Introduction
The concept of Ephemeral Art as a separate and independent category has not yet found its place in art history. The concept’s underlying principle is horizontal: many works of art, whose identifying aspect may derive from a particular art tendency or style, refer to the idea of temporality. In literature there are many references to ephemeral art which is identified with Land Art (1), for example Richard Long’s interventions into natural landscapes (2) or walks among the wasteland in New Mexico and Scottish hills. Rosalind Krauss (3) refers to ephemeral art as nomadic, not related to any particular location, the art that in time gets confronted with the particular site where the installation is realised in situ (4). The literal understanding of the site is gradually transformed into a set of relations that emerge between the work of art and its current location. The relations, resulting from the context of a particular site and cultural differences, are presented in chapter Permanent traces of Ephemeral Art. The rich heritage of Conceptual (or para-conceptual) (5) Art comprises also ephemeral actions and objects but in this case the artist’s motivation to create form is very strong since it is through form that time’s essential transitoriness may be grasped. Renate Weh’s Sifting through the Sand from 1969 (6) is an example.
The concept of ephemeral art I propose describes the mode of the artist’s activity rather than the end product (finished project); the mode of thinking informed by the artist’s intuition, the design process conceived in temporal categories, and the selection of adequate means.
The underlying principle of Ephemeral Art is the emergence of something that is intentionally transitory, evanescent by design, conceived as ephemeral. Ephemeral Art’s focus on the creative process clearly emphasises the eternal idea of transitoriness. One aspect of the artist’s statement is the relationship between the work of art and the time of its presentation. Time creates the project’s dramaturgy, determines its form and content of its transformation. From the artist’s perspective, this relativity may be best explained in the context of such works of art which – in my opinion – show a certain affinity with the idea of Ephemeral Art or are in some sense identical with its form.
Monuments of Time – this is the name I have given to my own works executed over the recent decade. Thanks to them, I have acquired some experience with ephemeral sculpture that is with objects whose creation is informed by the idea of observing the action of time within matter, of grasping the temporal scale, of taking an alternative measurement of time and studying its conventional status. My work on the Monuments of Time series has strengthened my predilection to the ephemeral form which I regard as whole since it integrates the rational and emotional elements.
Part I
Permanent traces of Ephemeral Art
Because I have been pursuing this kind of art myself, I have began my search for these traces from reviewing my old notes. I have found a sentence I once wrote paraphrasing Carpentier (7): Art is a journey and it is a journey itself which counts and not a destination. I still identify with this statement and because it has apparently stood the test of time, I will take it as a departure point to reflect on the conception and creation of ephemeral things and objects which are perpetually in the process of becoming; which express transitoriness and first of all convey the sense of taking a journey.
During my first visit to India, I worked for seven months at the Banaras Hindu University in Varnasi. In this sacred city of the Hindus I finally found what I was searching for: a place completely different from the one where I grew up. My stay in India was to bring many experiences essential for my art. I was struck by how differently the value of an artefact was perceived depending on its cultural or religious context. Confronted with the oriental tradition, I became acutely aware of the relativity of the vision of the world perceived by a person brought up in the western tradition and Mediterranean culture. Focused on studying Hindu art, I discovered its very different principles but also some surprising analogies. I was fascinated by the bipolar aspect of Hindu art in which the imposing tradition of monumental stone and bronze sculpture, spanning some five thousand years, existed alongside the mode of ephemeral and transitory artistic expression. I admired and respected the underlying force that saturated the act of spreading sand on the floor with an artistic purpose in mind with the same kind of energy as that radiated by a bronze sculpture of the cosmic dancer Nataraja.(8) I sensed the presence of a harmony of the opposite approaches manifesting itself through the expressive power of the work of art, whether monumental or ephemeral. I focused on studying the relations between the opposite manifestations and the problem of the value of art and its particular ‘genres’.
