ARSHAM DRAWS THE TV WITH NO ARCHAEOLOGY

Daniel Arsham drew his television, and left out everything that made him famous

Daniel Arsham spent close to two decades teaching the art world to read his work as fictional archaeology, the casting of cameras, phones and boomboxes as eroded relics dug up from a future ruin. His newest drawings throw all of that out. They are pictures of a television screen, made while old golf broadcasts played in the studio between exhibitions, with no excavation, no crystal decay, no invented future at all.

That absence is the whole point. Arsham, born in Cleveland on September 8, 1980, has built one of the most recognizable systems in contemporary art, and these drawings sit completely outside it. He has described them as a side project, not research and not part of any show, just drawings of the screen he happened to be looking at.

A golf broadcast on in the studio became the subject

The drawings come from the television Arsham keeps running while he works, tuned to old golf coverage during the stretch between finishing one body of work and starting the next. He drew the screen itself, the framed broadcast image, rather than building it into a sculpture or a relic.

Golf is not a random choice for him. Arsham has documented his obsession with the game in public collaborations, including the Malbon Golf capsule and the Arsham in Kohler installation, where he placed sculptures across three golf courses at the Kohler property in Wisconsin. The studio television, then, is showing him the thing he already loves, and the drawings catch it in its plainest form, a flat image on glass with no mythology attached. It is a sharp turn from the world building he is known for, closer in spirit to a quiet observational habit than a thesis. For readers tracking how artists move between high concept and plain looking, it sits near the drawings he resurfaced from 2007 at his Time Fold show, work that also predates the system he later locked into.

Fictional archaeology is the thing he deliberately removed

Fictional archaeology is Arsham's signature idea, an imagined future in which the material culture of the recent past has been buried, mineralized, and recovered as relics. He casts objects in geological material like volcanic ash, sand and selenite so they read as artifacts pulled from the ground after centuries.

The television drawings have none of that machinery. No object is eroded, nothing is staged as a dig site, and there is no future timeline implied. By his own account they carry no excavation and no fictional archaeology, which for Arsham is almost a statement of negation, since those two ideas have anchored nearly everything since he and Alex Mustonen founded the studio practice Snarkitecture in 2007. Stripping them out leaves a drawing that is only about looking, which is rarer for him than any fossil cast.

Color is the hidden tension in anything Arsham draws

Arsham is red green colorblind, and his monochrome palette of grays, whites and ash tones grew directly out of that condition. In 2015 he was given a pair of EnChroma corrective lenses that let him see more of the spectrum, and the experience pushed him to introduce specific hues like blue calcite and amethyst into later work, though he kept treating color as a deliberate tool rather than a default.

That backstory makes a drawing of a television screen quietly loaded. A golf broadcast is one of the most saturated images on television, deep green fairways under blue sky, the exact red green range his eyes process differently from most viewers. So when Arsham draws the screen, he is drawing an image whose color he has always related to on his own terms. The drawings do not announce this, but it is the same instinct that runs through his peers who treat a flat surface as a design object, the way Rei Kawakubo turned a store window into sculpture in Sao Paulo. A screen, a window, a frame, all of it is a rectangle that an artist decides how to read.

Why a side project from a famous artist is worth watching

Arsham is in one of his most public stretches, with Various Thoughts at Perrotin New York running March 5 to April 11, 2026, the Future Relic autobiography released March 17, 2026, and Time Fold at Perrotin London running June 4 to August 8, 2026. Against that volume of signature work, a set of unbranded drawings of a television is the most revealing thing he has shown, because it is the work he made for no audience and no concept.

The verdict is simple. A man who turned cameras into fake fossils and casts ash into the shape of obsolete machines sat in his studio with a golf broadcast on, and drew the screen with no excavation and no fictional archaeology, the two ideas that built his name. That is not a footnote to the Perrotin shows, it is the rare moment an artist lets you watch him make something just to make it.