How Daniel Arsham's Experimental Art Attracted Collabs With Pharrell and Adidas | Blueprint

[Music] installation artist filmmaker and co-founder of starchitect er Daniel our sim has made a career out of challenging our minds understanding of the material world this is his blueprint [Music] we drawn to art as a teenager primarily photography photography was always something that I used as a kind of like a visual sort of note-taking device and I continue to use photography as a way to sort of keep myself thinking and as a sort of catalog of travel and things like that and the photography sort of led to an interest in architecture and I was always sort of into art but I would say that architecture and photography were my sort of first things that I liked they elected to go to Cooper Union which is an art school did you have a sense at that point what you're always going to look like how you're going to start expressing yourself Cooper Union was a sort of dream place to go to right I had been to New York City once in my life and it was a school that you know I felt was sort of on the the most cutting edge of what I saw myself doing in the future I had a professor I remember first year we spent six months in one course making stuff out of cardboard like literally just sheets of cardboard and you're forming it and one of the things that he said at that time that has always stuck with me is if you can make this material look like something else make cardboard look like its water or make it look like it's foam or make it look like it's a building you know alter the materiality of it in a way that causes people to think differently about it so a lot of the work that you're most known for today is incredibly intricate and also oftentimes huge and I would imagine that the fabrication of this is not easy coming out of school you don't have necessarily the resources the means to do things like this what was the stuff you were making at that point like I would say I always kind of work with what I had while pushing the ability both of myself and also the people that I was collaborating with to kind of make the biggest you know most difficult thing possible but a lot of the work I was making out of school were paintings things that were potentially imaginary scenarios of things that I could make larger and I was making a lot of paintings of these kind of ice birds with architectural constructions on them things that when you look at my work today you might make a correlation but obviously making a painting it's just me in the studio with like $50 worth of paint now the works are made of crystal and volcanic ash and semi-precious stone and all of these things that not only require a different resource financially but they also require skill sets that are far outside of my own mold making and other casting techniques so I've sort of each time that I get to a place I'm kind of pushing where can I take this next as Daniel expanded to bigger platforms he found himself in a unique position being able to make art is accessible for collectors as for sneaker hands what was the stuff that you were doing in your own art practice in 2003 to 2008 I actually moved back to Miami from New York and some friends of mine had started an exhibition space there called the house this was before our Volvo was around and all of that and we essentially put on exhibitions of our friends and different people we would bring artists in from Europe and this is actually how I ended up meeting a manual because he was in town for one of the first editions of Art Basel and this was before there was parties and dinners and all this other sort of side stuff so after the fair was over he asked people he knew there you know other artists here that I should go see and the director of the museum and a couple different collectors pointed him to come see us met him there and the next year he did an exhibition in Paris that was a kind of group of Miami artists Emanuel has a particular talent in not only finding people but trusting right and investing in them because if I look back at what I was doing fifteen years ago when we started working together it's hard for me to identify how or what he was looking at particularly that was so different from every other artist that was showing at that time a lot of my work is really about taking things that people already know and that they have an expectation about and subtly sort of transforming that there's a lot of works that I've made that manipulate the surface of architecture so you look at a wall and it appears as if it's rippling where it's melting these are works that when shown you almost barely notice the works this sort of subtlety combined with this very jarring Petach can be very sort of impactful for people this is a whole series of work that manipulates the surface of the wall obviously causing it to appear not only is that a figure is there but the wall is kind of malleable and flexible I knew that I was colorblind you know all my life it's not something that was pointed out to me on many occasions or something that I even thought about as being part of my work most of my work has been an extremely reduced color palette ranging from essentially black to white and everything in between like when I'm manipulating a wall there in the gallery the walls are already white so it's a manipulation of that sort of color and texture and I've made a lot of works that use geological materials like crystal and volcanic ash and I've left the color in the work so the black works are volcanic ash the white works are crystal and it's sort of inherent within them I have a lot of things on the desk that are materials or studies of things that I'm working on that at some point may become something but this could take another year before it actually is is a work I believe you are the first fine artist to do a collaboration adidas is that true I'm probably the first artist and probably the only artist now to be signed with Adidas which is interesting thing for me what is it about your work you think that