An object can assume a different value depending on the location of the observer. The relative aspect of art perception concerns the reality in which the work of art is being perceived. Once the object is removed from its context, its value becomes absolute. Buddhist monks endlessly repeat the same task of sprinkling colour sand on the ground to form an intricate mandala.(9) Its shape and design have remained constant over millennia. One can say that the sand image does not change over time, only the people who work on it. Hundreds of monks over the centuries have continued to create the same mandala that has been in the perpetual process of becoming. Each time, the new form reaffirms the idea of mandala; the destruction of the finished image does not invalidate the idea but presages a new mandala that is about to become. The ephemeral character of numerous particular images, forming a series of a kind, seems to have no impact whatsoever on the permanency of the project itself. Referring to the framework presented above, in which monumental sculpture and the tradition of creating transient images are assigned a comparable status, I will analyse two works of art, one executed in a permanent material and the other ephemeral, to present them as an equipollent system, analogous to the complementary colours on the colour wheel. In the realm of art phenomena can exist that escape scientific observation or analysis and also experience that has no empirical foundation. This aspect is revealed through the fact that similar phenomena occur within different cultural traditions in remote parts of the world. The sign, functioning as a visual message, may be modified but it retains its original function of a short-lived image (symbol), painted, sprinkled or drawn directly on the ground, under the feet of the people participating in the ritual. However, it is not the religious or ritual context but the absolute value of the drawing-image that links the traditions of various cultures and societies. Similar evidence of ephemeral actions may be found in the art of the aborigines of Australia, recorded for example in the legend of Those Who Have Arrived on Earth in Their Sleep. Alongside very individual paintings (‘X-ray pictures’), they create ephemeral geometric designs on their own bodies, on the ground or tree-bark. The practice serves to establish the visual form of communication with the spirits. In some way these images resemble Magic Realist paintings: they captivate with their intrinsic expressiveness and at the same time are saturated with multi-layer symbolism
Similar rites are performed by the Athabascan-speaking Indians of North America, including the largest tribes: the Navajo and Pueblo Indians who had arrived from the North and are today scattered through in south-western territories of the United States. During the Ceremony of Initiation, Festival of Moccasins, Dance of the Mountain Spirit, they created dry paintings with a symbolic context by strewing powdered pigments on the desert’s sand. Also the descendants of the black slaves, who had been brought from Black Africa (Kingdom of Benin), living today in some parts of the Caribbean and South America, carry out rituals involving similar practices of creating ephemeral images. The participants in the ritual voodoo trance (10), for example during the neophytes’ initiation ceremony, make a chalk drawing on the ground representing the spirit of the voodoo religion: the lion symbolised by two interconnected “V” signs to convey the primordial Androgyny. The origins of these drawings are lost in antiquity and rooted in the tradition of the Yoruba tribes in Nigeria; the fact reflecting the long duration of visual signs, extending beyond the life-span of several generations. C.G. Jung observes that the symbol is a primitive expression of the unconscious but at the same time it is an idea reflexive of the most sublime intuition available to man.(11) Benedetto Croce has emphasised the fundamental role of intuition in the process of creating cultural heritage: he defines art as intuizione, or lyrical intuition, the presentation of images that are well-expressed or beautiful. Art, alongside logic, economics, and ethics, is one of the primeval and fundamental forms of the activity of spirit.(12) Croce identifies art with intuition. The material emanations of human creative activity as well as its non-material manifestations referring to the symbolic reflect the fundamental value of art as extending beyond the individual. I regard intuition as very important in creating art, especially an ephemeral art. The intuitive approach is complemented by the focus on analysing the object of creative action and studying its relations with the surrounding environment. These two complementary perspectives co-exist in art and their archetypes may be found in the ancient Chinese conception of dynamic contrast of the complementary opposites in the dualistic universe, expressed in the yin-yang symbol.(13) One in essence but two in manifestation, containing both the ephemeral and the monumental, the same principle underlies art and represents the totality of creation. It is rooted in man’s ephemeral existence confronted with the material presence and transitoriness of things. And yet, as Rabindranath Tagore poignantly observed, the endless duration of all things would mean hopeless despair for us; transitoriness and eternity: between these two opposites we have found our place and our freedom.(14)
The above described artistic practices, permeated by the spirit of free manifestation, may inspire modern artists as well. Having ascertained its autonomy, contemporary art feeds primarily on self-generated ideas. According to Benjamin Patterson, member of the Fluxus group, artists are concerned with representing the utopia and the ideal.(15)
In some extreme cases, the object – an artistic product – has been completely eliminated, the approach informed by the idea of the priority of the creative act over the art object.(16) Consequently, it may seem that today’s art. has reached the zero point from which a new, more sublime level of activity might be generated. As Jean Baudrillard observes, in order to really become nil, absent, art must be very powerful. Had it actually been nil, it would have been capable of re-creating its own absence, emptiness, and nothingness. One needs to be genial to be able to be none.(17) This declaration clearly reflects the influence of the paradigm of Eastern philosophy. It appears that art satisfies the need for equilibrium and variety, expressed in the language of Performance, Conceptual and Ephemeral Art. Thus, art generates an indispensable contrast to counterbalance the material traces of its activity in the form of objects and things. This aspect significantly expands the very concept of art, opening new horizons that are essential for continued creativity.
Part II
The relative monument
How does a monument come into being? What is the definition of a monumental object? How its import should be measured/assessed on the time scale? Do only such works that will last for centuries deserve this name? And what about objects which come into being here and now? Does the ephemeral exclude the monumental?
