Listen Now: Daniel Arsham and Kim Jones
A conversation between two creative collaborators, moderated by Charlie Porter and hosted by The Whiteley
A conversation between two creative collaborators, moderated by Charlie Porter and hosted by The Whiteley
Frieze Week in London sees the unveiling of a bold new work by Daniel Arsham, the artist and co-founder of architecture practice Snarkitecture. Eroded Summer (2021) is based on a 1911 sculpture by Paul Gasq that originally adorned the façade of Whiteleys, London’s first department store on Queensway, Bayswater. The building is currently being reimagined, to a design by Foster + Partners, as The Whiteley, and will be home to new residences, shops, restaurants and London’s first Six Senses hotel.
Responding to the building’s history and future, Eroded Summer is a work in patinated bronze with elements suggesting erosion and crystallisation, foregrounding the associative qualities of the materials and evoking the passage of time.
To mark the work’s unveiling this week, Arsham was joined by Dior Men’s Kim Jones – with whom he collaborated for Jones’ S/S 2020 fashion show - for an intimate conversation with Charlie Porter, writer, curator and author of What Artists Wear (2021).
“Pretty early on in my career, I worked as a stage designer for the choreographer Merce Cunningham, who was a legendary American modern dance pioneer. […] By the time I worked with him, he was 60 years exactly older than me. But was still very much interested in bringing new voices into his practice. And that idea of collaboration, I think, felt very natural to me, so I began working with other companies. Adidas was one of the first larger brands that I worked with. And I felt, not only was it beneficial in being able to engage with other types of materials in the process of my work, but also the audiences. They were not traditional art audiences.” — Daniel Arsham
“Christian Dior was a gallerist long before he was a couturier, for 15 years. That’s why I wanted to work with artists. Because he worked with Picasso, he worked with Salvador Dali, Max Ernst. […] Plus you also learn so many new things, yourself, working with other people, which I personally really enjoy. I’m not afraid to share the spotlight, because I think it’s interesting to look at different contexts.” — Kim Jones
“I began this body of work a little over ten years ago, that engages with archaeology, and a fictional archaeology of the future. And does so by reimagining the objects of our present, as if we might view them in the future, through a material transformation. Radios and cars and objects from our everyday life, as if we are viewing them in 1,000 years. […] If we think about the work that’s here out in the lobby, which appears to be in a state of decay or degradation, the crystals within it, we inherently associate with growth. We imagine crystallisation as a process that’s moving forward in time, so the works can be falling apart or they can be growing together. And that’s filtered across everything. One of the big challenges for Kim when we worked together was how to translate that process into fabric, other materials that would appear to be in a state of entropy or transformation.” — Daniel Arsham
“I think it’s interesting also thinking about how artists have worked in fashion for such a long time, but it’s only recently the technology has really become such a big thing, where you can actually develop fabrics that really replicate the art so well. That’s in the last five years, I’d say, we’ve seen leaps and bounds in ways that things can get made that really do respect the artists.” — Kim Jones
Daniel Arsham’s ‘Eroded Summer’ (2021) is on view at The Whiteley Gallery in London, until 17 October. The Whiteley is set to complete in 2023. Visit www.thewhiteleylondon.com to discover more.