connects with people in the art community they they may have a different read on the work than a 15 year old high school student but it says something to both of them and I think that certainly having a direct platform to speak to people like through Instagram I've used that heavily to talk to people to understand what they're thinking about to understand also their reaction and what they're sort of read is on the work slick in 1993 starter jacket one of the most complex molds that I've ever made because it has both an exterior surface and an interior surface Oh interesting so all there's no jacket inside this is entirely made of volcanic ash pyrite crystal and selenite crystal I don't ever try to make things have a specific meaning I try to allow things to have many potential meanings and many sort of different interpretations and that lends itself well to sort of broadening the work out into multiple audiences as Daniel broadened his creative output to film and beyond he tested the limits of his capacity and learned to balance his ambitions with his bandwidth I worked on this film series called future relic which was at Tribeca and was in can film in general I think is a much more sort of open medium that everyone kind of feels like they can access and feel comfortable about and the film work opened up my art practice to a much wider audience partially because of the talent that I was working with but partially just because I think people were able to see the work in a different context you know they saw it as as a kind of element in this larger narrative I'm always sort of taking notes about things so a lot of the a lot of the time that I spent traveling on planes you know I never watched films on the plane I'm always drawing or using that time as a kind of rest period and many of the concepts that are present in my work today are things that were developed on a plane five years ago and take that amount of time to sort of to build and also to figure out how to make them the things that I'm showing this fall are things that I've been working on for the last two years in some cases I think it's general just about kind of pacing yourself you know I mean there's only a limited amount of work that I can produce any in any given year so I'm not doing 30 shows in a year I can do like five maybe and out of those five things I have to choose between a number of different you know potential opportunities and at the same time I'm trying to expand because of my own sort of interest in it into film and in architecture so it's kind of like a bandwidth like try not to spread myself too thin and really like deliver and pay attention to the things that I am working on so we did a massive project that's been touring the world for the last year and a half or so which was a version of this all-white ball pit that was on a immense scale imagine this where the actual area that you can jump into is like twice the size of this entire room this is a prototype of a chair that we're working on that sort of appears as if it's off kilter right and this stone makes it level again Oh interesting so when you look at your personality what do you think are the attributes that have sort of sustained your success I'm here everyday at nine o'clock I leave at 6 o'clock the sort of growth into other disciplines like working in stage design you know and since then I've made stage design for opera we had a massive piece that I worked on with Pharrell and a choreographer named Jonah book hair that's on a world tour now was here at Brooklyn Academy of Music and going into film as well so this kind of broadening of the of my artwork into different disciplines a lot of the collaborations that I've done with Usher and Pharrell and you know other people in music and in film I met those people and knew them well in advance of those things happening and they were more a way of working with friends ronnie fide for instance has been a longtime client I think when Ronnie first came to talk about the first kiss he didn't know what it should look like but he knew what it should do right he knew how it should feel and so our job is to translate that sense that feeling into space and it's not easy thing to do when I feel strongly about something I like make a very serious stand for it this has happened with Ronnie also where he doesn't want something or he thinks that we should go a different direction and I've literally like got into a screaming match with him in his office saying that I think that it has to go this way or just straight up like do it and don't tell him yes sir how is that going over after time he's come to trust me and how come to understand that if I feel that strongly about something that he's going to get behind it too at any given time how many different projects are you working on at this point I don't know a hundred different things that may or may not happen but things that I want to do things that I've idea is about things that are in the very early stages most museum exhibitions that I'm working on are years away so the things that I'm making now and that are that I'm going to be showing this fall you know we've been working on since 2015 in some cases the projects are in some ways as accessible to a 15 year old kid in the suburbs as it is to somebody who's studying architecture at Columbia I don't want to make work for a kind of limited audience you know I want to make work that speaks to everyone you [Music] you

Channel: Complex

Views: 255,532

Rating: 4.9264865 out of 5

Keywords: complex, complex originals, sneakers, magazine, news, entertainment, current affairs, men, man, young man, culture, cool, edgy, funny, complex tv, complex media, art basel, daniel arsham, snarkitecture, fine arts, visual arts, artist, cooper union, kith, promo, miller17bp, cannes, tribeca, adidas, emmanuel perrotin, Snarkitecture, art and architecture, creative installations, Experimental Art, Pharrell, Noah Callahan-Bever

Id: XSI_DP1FWFc

Length: 13min 28sec (808 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 07 2017