Christopher D’Arcangelo

BH

I was thinking about the publication (why the return of Christopher D’Arcangelo now?), but then also about how and when I first heard of D'Arcangelo's work. In Modern Art in the Common Culture, Thomas Crow discussed Christopher Williams’ Bouquet, for Bas Jan Ader and Christopher D'Arcangelo, 1991, and the book included provocative pictures of D’Arcangelo’s displacement-action in the Louvre. For many years, Crow remained, I believe, the only art historian who mentioned D'Arcangelo in any substantive way. CD removing the Gainsborough painting from its place and leaning it on the floor against the wall, his natty sport coat and wary glance, these were mightily, mysteriously alluring. Then in 2005 Ben Kinmont did a really amazing quasi-samizdat publication, which persists in being as compelling and thorough, although very differently organized, as this new publication. So I was just considering both some pre-history and this rough moment. That's not a question. [Laughs.]

GL

But that's interesting because, I, maybe as someone in the UK, did not learn about D’Arcangelo through Christopher Williams’s work. I would say it was on a similar breath in the air as Bas Jan Ader and it came to me maybe at a similar time. Perhaps circuitously through Williams. I remember there was a whole bunch of stuff in the early-to-mid aughts that was kind of romantic conceptualism. I think I tracked down that Kinmont publication around then and maybe I found bits of information scattered in various publications, but it was a constellation, nothing singular, apart from the Kinmont. It was quite hard to track down information until the 2011 Artists Space show, which I remember deep reading the booklet of, as I couldn’t see the show—which is why it's so good to see this new publication being done today. It feels pertinent and necessary, because still when I mention Christopher D'Arcangelo’s work, I think many people, here in the UK anyway, wouldn't have heard of him.

MA

I think I first heard of him through Jay Sanders’s interest in his work, and then Ben Kinmont’s. The Whitney piece stuck in my mind. I knew it happened, but I never really associated it with a particular person. It was more that I knew some guy chained himself to the Whitney and kept people from going in or coming out. But, I also came to him through his father [Allan D’Arcangelo (1930–1998)], because I had an interest in showing his father's work. I had gotten in contact with his father, who was very difficult. I had spoken to him a few years before he passed away, and it was difficult to get him to agree to do anything. So I sort of dropped that. Then when his name resurfaced with Jay, the background was there already, and the interest of him, who his father was, his father's reputation, his prominence, and then his father just dropping out of the art scene and sort of being half forgotten was really interesting to me. Then it was just a matter of wanting to do a show and doing the research necessary—going to the Fales, and wrestling with the Fales because they're impossible. You can get one thing out of them and put on a pair of gloves and it takes you a half an hour to get the next thing you want to look at. So that was going really nowhere. And then I began working with Cathy [Weiner], who was D’Arcangelo’s partner in the five years before his death, which was great, because she was very much a part of the work. She's really the opposite of a ghost in the machine.

LO-B

How much does the new book replicate the Fales?

MA

I really never got an impression of exactly what was in the archive. I depended more upon Cathy.

BH

The archive has more than this book. About the editors’ decision to find, what, an ethical loophole for including certain materials by reproducing them in draft form, in CD’s hand rather than in a “final” version, well, I have mixed feelings. Of course, every scrap and document fascinates, but I don’t quite understand not doing a slightly more extensive book. It's a question of what this does in terms of formalizing certain works. CD’s is a very brief career no matter how you look at it, but this publication does emphasize a certain kind of work over others.

GL

What work do you think it emphasizes?

BH

Work as labor, work as art, action as work, specifically emphasizing works about different institutions.

GL

I know what you mean about the different institutions. Even down to the sites of the places of his work, even different people's lofts or whatever. It ties it very much to that context, doesn't it? But I have to say, as someone who's never visited the Fales and only ever managed to get into the website, to see the box listing of an artist’s documents, click on it and find there was nothing digitized, I’ve perpetually wished to get that information, so it was kind of nice to have that. And to access the sheer repetition of his statements, because, as an artist, anyone who writes, anyone who makes stuff, you know that you have to reiterate yourself. The editorial process, right? So it was good to feel that process, and understand that this was a very considered, forceful, and ambitious program and project, and one consistent outside of a certain trajectory.

