quotations from papers by Mary O’Neill
In order to understand ephemerality it is necessary to understand our attachment to the opposite – permanence – and its function not only in art, but in Western culture generally, which requires visual art to be both physically durable and collectible. This requirement derives in part from the economic demands of the art market and the need of collectors and art museums to possess artworks in order to valorize and legitimize their power and status Given the pressure from the art institutions, who, in their governing rules are obliged to acquire works that are preservable and can be passed on to future generations, and given the common assumptions about the need for a body of work to build an artistic career and reputation, why would an artist make ephemeral work? Part of the motivation may be a desire to dematerialize the art object in order to defeat the market, to democratize or to challenge art museums, but in many works something much more fundamental is involved. The ideal of the permanent work of art relates to our cultural need for at least an illusion of permanence which is a response to the difficulty posed by transience.
Adam Philips describes boredom as ‘integral to the process of taking one’s time.’ Ephemeral art is work both of and in time. It requires the time to view what might in fact be a very boring process; watching flowers decay, ice melting or a mound of sweets erode, but it also requires time to experience these works.
In no other area of human activity is the relationship between production and money as perverse as in the art world. The peculiarity of this relationship may be responsible for the appreciative failure of much of contemporary art and in particular conceptual art. If value is attached to ‘intrinsic’ qualities of an object it would be hard to justify the high prices attached to contemporary artwork. This however raises interesting questions as to the extent to which it is possible to separate economic from other values in art. There have been numerous attempts to break the link between art and money – Roger Fry’s Omega Workshop experiment, offered participants a guaranteed minimum income to free them from economic pressure. Commencing with Art and Commerce in 1926 Fry explored this relationship in a series of publication. In 1971, the Art Workers’ Coalition produced a statement of demands which asked for a small measure of what Fry had offered artist fifty years earlier. In the 1960s and 70s, there was a proliferation of highly politicized work challenging the art/commerce relationship, focusing on the dematerialisation of the artwork as a decommodification strategy.
In ephemeral artworks there is a form of sacrifice; the artworld is deprived of the durability that enables art to fulfil its role in creating the myth of immortality. However there is the greater gain of an understanding of the role of permanence in art as contributing to our death denying cultural worldview and why transience challenges that function. Discussing these works risks losing the central experience, because they demand an engagement that does not sit comfortably with the aesthetic detachment and the wariness of deeply felt personal responses, which are not valued in the hierarchy of knowledge validated in academia.
Within an ephemeral artwork, there is an element of sacrifice. If this is the case, what is being sacrificed? Is it our attachment to, and requirement for, permanence, the art object, or is it the artworld itself that is being sacrificed,? There is a bilateral quality to sacrifice – something given up for a greater gain. If the greater gain in the ephemeral art sacrifice is a form of knowledge about mortality, death denial, and terror management, how can that knowledge be accessed when the work no longer exists? Or, as the result of intervention by conservators, exists only in a form that is no longer ephemeral.
