In
1969, Gordon Matta-Clark laid out large sheets of agar (the
gelatinous remains of boiled algae) to which he added mixtures
of such substances as vegetable juice, chicken bouillon, mold,
trash, and various unmentionables. The air-dried results,
a series of reliefs with scuttled surfaces and still chemically
mutating materials, were hung from ropes and first shown as
a group. Museum was the title that the artist gave to the
ensemble.1 What better name, after all,
than Museum? The unsightly organic assemblages, as volatile
in their materiality as they were unpredictable in their shifting
visual form, defied the usual definitions of the artwork and
the museological object—that precious thing to be protected
and conserved for posterity. Matta-Clark had given each work
in the series a title of its own, but to call the group Museum
was more than to ironically evoke the institution, it was
to underscore the unconscionable distance separating the series
from its namesake; it was to demonstrate that the premises
of the museum and those of Museum stood so far apart that
the two could never meet or agree. The chemical volatility
of most all of the pieces determined that they would never
stabilize, never behave like bona fide art objects, and indeed
never enter the museum. And as an ensemble—as Museum—they
never did.2 The series thus reveals
that the rethinking of (good) form through the rethinking
of the (seemingly stable, eternal) duration of the artwork
was aimed at “Art” as much as it was at the institutions
meant to show it.
In more recent times, artists’ production of objects
of various mediums largely conforms to art’s traditional
aspirations to everlastingness (after all, artworks, like
memorials, are meant to be eternal and unchanging). Their
messages might be radical and their intentions critical, but
their aesthetic forms are all too often fixed forever. Let
Everything be Temporary, or When is the Exhibition?
brings together the work of a group of artists that consistently
and very differently explore temporariness and, more specifically,
the possibility of temporal instability in the work of art.3
This is manifest not so much as a subject (although it is
sometimes also that), but rather as a constitutive element,
shaping the artwork’s fragility as well as the indeterminacy
of an exhibition visitor’s experience of it. Whether
primarily motivated by the political, aesthetic, economic,
or the intimate, these objects literally perform their temporal
questioning. This project, rather than being a theme show
with a series of singular illustrations of an idea, instead
aims to reveal a persistent questioning at the center of these
artists’ practices; it endeavors as well to suggest
that in these practices might be found some of the most salient
questions being asked concerning the limits and nature of
art today.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ famous pile works—from
which viewers are allowed to take a piece of candy, a photocopied
paper or poster—may be one of the best known recent
examples of the artwork as a system of formal precariousness
or diminishment. The “ideal weight” for one such
candy pile, Untitled (Ross in L.A.), (1991), is 175
pounds, the weight of Gonzalez-Torres’ AIDS-afflicted
lover at the time. In these works the exhibitor may regularly
replenish its voluntary evanescence or let the candies dwindle.
There are, however, other specific rules inherent to this
and other piles: visitors may take candy, but they cannot
be specifically instructed to do so, and no sign or label
in the exhibition should tell them that they can transgress
the rules that typically define the art exhibition (Do not
approach the objects too closely, Do not touch, and above
all, Do not take). In appropriating a unit of the
“pile,” the visitor thus institutes an individual
violation of (the idea of) the institution along with the
undoing of the artwork’s dimensions and contours. This
perpetual shrinking and subsequent refashioning of form is
as integral to the work as is the fact that it offers a model
of the work of art as necessarily unstable and unpredictable,
like life itself.
The fragile balance between the emergence and annihilation
of form is repeatedly explored in Joëlle Tuerlinckx’s
oeuvre. Stukjes stukjes en dingen, dingen dingen
en stukjes [Particles particles and objects, objects
objects and particles] (1994), a square meticulously outlined
with confetti on the floor, is inevitably transformed—indeed
nullified as a geometric shape—by gushes of air in the
exhibition space or the footsteps of unsuspecting visitors.