KE

Janelle Reiring has said that when seeing a Christopher D'Arcangelo performance, at first you were focused on the institution, but then when the police came, you were concerned about his body. I'm wondering if you think this publication conjures the presence of his body. I am remembering a very generous Louise Lawler photograph of him in the book. Does it seem to you all to assemble material about the body or material that foregrounds the art world?

MA

I guess having run the gallery now for over thirty years and going back through it, what struck me is, in one way, how prescient it is and how much the art world has changed. The art world has changed so much that if one was to set about doing what he did, it would be dealt with very differently. His targets were the institutions, the museums, but the art world has been subsumed by four galleries, by a coterie of wealth. His project would have to be reformed in order to present a critique of the art world as it exists today. In a way, he was like a mosquito carrying a disease, but he was swatted. And maybe in retrospect, the infection got into the system, but it hasn't really been manifest as the disease yet. His work is a nucleus for something which has not really been developed. It just seems to me it's something of its time. Even though we all know about it, we know about it in historical ways, but it has extreme relevance, But the critique needs to be changed to deal with what we are part of now.

BH

Well, certainly there's no prior publication in which we see so many pictures of CD’s body in various states. The opening two photographs show the anarchism text on his shirtless back, one with him standing in his baggy, belted blue jeans, in the other he’s doing a headstand, inverting the give-and-take of the anarchism statement itself. His body is very tender and present, the poses alert, puckish. Of the many pictures of him from the documentation-films and photography that Cathy Weiner did of his actions, some of the most charming are of him at the Rosa Esman Gallery. He’s happy, a young artist enjoying what he’s up to, this uninvited work. He seems pleased with how it's going and fetching in every way. You do have to think about him as a person and as a body and where those two things meet: the body as a force of resistance, the body as part of a blockage or a strike against capitalism, the body under arrest, and then the life led. Because of the consequence of his suicide, the person is still very occluded, even though, with the Van Abbe proposal, he was interested in the lives of those who made up a community around an art institution, what things, what objects, mattered to them in their everyday.

GL

One thing I was thinking about, just when you were saying that, Bruce, is how the first images you encounter in the book are his body chained to the doors, and that's where you start off, but then what that generates as a kind of action is tons of administrative labor. Loads of legislative forms, texts, letters, that's the bulk of this. The images are in a minority compared to that stuff. So it's interesting that the body generates administration. And then there's the administration of the body, which is the guards, or the policing, which can go to the next question about whether tackling the guards is even to do with tackling anything. Then in the end, the proposal for Eindhoven is this raft of information, this huge administrative project. So there is this relation between the vulnerability of his body, his action of blocking, redacting, opening, and the institutional body, which in turn blocks via the legislative form and procedure.

CF

It seems that the body becomes an occasion for text or discourse. In the Whitney action, he's chaining himself to the museum in order to do political education. He wants to talk with all the visitors about what it is that he's doing, and he does this for a while until the museum  walls him off from his audience. Then at the Met, he's kind of unobtrusively chained himself to a bench, which ultimately provokes a confrontation with the museum, which is an occasion to hand out the printout. The meaning of the work lies in what he's saying. How can the body become an occasion to provoke the museum to engage with the text?

GL

Like a dissemination. Advertorial, in some ways, I suppose.

CF

He's spray painting, he's got an anarchist slogan attached to his back, but a lot of the techniques that he’s using are not so confrontational. He's using techniques of nonviolent civil disobedience, 1950s technologies of social protest. But he's not in the south. He's at the Whitney. So he’s not  provoking lethal or extreme force. It seems it is just one technique of disseminating the ideology. That's what I thought was interesting, because it seems that from the other Artists Space book, from their show, you get a lot more about his actual political thinking. In this book, you don't get as much of that. You get the documents that go into the artwork, but you don't get his deeper thoughts about Marxism or anarchism or social systems. Even though the thing that runs throughout the whole book is the anarchism phrase.

