Look Out for what you Look At.
The Christopher D’Arcangelo Papers
[Content note: suicide, police violence]
( _ _ _ )
I first learned of Christopher David D’Arcangelo through Martin Herbert’s publication Tell Them I Said No, a collection of essays on artists who abandoned or withdrew from the art world in various ways, ranging from death to self-exile to constructing antagonistic requirements for their participation in the gallery and museum ecosystem. I was surprised I hadn’t heard of him; as someone who lives in New York and is keenly invested in the history of radical movements in the city, along with the other overlapping interests we shared (anarchism, art, spray paint, eating apples), it was difficult to believe I knew nothing about him or his work before this year.
The most-known of his works are his interventions at major museums (including the Guggenheim and the Museum of Modern art) wherein he stripped off his shirt to reveal a stenciled text printed across his back, then handcuffed himself to various central locations: the middle of the floor in the Guggenheim rotunda, the front door of the Whitney. The text read:
When I state that I am an anarchist, I must also state that I am not an anarchist, to be in keeping with the ( _ _ _ ) idea of anarchism. LONG LIVE ANARCHISM.
Yesterday morning I visited the NYU Library Special Collections to view five boxes of documents, photographs, and ephemera from his archive, donated after his death. I was hyperaware of the “heightened security” in all parts of the NYU campus, a direct reaction to the Gaza solidarity encampments and protests mounted by students. The wall erected by the administration following the initial encampment’s violent eviction still stands, and the library was cordoned off with barriers manned by security guards. Ironically, the special collections floor is currently housing an exhibition on radical bookstores in New York City from the 1930s to the 2000s; the show can only be viewed by the general public by emailing the librarian for campus security clearance.
Image via Artists Space
In one of his texts, “Open Museum Proposal to MoMA,” D’Arcangelo writes: The museum functions as a ‘criteria space,’ it determines the value of objects and activities in our daily lives. By supporting certain objects the museum creates an unbalanced system of values in the world. Inside a museum space, the sense of something being allowed versus disallowed is palpable. Throughout “Processing Power: Archives, Prisons, and the Ethnography of Exchange,” Jarrett M. Drake describes the “pervasive imprint” of the prison as border, an imprint that shapes the archive. “Archives, in a sense, are for seekers, not finders,” writes Drake, naming the opacity and obscurity of archives in location and accessibility. He defines the archive as constituting its own borders, both organizational and psychic, that reflect those of the prison border. These parallel functions are highly material and technological: one archive, the Latter Day Saints’ genealogical records FamilySearch, operates indexing programs inside Utah’s prison system wherein incarcerated people are paid nothing for their labor, the idea being that by volunteering their time to a religious cause they are performing a form of rehabilitory penitence.
I find myself wondering what the difference is between myself, who weeks ago was outside NYU as police held a standoff with the student encampment, recording and observing in an effort to try to prevent NYPD from killing anyone that day, and the threat they anticipate will enter the library. I understand well that my access is allowed only as long as they have my identification and that I don’t do anything disruptive. The texts on view in the Reading from Left to Left exhibition are beautiful, incendiary, and disorienting to see in the context of such controlled and limited access. There is cruel irony in seeing zines about squatting and a world without landlords under the stewardship of NYU, one of the largest landowners in the city. I think of and bless the librarians and donors, who know and navigate all too well the compromises required in preserving these materials for future generations.
This all being said, I love libraries. Librarians are heroes, helping people apply for jobs, practice a new language, providing basic public services amongst a devastating reduction of library funding. I am at multiple public library locations per week. As a volunteer at the Hugo House’s Zine Archive and Publishing Project in Seattle one summer years ago, I thrilled at the never-ending pile of donations to index. Finding something obscure in a crate or on a shelf is genuinely like drugs to me, producing a serotonin hit unlike most others. In a cultural era where most information is easily and readily accessible, though heavily shaped, surveilled, and censored by AI and discriminatory algorithms, the satisfaction of finding something that feels as if it might elude those systems is an incredible promise. I am sincerely grateful for the preservation of these materials and that I can read and touch them today, fraught as that access is.
A box of Christopher’s stencils has inside it cut acetate sheets that read VIVA ANARCHISM, dust and hairs stuck to the dried red paint. One box contains a set of metal handcuffs, key still in the lock and smudged with fingerprints. I think about him clicking them onto his wrists and of the security guards working diligently to remove them. I leave my own fingerprint on the surface of the metal, feeling emotional at the idea of touch across decades. Pencil handwriting on a manila folder claims it contains a stencil reading “WE ALL DO THINGS.” The folder is empty, and I am left with a piqued curiosity: what is it that we all do? What was the second half of that sentence?
There is a haunting photo of Christopher shirtless and facing away from the camera. His back is blank this time, and he is standing among an arrangement of tree branches and twigs formed into a circle on the floor of a white room. It looks to be a gallery installation, but there was no contextual information or document alongside it that I could find. The image is hazy, as are all the images of his work from that time, blurred by the photography methods and age of the prints themselves. Unexpectedly, the object I am most affected by is a small rubber stamp of the anarchist text that accompanied his actions. It is tiny, the reversed text inky and almost illegible, but something about it makes my heart ache when I gently place it into the object viewing tray. Photos are prohibited and I try to fix the image in my memory.
