Most of us like when things last a long time. Love, good weather, your favourite pair of socks. But there’s something to appreciate about a fleeting moment, something you must commit to memory as fast as you can. A firework having its bright, beautiful moment before fading away forever. This week we’re talking about ephemeral art - artwork which is designed not to last for whatever reason, due to the materials used, the nature of performance or through human intervention. And! There’s a special, lovely surprise at the end. Tuck in luv.
Néle Azevedo
Brazilian visual artist and sculptor Néle Azevedo has been watching us melt away since 2005. The Minimum Monument which first exhibited in São Paulo in 2005 is a public art piece featuring hundreds of 20 centimetre tall ice sculptures, faceless humans in relaxed seated positions. While the climate change statement is there to see, the original intention of the work was to critique public monuments and to take into account “the history of the defeated, the anonymous, to bring to light our mortal condition”. In other words, who do we celebrate with our metal statues? Our marble busts? The Minimum Monument celebrates those lost to history, the victims of policy, the people who fall in between the cracks in the tectonic shifts of state and religion.
This video follows how this work has evolved since then, with the development of Suspended State, ice sculptures suspended above pots and pans and microphones. The percussion of their bodies fading away reverberates, the soundtrack of the voiceless. You can also learn more about Azevedo’s process and how they pulled off having more than 900 ice sculptures suspended at once.
Azevedo’s website is here for more info!
Francis Alÿs
In 1997, Belgian artist Francis Alÿs pushed a large block of ice through the streets of Mexico City for nine hours in a project called Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing. Our focus here is less on the ice itself, but the man pushing it and the environment he inhabits. The act of manual labour, of moving a resource from one area to the next is a natural part of the visual language of the street. Workers build buildings, couriers deliver packages, grannies go and buy biscuits even though they already have 10 tins of biscuits at home. We see people carrying things all the time, we are trying to get somewhere, trying to avoid running into people, to stare is rude, to linger is dangerous, so why would we focus on a man moving ice?
We watch as Alÿs pushes the ice past various passers-by who don’t hesitate, don’t stop to ask. The streets offer anonymity, they equalise. Nobody owns the street and what moves through it. Jackson Arn offers an interesting layer to the performance also: the “white cube” that Alÿs pushes resembles the “white cube” of the gallery, a phrase coined by Irish art critic Brian O’Doherty. While the white cube of the gallery is an internal, privately-owned space that can be policed, where art can be bought, exhibited to the people who can afford to see it, the white cube of the street cannot be owned by anyone. It is seen, shared, and ultimately temporary. This form of art cannot outlive the environment it is born into, the only privilege it has is to be committed to memory or replicated. A truly public, communal work of art.
There are plenty of other gems on Francis Alÿs’ website, here.
Pope.L
Broadway in New York City is one of the longest streets in the world, stretching 22 miles long and cutting across multiple parts of the city, from Manhattan to Yonkers to Sleepy Hollow. It is busy, lit up day and night by luminescence, by traffic. It is dirty, loud and populous. You certainly wouldn’t want to crawl across it for 9 years to draw attention to racial inequality in the United States and to “to reinvent what’s beneath us, to remind us where we all come from”!
Pope.L is an American performance artist who is best known for his “crawls” - a performance that involves crawling through the streets using only your elbows and knees. The crawls through broadway took place from 2001-2009, with Pope presenting as various “crawl figures”, including Superman. The juxtaposition between Superman - a near-god who grew up in the overwhelmingly white, rural locale of Kansas - who is invulnerable and all-seeing, to the crawler is stark. Pope.L stated that Superman was a beloved icon to his Aunt Jenny, a white man who was almost as important to her as church. Superman thus occupies a unique space in his memory, as a beloved symbol and as something to be challenged, to be Superman as a Black man is not enough. Or so it appears as Pope.L drags himself across the concrete, ignored, ridiculed or followed by passers-by.
There is an absurdity in the performance too, Pope.L self-proclaiming as a “fisherman of social absurdity”, inviting conflict and confusion. A moment occurs where a policeman stops Pope.L as he is on all fours. Apparently due to a passer-by calling the police after witnessing a white man filming a Black man on the floor, the policeman expressed concern for Pope.L. But as this is happening, the policeman touches Pope.L, towering above him with authority but also the physical upper hand. The inequality of the interaction lays bare how those at their lowest, their literal proximity to the street can dictate how they are seen and dealt with. But it is also silly. The policeman is justifiably concerned for the individual who is wearing a Superman costume and a skateboard, but also is less concerned with overstepping personal boundaries due to the spatial configuration of the performance.
Since then, Pope.L has done crawls with participants who are invited to “give up their physical privilege and satirize their own social and political advantage, creating a captivating scene of struggle and vulnerability, shared with the entire community”. The absurd nature of the performance is emphasised as a strength here, an opportunity to ridicule your own privilege and embrace closeness to others in the most absurd way. Whether the crawl lasts a day, a month or nine years, it is experienced by those who happen to be there. Whoever stops to look, to try and decode, whoever gets on their belly and follows. And then, like all traffic, it is forgotten again.
Well that’s it this week folks, I hope you enjoyed this lil foray into ephermal art and performance art. There’s more I could have covered here - one personal favourite is Cai Guo-Qiang’s Sky Ladder, a spectacular burning bridge to heaven which was dedicated to the artists’ grandmother who was in ailing health. I didn’t include it as Guo-Qiang is now wrapped up in various blockchain, NFT bullshit and I’m simply not about it. Go back to blowing up the sky the proper way man.
I have one final thing to share…the poster for our film screening!! Go check it out on Instagram and please, please give its designer some love. My wonderful, super talented partner Mia has been working on this for a while and put a lot of love and care into it. If you’re coming to the screening, you will have a chance to win or buy a high quality print version of the poster which is the only reason to come you’d ever need.
You can reserve tickets to the screening here.
Until next time,
Paulie x