Hublot on top – Style – Kommersant

American artist Daniel Arsham stands on a snowy mountain platform against the backdrop of the symbol of Switzerland, the 4478-meter Matterhorn, rising into the sky. Here, in the Alps, his new sculptural installation Light & Time has opened.

The sundial with a gnomon-obelisk built by him from snow and ice marks the beginning of his collaboration with the Hublot watch brand. Daniel Arsham joins the international team of creators, which includes Japanese Takashi Murakami, American Samuel Ross, Frenchmen Richard Orlinski and Marc Ferrero, Swiss Maxime Bushi and many others.

— What will Daniel Arsham bring to your collection of artists? I ask Hublot CEO Ricardo Guadalupe.

— Working with artists, first of all, reflects our love for culture, and our program is called Hublot Loves Art for a reason. But we are just as important about concrete results: Murakami, Ross, and others have designed special watches for us that have been incredibly successful. Because in these models the personal artistic style of world famous masters was combined with the innovation of our watchmakers. Daniel Arsham will also make watches for us – amazing, unusual. We are now in the development stage and I assure you, the result will be stunning.

An obelisk in the Swiss mountains is dedicated to time. Daniel Arsham is a special artist who knows how to depict everything that cannot be depicted, namely the course of centuries. He is interested in what time is doing with art, with technology, with society. At his exhibitions, signs and objects of the past and present world appear as if from a great historical distance. It doesn’t matter if works of art or household items are mixed up – approximately the way they are mixed in cultural layers during excavations.

Among the objects that he exhibited in the galleries were luxury cars that seemed to have lain for centuries under the ashes of Herculaneum. Or classical sculptures that have experienced the erosion of time. This was a double game: once the Venus de Milo appeared in the Louvre from under the ground. What will happen to her or Michelangelo’s Moses if they are hidden for centuries in the depths of new deserts? One of Arsham’s installations depicted a huge hourglass. The glass flask turned over and the sand gradually covered the object below, freeing the object above. The cycles of oblivion and acquisition, burial and excavation appeared in this work in a form compressed by time.

The new large-scale sculpture by Daniel Arsham at the Matterhorn itself can count minutes. It is essentially a sundial with a dial 20 meters in diameter and six marks, ice sculptures that everyone recognizes as six H-shaped screws holding the dial ring of the Hublot Big Bang.

The gnomon obelisk (according to Ricarlo Guadalupe, he was taken to the mountains by helicopter) will not stand long enough to experience the mountain summer and winter. But the very shape of the obelisk, a timeless monument echoing the pike in the background, suggests something else: Hublot values ​​being a Swiss brand. Not even because Swiss Made is the best recommendation for watchmakers. In Light & Time, the artist’s task is to establish a dialogue with the most famous mountain landscape in Switzerland, with the most famous mountain in the world, which has long been decorating tourist booklets and chocolate packaging. Everything is not so simple here. If you think about it, the foothills of the Matterhorn are the least reminiscent of a chocolate idyll. There is a special atmosphere here, discharged from the height and charged with history, in which there is so much drama. The Matterhorn can be evil, cruel, indifferent to human efforts. This is best told by the cemetery of dead climbers located in the resort of Zermatt. But the same cemetery speaks of the stubbornness of the brave, who sought to master the height. So Daniel Arsham’s project reveals the philosophy of search, record, indomitable striving for the sky, which is so characteristic of the watch brand.

Their interest in time is mutual, suffice it to recall one of the pages in the history of watchmakers Hublot, who released in 2013 the Antikythera SunMoon watch based on Antikythera, an ancient astronomical mechanism in which our distant ancestors encrypted their picture of the world.

Daniel Arsham admires the work of Hublot watchmakers – he told how he tried to compete with them at the assembly table, but could not accurately tighten even a single screw. He is fascinated by the brand’s ability to create new materials, and in this, as he says, “alchemy”, he is most attracted by the unraveled mystery of the birth of colored sapphire glass. It was a watch made of the latest SAXEM material, created on the basis of aluminum oxide, chromium and the rare earth elements thulium and holmium, that adorned his wrist during our meeting in Zermatt. A heavy-duty material with a brilliance that surpasses that of sapphire seemed to him the ideal. The artist was obviously proud of his Big Bang Tourbillon Automatic Yellow Neon SAXEM, perhaps wanting to tell those same journalists what direction the collaboration with the watch brand would take. Ricardo Guadalupe also spoke about this: most likely, the artist will work with sapphire, creating his own version of the Hublot design.

At the Arsham exhibitions, I saw pyramids of consumer electronics, which were once an object of desire and admiration, and now are not interesting even to junk dealers. Technique is decrepit and out of fashion faster than art. This is the challenge of working with Hublot, with watches that never age.

Two hundred years ago, Gavrila Derzhavin wrote a beautiful poem about the omnipotence of time: “The river of time in its aspiration Carries away all the affairs of people And drowns peoples, kingdoms and kings in the abyss of oblivion. And if anything remains Through the sounds of the lyre and the trumpet, Then eternity will be devoured by the mouth And the common fate will not go away. Everything is so, but for two centuries we have not forgotten these lines. Hublot and Arsham have a far from pessimistic view of the world: the most durable materials are destroyed, but human thought and human interest are not limited by time, life, or the dictates of technology.

Alexey Tarkhanov