The artist’s playful and ethereal riposte to the seriousness
and solidity of so many Minimalist works (think Carl Andre’s
lead squares), perfectly exemplifies the transience but also
the complexity of her body of work. Equally typical to it
is the slippage between materiality and language and between
the original and its copy or representation. Wall
(2007), a projection of the doubly crossed out word “wall,”
written with a marker on a single glass slide, fades over
the course of the exhibition because of the effect of the
heat of the projector lamp on the ink. The slowly effacing
word, already twice crossed out (which is to say, already
declaring: This is not a wall), reveals and indeed spotlights
the actual wall behind it as the word disappears. Differently,
Ça là [That there] (1994) shuffles
between original and copy, form and formless. As a perfect,
rectangular cube of ordinary baker’s flour, it sits
monument-like on a table at the start of the exhibition. Held
together by nothing except the invisible tension that allows
the flour’s temporary and improbable replication of
the mold that it was once in, Ça là
could at any moment give way to being a collapsed heap of
the minute and disparate particles of flour that compose it.
A sketch of the model on which the piece was based hangs nearby,
suggesting the necessary gap between the “original”
and the three-dimensional form that it never manages to equal
or permanently reproduce.
The floor and the wall are surfaces Michel Blazy uses often,
less as sites on which he situates or hangs something than
as the ground that the artwork might act upon and defy. A
whole array of organic substances—from pasta and cotton
to beet juice and mashed potatoes—are the staples of
a practice that reverses the artistic mandate to “compose”
and makes decomposition the motor of an unstable, mutating
body of work. His wall paintings including, Mur qui pèle
[Wall that peels] (1998), are made of homemade mixtures of
agar or vegetable purées that contaminate the architectonics
of the exhibition space. By introducing perishable materials,
pungent odors, and decay into the exhibition and onto the
white gallery walls, Blazy makes that otherwise ignored backdrop
(because taken to be pristine, neutral, and timeless), the
explicit and progressively changing subject of the viewer’s
attention. Rosace (1993), made of a roll of ordinary
paper towels, approaches decomposition in a different way;
coiling like a tree trunk’s age rings or Robert Smithson’s
Spiral Jetty, the unfurled upright sheets make up an elaborate
structure of spirals that wane and collapse—literally
undoing their form—over time and under their own weight.
Waiting, that banal quotidian act that perhaps better than
any other reminds one of the inexorable passage of time, is
a recurrent motif in Gabriel Kuri’s work. Tied to it
is a complex relationship between leisure and production,
expenditure and speculation, which finds expression in the
prosaic items that populate Kuri’s oeuvre: cash register
receipts, waiting stubs, daily newspapers, disposable shopping
bags, and fruit labels, to name but a few. In The Recurrence
of the Sublime (2003), a trio of avocados carefully wrapped
in newspapers dated 21 July 1969, juxtaposes mundane practice
(any Mexican would tell you that an avocado in newspaper ripens
faster) with monumentally historic progress (America’s
triumphant first steps on the moon). The pile of newspapers
beneath the avocado bowl slowly diminishes as the papers are
used to envelop new avocados in the play of consumption and
accelerated obsolescence that the wrapping sets in motion.
The quiet absurdity of it all—of using ever more but
different pages, each with lunar landing announcements alongside
car ads, pimple cures, and other newsworthy events of the
day; every elegantly swathed ball flaunting the anachronism
between the then of 1969 and the now of an avocado—makes
for its strange sculptural grace. Untitled (2007)
provokes different but no less evocative questions about the
march of time. A take-a-number machine enables visitors to
take their turn and an ongoing number-calling sequence is
displayed, but no definable reason for the wait is given.
The visitors are left to deposit their stubs in a voluntary,
arbitrary way so that the advancement of numbers and consumption
of tickets accumulates into the progressive erection of an
ad hoc and indeterminate sculpture—a testament or commemoration,
if there could be one, to anticipation and duration.