I feel foolish somehow, looking at the circle A tattoo on the heel of my hand as I gingerly handle these yellowed papers and arrest records. I observe myself from the outside, covered in tattoos and barbed wire wallet chain dangling from my belt, showing up early in the morning to try to connect with anarchist artist forebearers through this quiet and forbidding process. Alfredo Bonnano’s words come floating to mind: something about anarchists being accused of being dreamers.
If we anarchists are utopians, we are so as a tension towards quality; if democrats are utopians, they are so as a reduction towards quantity. And against reduction, against the atrophy lived in a dimension of the minimum possible damage for them and the maximum damage for the great number of people who are exploited, to this miserable reality we oppose our utopia which is at least a utopia of quality, a tension towards another future, one that will be radically different to what we are living now.
From Chris’s (can I call him Chris?) actions and texts is it clear he was not a disruptor for disruption’s sake. In immersing myself in his writing and archive it is striking to notice that I had myself, to a degree, fallen victim to a version of mainstream media’s flattening anarchism as chaos, as provocation without substance, in seeing only the actions without their intentions and invocations. D’Arcangelo was not sabotaging, he was sincerely introducing an alternative question in hope of a generative answer. Moving a painting in the Louvre to the floor, he asked, by way of a printed text taking its place on the wall:
“When you look at a painting,
where do you look at that painting?
What is the difference between a painting on
the wall and a painting on the floor?”
Before his death, D’Arcangelo was working towards his first solo institutional exhibit at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven. His proposal was titled A Museum for Everyone, the idea being that the public would be able to display anything they wanted for the duration for the show, with the contributions being added to the museum’s collection following the exhibition. During the museum protests in recent months—in particular the actions at MoMA and at the Brooklyn Museum, both demanding a divestment from the Israeli occupation’s genocide in Palestine—I have thought about D’Arcangelo’s one-man actions and how he considered the collective even as he staged them, to an observer, alone. A document regarding his Whitney action credits sixty participants besides himself as he single planned participant. At the Norton Simon Museum action in Pasadena, he covered five paintings with thick plastic that created a reflective surface. He described the function of the plastic as both to protect the existing work beneath it, but also to “[fill] that new plane with a new content. The reflection of the viewer, the room, other paintings, and the museum…in short a new painting.” The works create space in these institutions without rejecting them outright; instead, they expand the idea of participant, of contributor, of a museum by and for the people, adding voice to the salient and ongoing debate between reforming institutions and dismantling them altogether in order to build populist alternatives.
Christopher D’Arcangelo took his own life at the age of twenty-four on April 28th, 1979, “creat[ing] another unresolved space.” Considering that he meticulously documented his performances with communiques, epistolary exchanges, and court documents, the absence of text surrounding his death is notable.
“How, his art asked and answered, do you add something that is also a subtraction, construct the irreducible, disappear and don’t?” writes Martin Herbert. I wonder what Christopher would have thought about his legacy being experienced through the apparatus of archival access: registering an account, specifying boxes and folders you wish to view, keeping everything in plastic sleeves. He would, I imagine, want me to insert my own guerilla addition to his archive, or to stage some kind of conversational intervention, neither of which I do save for my fingerprint remnant as a natural consequence of handling his objects. The forbidding of photographs, at least, feels aligned with what I understand through his work—the encounter is confined to the space itself and the representations you choose to make of it.
PS. In writing this I flipped through the Artists Space publication that came out in 2023, which arrived not long before I visited the archive. The second half of the sentence and the answer to my question was there: WE ALL DO THINGS IN OUR OWN LITTLE WAY. LONG LIVE ANARCHISM.
Sharing, Reading, Amplifying:
For Our Liberation Juneteenth BBQ – Black Revolutionary Communist organization FOL is hosting a Juneteenth BBQ and is in need of financial contributions to provide free food for the people. You can support via CashApp to $4ourliberaton.
FOL is also hosting a community screening of Paris is Burning this Tuesday, highly highly recommend!
Praise Fuller housing battle – our beloved comrade Praise is dealing with a sadly not uncommon housing dispute and needs our support.
Rootwork: Building Block Power
TODAY Saturday June 8th 11am-5pm
Building Block Power
Learn how to build block associations and share resources locally. Join community conversations on gentrification and hear from neighbors who have fought evictions.
Workshops
Block Association 101
Economy of the Block
How to Build Resource Libraries
How to Build Block Power
· On libraries: my friend Kae Bara Kracha’s Spotify series Speculative Telephone, created as a contribution for the Journal of Critical Digital Librarianship's special issue Turning It Off and Back On Again: Speculative Digital Librarianship (March 2024) I was on this one, Things That Don’t Quite Fit.
· This astoundingly beautiful cover of Suzanne by Nina Simone
· Nearly finished with Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe
· Ella Sklaw is running a fundraiser to help the Al-Shorafa family evacuate Gaza—info here or donate directly via GoFundMe.
Sources:
Alfredo Bonanno, “The Anarchist Tension”, 1996
Jarrett M. Drake, “Processing Power: Archives, Prison, and the Ethnography of Exchange” from Paths to Prison: On the Architectures of Carcerality, Columbia Books on Architecture and the City. 2020
Martin Herbert, Tell Them I Said No, Sternberg Press. 2016
Christopher D’Arcangelo, Kunstverein Publishing, Artists Space. 2023
Anarchism Without Adjectives: On the Work of Christopher D’Arcangelo, 1975-1979