MA

All of D’Arcangelo’s actions seem to have something built into them to keep them from getting out of hand: there's a time limit, there are keys just out of his reach. He seems to build something into each action that would keep it from going over the edge, which is disciplined and thought out. Things aren't gonna go crazy here unless the other side decides to let it go crazy.

KE

I don't have the longer history that you all have, and I am trying to think through D'Archangelo's contemplation of anarchism. It's a bit of a tangle. On the one hand it seems like anarchism with a twentieth-century modern twist—the modern that has to be new and dangerous. But then, as you say, there is another kind of gentleness and exchange that seems more like a Kropotkin-style anarchism. That form would not be just about refusal or dissonance or disruption. You would not just be confronting or refusing capitalism but finding a way to be a non-capitalist by simply overwhelming it with multiple other forms of exchange that rely on difference. The door is wide open to be this second kind of anarchist artist. There's nothing stopping you. You can make those exchanges. You can find all those problems and needs and put them together anywhere. But in that case, the resistance—as a default in the artist’s narrative of the twentieth century—might be absent. This might be a very contrary thought. Sometimes the work seems to need to take itself to the narrower confines of the art world to find that narrative default. And then the project sometimes seems conservative relative to the position it's taking. There’s a conundrum there.

GL

I think I know what you mean, but I'm curious to hear more.

KE

The larger application of anarchist thought stops with a familiar critique of art institutions. You still have not been the anarchist artist that you might have been because the performance is enacted in one of the closed loops or familiar conundrums of art world logics.

GL

For sure, I found the work more intriguing when I learned about his more technical-functional work with Peter Nadin, where the labor they're having to do as builders, as technicians hanging work, as art studio assistants, is being named as art, almost in a Ukeles Laderman kind of way—to say, "I am doing this and I'm going say this is art" and I'm going lean into that as a socio-political maneuver to talk about survival in capitalist society. Perhaps at that point it begins to reach outside of those confines.

MA

I mean, the idea of the artist as a laborer and one's labor is one’s art. To go into that loop is, I won't say obvious, but it seems that that's something which in a sense is a conceptual readymade. The acts themselves and the institutions and the power structures of those institutions seem to me more challenging. Even though you can say that, in a way, is pat as well, but I mean maybe it's the opposite of just labor as art. He's playing around with things which seem in a sense readymades, but the performances in the museums seem less so.

CF

It seems like he's constantly concerned with displacing the position of the gallery or the museum in the social world. But he is also extremely interested in the situation of art. On the one hand he’s like, look, the gallery is a shop, and the gesture is to show that the gallery is a shop. And there's all this ideology, there's all this propaganda, that wants you to believe the gallery is something other than a shop and it's because of all these things that are happening outside the gallery that are invisible to the viewer. His role is to help the viewer understand all the ways in which the gallery is merely a shop. But then, with the Artists Space show he was in, the press release reads, “The fourth artist is concerned only with the immediate exhibition situation and wants the viewer to have information about the piece only as it exists in itself.” So it’s not just that the art world is of the world and complicit with it. He also seems to be saying there is something special and important that's happening in the art world. And nothing about the work should even circulate outside of the actual moment of the visitor beholding the work in the situation of artistic criticism or artistic experience. He wants to work on both of these on seemingly opposite levels.