Tomo Savic´-Gecan’s deliberately inconspicuous
projects deny the primacy of the visual without retreating
to the pure ideation of conceptual art. His is an art intimately
concerned with experience, often spread across two places
or temporalities. For Untitled (2005–2007),
he alters the temperature of the gallery space by infinitesimal
amounts based on data recorded from an exhibition held a year
earlier.4 Using intangible elements
such as air and temperature to transform the conditions of
an entire exhibition space in accordance with an invisible
logic, Untitled recalls a previous project in which
Savic´-Gecan changed the temperature of a public pool
in Tallinn by 1°C according to the entry patterns of visitors
to an exhibition in Amsterdam. In both projects, the individuals
whose data concretely makes up the “artwork” are
separated in time and space from those who will experience
the sensorial—that is to say, properly aesthetic—results
of the changing temperature. In a second piece, entitled (like
all his projects), Untitled (2007), Savic´-Gecan declares
that the value of the artwork at any given moment is the artwork
itself, and the value is in a continuous process of devaluation
throughout the duration of the show. Problematizing the commodification
of the work of art, Savic´-Gecan erases the ambiguity
between the commercial price and the “art.” If
one attaches importance to value, then the piece will have
destroyed itself entirely, indeed ceased to exist, at the
very moment that the show ends; if, however, one can abstract
an artwork from its market price, then Savic´-Gecan’s
piece will remain an artwork despite its being nothing more
than a value, which happens to be nothing.
Oksana Pasaiko’s Short Sad Text (based on the borders
of 14 countries), (2004–2005), a small sculpture
made of soap and strands of hair that map the contours of
several former Eastern Bloc countries, is not physically present
in the exhibition. Pasaiko left the sculpture in a public
bathroom in Oslo where its soapy dissipation might literalize
the transformation and effacement of actual borders. No documentation
or other evidence tells of the expenditure of the work, but
a postcard of its pristine original state was made, providing
the exhibition visitor with the possibility of a “souvenir”
of an artwork they will never see.
When do these artworks take place? At what moment can the
visitor be said to have effectively seen or experienced them?
When, then, is this exhibition? Duration and exposure (in
its dual sense of display and the wearing away of something)
both determines and undermines the forms of all the pieces
in the show. They are premised on their fleetingness, instability
and, at times, their disintegration. As Matta-Clark knew well,
any such artwork raises the question of the conditions under
which art is bought and sold, comprehended and historicized,
exhibited and collected. In so doing, they refuse the illusion
of the transcendent experience of the work of art at the same
time as they undermine the logic of the author as its unique
activator. There is something impetuous, violent even, about
artworks that operate this way, that resist being finished
or fully available for visual consumption. Visitors are invited
to return to see the show again and again so as to experience
something of its continuous evolution, but the truth is that
it will always escape them because, in between every visit,
these artworks—like time—will go on while no one
is looking.5
Elena Filipovic, 2007
1. I am indebted here to the description of the series by
Rosalind Krauss and Yves- Alain Bois in Formless: A User’s
Guide (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 183-4.
2. A lone remaining piece from the series, Land of Milk and
Honey, failed to be as unstable as all the rest and survived;
it is currently in the collection of the Stedelijk Museum,
Amsterdam.
3. The title makes reference to a line by Lenin, who, in 1917,
ordered monuments of the revolution, including his own effigy,
to be made in cheap, readily available, and ephemeral materials.
The principal was simple, he explained, just “let everything
be temporary.” As it happens, his pursuit was itself
perfectly
temporary: countless surviving monuments attest that the imposing
permanence
of bronze won out over that particular refutation of bourgeois
values. However short-lived, the directive meant to challenge
one essential function of the memorial, a function shared
with works of art more generally: the message and aura of
both are arguably located in their unflappable condition of
everlasting timelessness.
4. A mechanism recording the times of visitor entries was
Savic´-Gecan’s contribution to The One, held at
New General Catalogue Gallery in Brooklyn from October 15–November
14, 2005; that mechanism now provides the data determining
the temperature at apexart for the duration of the exhibition.
5. In a related way, the images of frozen, singular moments
in the life of these artworks can only betray the pieces themselves
and the exhibition this brochure accompanies. Still, because
they are partial and failing as records, these images might
be read as testaments to the ways the artworks resist static
representation.
Elena Filipovic is an art historian, independent
curator, and critic based in Brussels.
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