DANIEL ARSHAM'S CRYSTAL RELIC 001 TOOK TWO YEARS TO DEVELOP

Daniel Arsham says the Crystal Relic 001 took two years to develop, and the resin Yankees cap that came out of that work shipped on April 5, 2019 in an edition of 500. He has now gathered it with a run of other 2019 material under the heading "How life looked back in March 3019", a date a thousand years ahead of the work that fits the fictional archaeology he has built his name on. The set is a small archive of what one busy year produced: a cap, a museum survey in Amsterdam, a clock in Michigan, and a travel list that runs from Beijing to Doha.

Two Years to Cast a Yankees Cap in Crystal

Crystal Relic 001 is a cast resin replica of a New York Yankees cap, released through Arsham's online store on April 5, 2019 and limited to 500. Arsham says it was inspired by 18th century archaeological objects made of crystal. Each piece shipped with a metal identification card, die cut foam, a sealing label and a pair of white art handling gloves, and a holographic label confirms the edition number.

The gloves are the tell. A cap is an object you wear, and this one arrived with the equipment a conservator uses on a museum piece. That is the whole Arsham trick: take the most disposable thing in a closet, give it the weight and provenance of an excavated artifact, and sell it as if the excavation had already happened.

He followed it with the Crystal Relic 002, a Game Boy, in a second edition of 500. Two years of development for an object he could have cast in a weekend says the slow part was never the casting. It was making a modern cap read as an 18th century find.

January 18 to September 30. Moco Amsterdam.

Arsham's Connecting Time at Moco Museum in Amsterdam opened January 18 and ran to September 30 in 2019. It was the first exhibition of his work in the Netherlands and a survey with pieces from across his career. He says it has had more than 100,000 visitors.

Set that against the other attendance figure on record. Perrotin's listing for his Seoul 3024 show at the Lotte Museum of Art says 50,000 people attended over 66 days, which is roughly 750 a day. Moco's number is an Arsham claim rather than a museum release, and the show ran far longer, so the two cannot be compared directly. What they share is the dating habit: Seoul 3024 and March 3019 both write the present as the distant past.

The Moco show also explains why Arsham moved into Europe's museum calendar. A survey that long builds a visitor count that gallery shows cannot. His birthday retrospective, in which he credited a full scholarship at Cooper Union and a start in New York at 18, treats those years as the foundation, as the reading of that anniversary shows.

A Falling Clock in a Michigan Lobby

Cranbrook Art Museum in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, showed Arsham's The Source: A Catalog of Late 20th Century American Relics from March 1 to June 23, 2019, and the museum's release said it would also display his Falling Clock. The release described the clock as inspired by the idea of an object's gravitational force bending space and time.

Arsham says Falling Clock has now been installed at Cranbrook as a long term loan, on view in the entrance lobby. That moves the piece from a four month exhibition to a permanent greeting for every visitor, and it is the one item in his list that is still on view to see today. Sources date the Falling Clock variously to 2019, 2021 and 2022, and galleries sell a wall mounted edition of 99, so the lobby piece may be a different iteration from the one sold.

Beijing, Doha, Hong Kong

Arsham's travel line reads "Beijing, Doha, Hong Kong" and he labels the trip "3020 Research", which keeps the fictional timeline running a year past the March 3019 heading. In Qatar he points to a Richard Serra work in the middle of the desert and says that when E.T. comes, the visitor will be most curious about it.

The line is the thesis stated as a joke. Arsham's practice assumes that someone will excavate our objects later, and a Serra steel work in an empty landscape is the kind of thing that would survive to be found. He applies the same logic to sport: his football future relic series treated the game as an archive to be dug up, and he says he did something special with the International Champions Cup, the football tournament.

Five Hundred Caps, Nine Jackets, One Failed Cast

Arsham says one piece took almost a year and that the first cast failed and had to be redone. He does not say which, but the sentence is the useful one in the list: it is the only admission that the objects can fail. His nine RSA racing jackets are the opposite end of the scale from 500 caps, and Time Fold at Perrotin London, which ran June 4 to August 8, 2026, shows the same impulse in cameras turned to mineral.

He also says he made one drawing back in 1993, minus the erosions. Arsham was born in September 1980, so he was 12 or 13. The drawing is the earliest evidence in the whole set that the ruin was the idea before the cap, the clock or the museum survey. A cap in an edition of 500, a clock in a lobby, and a visitor count above 100,000 all grow from a drawing a teenager made without any erosion in it.

Related: Marine Serre Chaisor Chair Lujipeka.