BH

He was interested in questions. He was interested in the community of questions. There is this strange (?), to pick up Keller's word, ‘conservatism,’ part of the contradiction that Ciarán just pointed to. Whatever disruption or strike involved, CD did love art. It was no small part of his daily life and world. He was the son of a not minor artist. He hung out with people who were artists or who were interested in being around artists. He emancipated himself at the age of 16 and worked for galleries and for artists (John Gibson, Daniel Buren). Art was his home base. The specificity–in the Louvre piece and in the Norton Simon piece–of those particular paintings, respectively, Gainsborough’s “Conversation in a Park” and, I believe, Zurbarán’s “The Birth of the Virgin”: these were not naive or random choices. At MoMA, CD’s response to and with Guernica is also a response to Tony Shafrazi’s spray-painting “KILL LIES ALL” on the Guernica, his defacement a protest of Nixon’s pardon of William Calley Jr., the only soldier convicted in the My Lai Massacre. CD’s attraction to and use of Picasso’s anguished scene occurs a year after Shafarzi’s action, a kind of a commemoration. Despite all kinds of absurdities and indecencies and inequities the art world participates in—because it is, of course, actually part of the world—how does art as well as the systems and communities around it, making it up, still produce these strange zones of possibility that allow, even (let’s hope) encourage, intellectual, emotional, and political exchange, argument, and dissent? Part of a D’Arcangelo Effect would be to continue to break things open or even to break things down and to confront what’s revealed. And yet…and yet, much that is considered art is fragile and subtle and, at times, wonderfully pale. There is this other strain of the things, the objects that we point to or refer to and want to talk about as art, organizing a thinking life around them. At root, conservatism, in the most generous terms of the word, protects, cares for, and conserves. Nuanced thinking and its variegated materializations and dematerializations, unlike entertainment, cannot exist everywhere, but the institutions of art, some of them at least, allow for such delicate differences and occult gestures. CD seemed incredibly attuned to all of this potential.

GL

So those two things are tied, aren't they? It’s about the artwork and its intrinsic and special qualities, and then it's about what is not that? What is the thing that upholds that? What are the value structures interwoven into that? So that forensic, massive list of all the things that would be presented in Eindhoven is a kind of attempt to understand what is not the work, and perhaps in that way, negatively determine what is the work. That feels like a link between the body and the administration of the body, and then the work and the structure around it. Those two poles are being attempted to be understood somehow. What is not the work? What is the work? How do those things relate and what enforces them? And how are we, the viewer, as well as the institution, perpetuating them in that act of viewing?

MA

I think what Bruce is saying is that D’Arcangelo was acting in a very special place, whether conservative in the best sense, he's doing actions which would have, if performed in another space—doing a sit-in, chaining yourself to the door of the US Treasury—would be very different. No, this is wrapped in the art world context and, like Bruce says, he recognizes the special place and he performs his actions in that space. And they mean something to all the people around that space that they wouldn't mean in a different context out in the world, but we see out in the world just as often.

LO-B

That's true. But, what strikes me about some of the work is how the art world bubble bursts. He does get arrested. The structures of policing do invade the art museum. The question for me is, how much did he anticipate getting arrested? And did he think about the consequences of that arrest? Did his specific white, heterosexual, cis male composition factor into his thinking of getting arrested? Did he believe he would be given due process, released, and not given a hard time? I’ve been thinking about Adrian Piper’s 1974 The Mythic Being: Loitering piece, which she enacted in Cambridge, Massachusetts, around the same time as his works, though hers was so much more about what it meant to be a Black, trans body.

KE

It's such an important thing that you bring up. This is maybe not a very good segue, but I also think about how, over the course of the works, his first-person self starts to broaden to larger populations. It's first his stenciled-body—a body in some distress. It's about him and what's going to happen to him. Then, as you all were saying, when he’s selling the apples and wearing a change belt, there’s another kind of release or comedy that is not focused on him. In the 1978 Artist’s Space show, no one's names were to be used in the exhibition. And the later proposals to Eindhoven are even referencing a larger tax base of people there so that all of the citizens can be part of his work.

GL

In that 45-minute window of the performance, it's actually this opportunity to talk to a lot of people. If the primary operation is not to be arrested, in terms of a risk assessment of that, it seems the primary operation is to put yourself in a position where you can talk to people and some exchange to happen.

LO-B

Yes. Though that seems so particular to his position, as a white child of the art world, and perhaps kind of sheltered? Maybe getting arrested wasn’t his primary concern, but for many artists, like Piper, it must have been considered.

GL

Exactly. If you can afford to have it not be your primary concern …

LO-B

Right. Also, I’m not trying to diminish what he did. It’s important. But I do wonder why we don’t see his name circulating alongside other artists who used guerilla tactics in the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s, during the war on crime years that led to harsher forms of policing and more prisons.

