Lars Arrhenius’s closest progenitor would have to be Matt Mullican—both dig into the world of graphics, signs, and symbols and imagine that these ciphers live in an analogous world of life, death, violence, and spirituality. Arrhenius’s The Man without Qualities, 2001, amusingly proposes the universal “man” sign that graces restrooms around the world as the embodiment of Robert Musil’s existential blank slate. In a series of laminated metallic C-prints that wrap around three walls, our generic hero is put through the paces of a birth-to-death narrative that recalls Mullican’s forays into the graphic cycles of consciousness. Elsewhere, a digital animation deploys a cast of characters entirely derived from public signs (men, women, people in wheelchairs, etc.), giving them active lives and a community complete with hospital, office, gym, bowling alley, and disco. Other works, like a world map and another three-wall narrative, borrow from comics and graphic novels. Together with the pictograph-people, they forge a space between representation and abstraction and comprise an absorbing fantasy of what it would be like if signs had souls.
