoughts,” as literal, representing the breadth of work on display and the intersections of his creative process. It’s tempting to draw out a narrative between the pieces. The throughline is an unplanned but inherent byproduct of Arsham’s iterative process, as his work continues to evolve along thematic threads. 

“Everything always starts with drawing, and then in some cases it moves to painting, imagining these larger scenarios, and then into sculpture,” he says.

The show includes three audio speaker sculptures, which have been tuned to play ambient bird sounds for the exhibition but can be hooked up to any playlist of choice. He debuted the first of his audio bonsai speakers recently as part of his exhibition with Perrotin Dubai, and two similar pieces — each featuring a bonsai tree fashioned from copper wire set atop a wooden speaker platform — are situated in opposite corners of the gallery. In the center of the room, a classical male sculpture is flanked by four speakers, cementing the figure’s place in the present era.

Many of Arsham’s classical sculptures are created directly from molds of works displayed at the Louvre in Paris, and “Classical Speaker Sculpture 001” is an iteration of that work. He’s known for building intentional cracks and erosions into his works, which often reveal an interior geology of materials like crystals or gears, and more recently, labyrinth staircases populated with small figures, not unlike a surreal antique dollhouse.  

The inspiration is classical but his materials are new: one labyrinth bust sculpture was created with cast sand, a new type of resin; another features a new patina resulting from a different oxidation process, which led to a deep red finish that will continue to evolve with exposure to the elements (depending on where its eventual owner decides to install it).

Paintings around the room place the sculptures in imagined settings, and some scenes are accompanied by silhouetted figures, which act as a conduit for the viewer to project themself into the dreamscape of a past world or bizarre future.

The sketches of hands lining the wall outside of the gallery space point to what’s next — a future already unfolding as Arsham prepares for upcoming shows with Perrotin in London and Los Angeles, as well as in Helsinki. While “Future Relic” explores the mythology of his own career, Arsham has recently been reflecting on a much older story within his studio.

“I’m building a whole show around the mythology surrounding Prometheus, who was the god who gave fire to humans, and then was outcast by Zeus,” he says. “It relates a lot to this new feeling that we’re in this technological shift, and AI kind of feels like the fire that Prometheus stole from the gods.” 

While the work doesn’t directly reference AI, it’s offered him a framework to think about myths that recur across time and across cultures. “We just keep repeating the same thing over and over again,” he says. 

And as myths repeat, they also offer opportunity for reinvention — for the next creative narrator to make those stories their own.