Setup of the “Kalei(en)doscope” installation at the Athens School of Fine Arts, Greece, September 2016.
I was with a friend the other day, and we were discussing the various forms of art. At one instance, she said, “I don’t like installation art because you experience it once, and then it’s gone”. Her thinking was based on her experience of Olafur Eliasson’s “The Weather Project” installation at the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. She liked it so much she wanted it to remain permanent. But isn’t the transience of this work comparable to the ephemerality of live music performance? Each performance lasts for the length of the performance. Like life, each day passes, not to be repeated.
Well, that’s one view.
Unless you believe in reincarnation, you get one chance to live your life, and then that’s it.
If you are an energy theory advocate, however, things are a little bit more optimistic. The energy “imprint” that each of us has will remain (since energy cannot be lost); the only thing that will pass away is the perception of ‘self’. The creations we leave behind will be the only marks that will attest to our existence.
Since I started writing about the visual arts, I will not refer to “creation” in the broader sense. A painting or sculpture may live for centuries, depending on the materials used. Even so, permanent works are not really permanent. A natural or man-made disaster can destroy them in an instant. Many artworks from antiquity have already been lost—and we keep on losing more every day.
Does it matter whether an artwork lasts for days, months, years, or centuries if we consider “permanence” in terms of cosmic time? What matters is the experience of the viewer and the work’s “imprint” on the viewer. Even if you archive, catalog, and photograph the work, the viewer can only have their own transitory experience of the feelings the work triggers within.
And this feeling can be carried forever.
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