CD DA FM (A description of  Christopher D‘Arcangelo’s works) – 2014
Book (728 pages, 27,9 x 21,6 cm)

In 1955 the US-American conceptual artist Christopher D’Arcangelo is born as the first son of the artist Allan and the choreographer Sylvia D’Arcangelo. He is born in New York where, except for a few years, he lives and works until his suicide 1979. Work in the tense atmosphere of art and living produced during his main creative period between 1974 and 1979 valuably contribute to the area of the late conceptual art of the 1970s starting from consistent development and performance.
D’Arcangelo’s substantial involvement finds its expression both within his two main sequences, the action and labor works, as well as in exhibition concepts and publications. Within these he addresses entry requirements and exclusions in arts, whereas D’Arcangelo not only involves artists, but also includes observers of his work. Furthermore social policy and economic considerations are put down within this work, especially due to D’Arcagenlo’s interest in social changes. This striving for change can be found within his works and appears in different ways. Productions of the action work series find their expression within radical performances, which D’Arcangelo took up at different institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. On the contrary the mechanical constructions of the labor works are limited to private spaces of people from the art milieu, like Louise Lawler, amongst others. Productions of this series are group works that were put into different constellations and deal with the relation between art and (wage) labor. As a main part of D’Arcangelo’s ephemeral work has not remained, documentary records are especially valuable and interesting. This is not only due to the transparency of these works from a present-day perspective, but also includes the approach and severity of the documentation by Christopher D’Arcangelo.
The reception of D’Arcangelo’s artistic involvement has decreased since his death and his work has most widely lost attention. Besides the abrupt end through D’Arcangelo’s death this low attention for his work mostly depends on the accessibility, as his legacy has not been refurbished being locked up in a storage room of Allan D’Arcangelo for decades now. Not until the donation of the whole set of works to the Fales Library & Special Collections in New York and the therewith initiated archival reprocessing a suitable approach to D’Arcangelo’s material has been created. To get access to this archive the administrators have established certain requirements. These, on the one hand, enable every person access to the archive on site, but on the other hand ban reproductions, which even includes taking copies or pictures for research purpose.
Precisely this prohibition of reproduction opens interesting ways to approach to D’Arcangelo’s documents, which find their expression within my arts-science thesis. I approach the set of works through the method of description, what finally leads to a chronological listing of D’Arcangelo’s works. My ways of approaching this research and the documentation strategies put into reflexive text are set right before the descriptive part of the thesis. Between an objective description of the works my own subjective graphic interpretation and a narrative part with pictures widen the involvement with Christopher D’Arcangelo.