CF

It's interesting to consider during this moment in New York, where there's a lot of civil disobedience happening that is so much about, is this action arrestable? Are you resisting arrest or are you not resisting arrest? What infrastructure do you have if you are then resisting? All these types of things are so much a part of the question of when you're doing this type of protest—and he's not. I've been thinking about him in relation to Strike MoMA or Decolonize This Place and some thoughts put forward in e-flux a few years ago by Andreas Petrossiants. But I do think his strategies are really different. If civil disobedience tactics are basically a media strategy, you do it to get your point across, you do it to provoke a situation in which the media has to take a photo, or the museum has to respond in a spectacular way, or a viewer has to come talk to you, he's provoking the situation in which the work gets captured and then the work exists in the photo documentation, which is not the work, but is the afterlife of it, but also the arrest record, which are these really rich sources for how we understand the work.

I do think he satirizes the situation. There's the hilarious discussion between the guards about whether they need to handcuff a man who's already handcuffed himself, because he's already bound his own legs and feet and they can't figure out what’s proper protocol. It's really good as a way of artistically ironizing the whole situation of the museum guard. But he isn't so confrontational toward the guards, which I think is interesting because that's not always the strategy Strike MoMA used. There was more direct confrontation with the museum guards as the protectors of capital and bad board members and these types of things. Whereas, he’s telling the guards, the key is right there if you need it, I'll unlock myself at the moment in which it presents itself to me. Or he's got the printout explaining it that he gives to the guards in France because, due to the language barrier, he's not able to have the dialogic situation. He is always, at every moment, ready to de-escalate once the situation the work’s trying to provoke has happened, which is interesting as an artistic strategy for protest art.

GL

What do you think the stakes of de-escalation are, to make sure that happens or can happen?

CF

Think of the Norton Simon Museum Museum piece where he basically provokes a citizen’s arrest, which is a really interesting mobilization of the museum space and the viewer's own complicity in the preservation of the ideology of the art world. Of course, the police sanction it. Then there's the Guggenheim piece where he's arrested, but he’s not charged specifically because they used aggressive or excessive force in his arrest. He seems like he's hedging, but he also seems like he's prepared to keep doing these things even when he's risking greater harm to himself. Even in that letter to Eindhoven where he writes, no work for 90 days or I'll go to jail de facto, but I'm just gonna go to New York where the California courts don't have any power and I'm gonna keep doing the work.

He's finding ways around facing very serious consequences. There is a real commitment and bravery, too, while at the same time recognizing the actual stakes. If you think about this type of protest work in relation to Ben Morea’s Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, D’Arcangelo had really ratcheted down a lot of the negativity of the Situationists. He offers radical proposals about what the art world is, but they are also quite modest in the way that they're carried out and also in some of what their political aspirations are. I think the word revolution appears once in the book, and it's mostly in relation to the creation of a discursive situation. He's ironizing the anarchist gesture as well. He’s an anarchist, but he's not an anarchist. There's a lot of ambivalence and irony.

LO-B

And he was kind of a loner? It's interesting you bring up Up Against the Wall Motherfucker, or Black Mask before that. D’Arcangelo didn’t join a group, like the Guerrilla Art Action Group or others. I wonder if he was opposed to collectivity.

GL

It also seems in that technique, as well, it's very obvious, but it allows him to maintain doing the work. So it has to kind of function at this level to be able to keep doing it and to be able to do it this many times.

LO-B

Right. I wonder if museums worried he might be coming to them next.

GL

That would be a kind of irony, given his notion of the open museum. But that would be the mosquito argument, or like the system of a vaccine where a small amount of live virus creates the functioning antibodies.

LO-B

And like the gadfly, who poses questions that disturb the status quo and authority, and that infects people with curiosity.

GL

Even with his simple statement that keeps going, “I'm an anarchist, I'm not an anarchist,” that’s attempting to do and undo simultaneously and then leave you in this ambivalence and complicity. But in a way it’s kind of interesting to see that complexity and ambivalence in a protest position.

