Edgar Arceneaux: Hopelessness Freezes Time

The strata of the Earth is a jumbled museum. Embedded in the sediment is a text that contains limits and boundaries which evade the rational order, and social structures which confine art. In order to read the rocks we must become conscious of geologic time, and of the layers of prehistoric material that is entombed in the Earth’s crust. When one scans the ruined sites of prehistory one sees a heap of wrecked maps that upsets our present art historical limits. A rubble of logic confronts the viewer as he looks into the levels of the sedimentation. The abstract grids containing the raw matter are observed as something incomplete, broken and shattered.
– Robert Smithson

When artist Edgar Arceneaux called us to work with him on a catalog for his new exhibition at the Kunst Museum Basel we couldn’t have been happier. Our earlier project with Edgar, The Alchemy of Comedy… Stupid, offered us the opportunity to get to know this fascinating artist. Large segments of that book are made up of the ephemera of a collaboration between Edgar and the comedian David Alan Grier. Those two elements, ephemera and dialogue, plus Detroit, are essential elements in Hopelessness Freezes Time.

Hopelessness Freezes Time, the book, is many things; a catalog for a museum exhibition in Switzerland, an “ongoing collaboration with art historian Julian Myers”, a collection of ephemera, a unique object.

Topics Covered:
Edgar Arceneaux: bio, artists studio, artworks, artist’s notebooks.
Julian Myers: earthworks, ontology of art history.
Detroit: Institute of the Arts, blind pigs, riots, techno music.
Earthworks: Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson.
Mirror Travel
Sniping
Civil Rights
Riots
Re-diasporas
Distribution of Music
Guerilla Monuments
Great Lakes Aquatic Afro-Aliens
Monoliths *
Aliens *
Startrek *
2001*

*these are direct quotes from a page of Edgar’s notebook, many of which are documented in the book.

Although its references to urban decay are oblique, the piece’s sentiment is clear. The pendulum suggests cycles of time and how the image or reputation of a place — the outsized shadow it casts — may grow or shrink, but is always ephemeral.
—Sharon Mizota, review for LA Times, 12/3/2010.

Containing what is essentially a drift around a string of metonymic relationships surrounding urban decay, Detroit, and an entropy of identifications—this book manages to approach the form of Smithson’s “jumbled museum.” It’s cover, giving the false illusion that its hardbound, is a thick piece of brown chipboard. Its title, stamped with mirrored silver foil, reverberates back the concept of “mirror travel” discussed within. The rest of the book is soft, spilling (relatively controlled) from the spine. Paper  is brown, white, grey, then cold cold blue. The back cover is the image of Dr. Spock and Karl Marx icily staring back out to us.

Inserted into the book are 10 strategically placed flysheets drawing together photographs from the Michael Hiezer’s Detroit based work, Dragged Mass; album art from Detroit techno label Underground Resistance; a vitrine from an exhibition containing artifacts pertaining to Submerge Records; notes regarding the mythology surround Drexciya (an afrofuturist Detroit techno group); photographs of urban ruins. All of these elements relate back to the artist, his dialog with Julian, and the texts within. The flysheets also contain reproductions of Edgar's work which are oddly at home among the jumble.

While it’s easy to archive ephemera and put it in a box, it’s a challenge to hold it within a form that magnifies the spirit of instable enigmatic expression. As an artist, Edgar Arceneaux continually does this. We believe the book we just made with him, Hopelessness Freezes Time, does the same.

You can purchase it through the Kunst Museum and perhaps soon here in the states.