Daniel Arsham: Time Dilation

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It is a huge, perfectly circular tunnel in which particle beams converge at near-light speeds, a task (according to CERN’s website) that is “akin to firing two needles 10 kilometers apart, with such precision that they meet halfway.” The collisions allow for the study of the most elusive aspects of physics: among them, the possible existence of dimensions beyond space and time.

CERN’s operations and Daniel Arsham’s career have been roughly contemporaneous, rather like Einstein’s Relativity and Cubism. Arsham is no scientist, but his quarry, too, is the nature of temporality itself; and he applies a pin-sharp exactitude to his many experiments. For the present exhibition at Perrotin, he has brought together multiple pathways of his creativity, groups of objects that would usually remain discrete. It’s another type of collision. And it warrants analysis.

The exhibition’s most striking encounter is the one that Arsham stages between classical statuary and Pokémon, the latter of which marks the first major collaboration between a contemporary artist and the storied Pokémon company. Here, both are subjected to the artist’s signature decay. It’s as if he were enacting the half-life of these icons: trophies, meet entropy. The classical works are drawn from Arsham’s collaboration with the august RMN-Grand Palais, in Paris (also featured in his exhibition “Moonraker” at the Musée Guimet), while Pokémon is Pokémon. Two different cultural universes, in a highlow, head-on crash. Or is it a crossroads? Two trajectories arriving to the same point: ancient sculpture is so venerated that it has become cliché, the stuff of museum gift shops, while the creatures of Pokémon, which seem to be influenced by Japanese mythology, have morphed into their own 21st century version of the sacred.