KE

Just to go back to what Ciarán mentioned: How do we arrest someone who is already wearing handcuffs? This is a clever and well-rehearsed way of disarming power through forms of submission. I was wondering why he didn't make other similar structural moves. Why wasn’t he part of a collective? That would have been another of those classic techniques for appearing and disappearing into a disguise, a double, or a group. It also might have been more in keeping with an anarchist position in some ways. There is still the individual career, but there are also caring curators and close friends (Louise Lawler, R. H. Fuchs, and the incredibly generous Mitchell Algus). After D’Archangelo’s death and the closing of the gallery, I struggled with everyone stenciling their names on the floor. Was it making a bit of art history? Was it an expression of a loose collective? Or maybe it was like the stenciling on his back. Maybe it was a gesture of intimacy and love.

MA

It’s important that he didn't actually work alone. It wasn't just him. Cathy was a part of this, and she's working with him. She's documenting. She's part of all of it. So it's the two of them. He's not a lone artist. He is part of a collective, and it's the two of them who were doing this.

KE

I see.

MA

And she continues to do it. She's the person behind the Fales donation. She's very much a part of this, and it didn't end with his suicide.

GL

I think there is an interesting incongruity or contradiction or complexity in the curatorial control. Like the questioning of curatorial control as well as guard control, or policing or any of these forms of control. Then, of course, there is this huge amount of control that is happening in his own work, right? It’s questioning those structures, but it's also instigating its own structures. There's a complexity in that that's interesting. It's not so simple, I suppose. Like with the open museum and all those notions of openness, obviously, structurally, lead to huge amounts of maintenance and administration. So it's interesting what that kind of demand takes. And why it might end up being denied for that reason, I suppose. The tyranny of structurelessness and so on.

I did wonder about the mosquito and this notion of it being this nascent project that hasn't come to fruition or maybe can't because it's from a different time, or whether people feel like that is something that there's still space for where it comes from now?

BH

Ciarán pointed to the urgency in this current moment of necessary disobedience. Cruising too quickly, but… CD hanged himself on April 28, 1979. “Rare Cancer Seen In 41 Homosexuals” appears in the New York Times, far from the front page, in 1981. To begin to point to differences in how action and political protest, through art, by art, by artists, can be done and why D’Arcangelo couldn’t be rallied then as a precedent, it might have something to do with the combination of societal shame around suicide and the phobias around AIDS, stories about which were kept off the Times front page, editorially, until, what, 1983? In any case, CD’s absence was too sudden—his career too brief, his actions too fleeting, and the juncture too aggrieved at which all his work said might have been harbored—for him to be seen as a model. Almost as if his work, too raw, too volatile, had to be occluded. Obviously, his motives as well as his work’s ramifications could have been resonant for all those in ACT UP despite the variances (i.e., ACT UP was group- and community-driven, for starters), and yet there is a dream logic—impossible and hence called for—that connects them.

KE

The Eindhoven project seems like a very contemporary project and you have many of the same ideas and techniques ricocheting through his colleagues. It seems that it wasn't completely extinguished or swatted down, that it took root.

LO-B

Mitchell's comment that this work feels almost impossible now made sense to me. It feels contemporary, but also impossible now, at the same time.

MA

It doesn't mean that this doesn't need to be addressed. The art world has changed tremendously. The issues now are so much greater because there's so much more money, so much more institutional power. The distribution of power is vastly more unequal now than it was then. So these things need to be addressed. They receive practically no address as galleries become corporate monsters and museums become worlds unto themselves, except when they have to extend their little tentacles out to bring something in to make them seem relevant. From doing this for thirty years, it's gotten worse.

KE

What kind of apparatus would he have had to use to address vaults of art and free zones in Zurich or something like that? What would it take to address that kind of institution?

MA

Looking at it now, art—if it's Hauser & Wirth or Zwirner who's dealing with it—is a financial instrument. The fact that it's art is now window dressing is unaddressed.

GL

It needs to be addressed.

MA

It perverts everybody's participation in it. It perverts the artist's participation in it. All I’m saying is what Christopher D’Arcangelo did needs to continue, and it has to continue in a different way because things have changed.

GL

I thought it was a good point that you made that it feels so important and so relevant, and at the same time, it feels so untenable. If it were possible for this work to be continued, now, perhaps we would need to go further outside, and inside, of our art industrial situation, structurally and intersectionally. And it feels like it needs breath from other places for that to happen.