I will discuss works by several artists whose oeuvre displays an important connection with Ephemeral Art. In my opinion, these artists are guided by similar intuition. What connects their approaches is that they have distanced themselves from the idea of permanence as an essential feature of the work of art. This attitude has informed certain works of such artists as: Gordon Matta-Clark(18), Robert Smithson(19), Christo and Jeanne-Claude(20), James Turrell(21), Walter De Maria(22), Olafur Eliasson(23) and the Wrocław artist Jerzy Rosołowicz(24). Another aspect which connects them with Ephemeral Art is the fact that some of their artistic activities may be accessible to art historians only in the form of documentation. Very diverse in terms of form, their works are underlain by several common ideas: the work’s inevitable destruction despite the undertaken effort to create it, the choice of an impermanent medium, the one-time-only character of the artistic event. The envisioned object or a fragment of physical environment in its entirety is transformed by the artist into a structure designed to capture the imponderables, e.g. Rosołowicz’s vessels for collect dew or Turrell’s containers for capturing light. Ephemeral compositions may also be aimed at presenting the organic relations existing between them, their physical environment and natural, cyclical processes.
Trying to find a place for the ephemeral work in the context of other art tendencies, I have focused on ephemeral monuments that are being created outside of the mainstream of gallery and museum objects. These installations involve extensive preparations, can be viewed only during a limited time period and self-destruct or are destroyed by the artist. These which are the most transient are at the same time the most dynamic and spectacular, their monumental character consisting not in their form but in the persistent realisation of a timeless idea.
Gordon Matta-Clark, son of the surrealist painter Roberto Matta (25), during his short life-span was in the centre of a new avant-garde of earth-artists and conceptualists. He invented an entirely new form of artistic intervention(26) which continues to be identified with his work. Although the documentation of his oeuvre comprises only about a dozen projects, it shows beyond any doubt his genius. His “interventions” consisted in the systematic and organised deconstruction of structures. He practised his “anarchitecture” on buildings designated for demolition and thus excluded from the public domain: dilapidated houses, garages, hangars. A former student of architecture, he employed his structural knowledge to take down walls of buildings, to remove large sections of floors, balancing on the verge of the structure’s collapse. Each object of Gordon Matta-Clark’s intervention became a gallery of a single work. His Office Baroque, commissioned by the International Culture Centre in Antwerp and realised in 1977, was such a transient work. He carved a sphere out of the gallery building’s volume: the spherical void adjoined the gable wall stretching from the ceiling through the staircase. The negative shape effectively implied the actual presence of the sphere. The viewers could see the structure’s inner workings: the cut uncovered electrical wiring, water and sewage pipes – like dissected fragments of the organism’s life systems. The building resembled a giant living organism on which Gordon conducted a vivisection, something akin to Tadeusz Kantor’s happening Anatomy Lesson after Rembrandt realised at the Kunsthalle in Nuremberg in 1968. Carrying himself as if he were a surgeon performing an operation, Kantor recovered various mundane objects (tramway ticket, coins, matches, etc.) from the pockets of a “patient” stretched on an operating table under bright lights. Objects retrieved by Kantor from the jacket could have been just as well recovered by Gordon during the autopsy performed on the “deceased” architectural structure. The artist’s approach is that of an archaeologist uncovering the building’s past. The cut house piece (Splitting Four Corners, Englewood, New Jersey, 1974) inspires an unsettling feeling. His cutting of a home – dividing up something sacred that should never be divided – was a very poignant metaphor; it had psychological and formal punch. It was an exposé of what a building was. Another Gordon Matta’s installation has been preserved at the PS1 Museum in New York. The artist cut out a rectangular opening through the building’s three floors, from the roof through the basement’s concrete floor and then continued the penetration by digging in several metres below the ground until he reached the subcutaneous water level which prevented further exploration. Reviewing Clarks realisations and their documentation, I am convinced that he has succeeded in materialising the void: it is precisely this which does not exist that constitutes the artistic object. Revealing the form is his primary objective while the object itself is secondary. Looking at a plaster mould, I consider an alternative representation, the negative form which could become an object of art. In a similar way, Gordon Matta-Clark forcefully suggests the existence of a material sphere inside the gallery building or a real shaft penetrating through his split home from the sky down deep into the ground.
Matta-Clark’s monumental interventions were very ambitious projects undertaken by an individual artists. The task were relatively easier with regard to American structures thanks to their lightweight skeleton construction but the European projects, like Office Baroque, were realised within much more resilient structures and were true feats of structural ingenuity and painstaking labour. Like a giant bark beetle, he hollowed out the desired shape being fully aware of the transitoriness of the effect. His innovative approach consisted in putting enormous effort in producing works which were small on the time-scale, their existence deliberately and irrevocably terminated by the artists. It seems likely that as a member of the 6o’s generation Gordon Matta-Clark was familiar with Eastern philosophy of construction and deconstruction (for example of the Buddhist mandala). Although we will never know for sure how he arrived at his innovative ideas, his “interventions” will be treasured in our private “museums without walls”.(27)