The Brooklyn Rail

Many still don’t know his name, but it was words that Christopher D’Arcangelo chose as his materials, stenciling or pasting them onto different surfaces—the museum wall, his own back—during the unauthorized actions he staged at art museums in the late 1970s. Some have called his actions “institutional critique,” but D’Arcangelo reminds us of the paradox behind art’s ruse: “Art is no more political than tea cups” he scrawls in a draft for a show at Artists Space in 1978. These notes can be found in Christopher D’Arcangelo, edited by Yana Foqué and Isabelle Sully, the first official monograph of his work since he died by suicide at the age of twenty-four in 1979. Following D’Arcangelo’s early death, his father, the painter Allan D'Arcangelo, held onto his papers, keeping them until his own death in 1998, after which they entered into storage and eventually made their way to New York University in 2009.

The book brings together materials which the younger D’Arcangelo had assembled into a work binder before he died—a scrapbook of correspondences, notes, receipts, police reports, photographs, and floor plans that document his actions over the course of five years from 1975–79. It’s true that not everything from the archive is presented in this monograph—and his stencil and video works have been omitted. The editors describe their intentions to begin “where his archive begins.” In their decision to present a “logistical loophole into the archive,” they dislodge a small bit of this material from its place, teetering between the documents as given and the mediation of editorial control. While the contents are for the most part limited to that original binder and its “streams of ‘work’” as the editors call it, the book is organized chronologically. The result is that the book sits a bit uneasily between a facsimile and an artist monograph, between the hands of the editors and the hands of the artist.

D’Arcangelo always leaned toward such self-evasion. After the first actions, for example, he had his then-partner Cathy Weiner write out witness statements describing how the events unfolded. The book follows this degree of separation in making us witnesses to D’Arcangelo from the traces he’s left behind. While he shows up at times in the photographs taken by Weiner, his spectral presence is felt most intimately in his handwritten notes, pieces of loose leaf that are presented against the white page of the book. D’Arcangelo was astute to the way something was arranged to “be seen (better) in an austere space,” as he writes in one note for the show at Artists Space. The note’s torn edge draws us to the space around the document, turning it into an object to be deciphered. We become perceptive to a person behind this object, someone who seems to fall back once again into space.

Bringing this material together reveals a certain stillness at the heart of D’Arcangelo’s practice, stillness as a setting for action, but also the stillness that follows action. Consider the action at the Louvre in 1978 when he took a Thomas Gainsborough painting off the wall and pasted one of his statements in its place. He disrupted the stillness of the painting—a stillness which comes to represent the institution, as much as the guard seated just beyond his shoulder—and inserted a new stillness in the form of a space of text.

The book’s documents function in some ways like the one he’s placed in the painting’s absence, both because of the materials D’Arcangelo himself selected, but also how the editors have chosen to arrange them. Curator at NYU Special Collections Nicholas Martin notes in his postscript that in the time since the materials entered the archive in 2009 and the book’s publication, the D’Arcangelo papers have been visited by about forty people. The stillness of the archive is something we might take for granted, but to rearrange it and provide editorial comment further reveals the mechanisms of mediation through which we access its contents.

It’s impossible to entirely remove mediation. That’s not a bad thing, nor was it D’Arcangelo’s intention. There’s a deep tenderness in reading the new contributions from Weiner, Daniel Buren, Peter Nadin, Louise Lawler, and others who knew D’Arcangelo, inserted between the documents. There was care in how this book was collected and edited together, as there was care in assembling the work binder. In moving through these documents and ephemera, evidence of the artist unfolds over time. The book Christopher D’Arcangelo helps clarify the potential of fragility to make known the space and stillness beyond what we see and are given.