Materiality of Transience

“In relation to material, it seems to me that the art historian is divided.
On the one hand, material belongs to an order of concrete and
direct evidence, in so far as it is the physical quality of every work
of art: it tells us, quite simply, what the art object is made of. On the
other hand, this concrete evidence is already contradicted by a spontaneous
philosophy that underlies the art historian’s training without
his or her even recognising.”1)

The materiality of art, and more specifically, the material manifestations of transience within art objects is the very subject of my doctoral dissertation since the process of aging not only affects living organisms, but also material objects: some artworks are created to last for centuries, while others reflect time and temporality in their material manifestations. In turn, some works have a very short ‘life-span’ and are meant to ‘die’, such as Jean Tinguely’s Homage to New York (1960) that famously self-destructed during a performance in MoMA’s sculpture garden in New York.2) Half a century after Tinguely’s Homage to New York, in a time when popular media is torn between  representations of enduring war and terrorism and a cult of longevity and eternal youth, contemporary artists are engaging intensely with notions of aging, transience, and mortality. Using my analysis of Tinguely’s work as a point-of-departure, my dissertation analyzes both modern and contemporary artists’ use of similar modi operandi to illustrate the broader implications of transience in ephemeral or ‘aging’ artworks. One example of this is Urs Fischer’s replica of Giambologna’s marble sculpture Rape of the Sabine Women (1579–83) that was on display during the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011. Comprised of a 1:1 scale wax model, which doubled as a candle, the work slowly melted down during the course of the event until nothing was left of it except for a waxy lump on the floor. Fischer’s work poses questions regarding the dichotomy between permanence and impermanence in terms of materials by referencing a historical work of art from the 16th century. Replicating in wax an iconic Renaissance marble sculpture which has not changed much in its appearance since its creation nearly 500 years ago already hints at the duality between ephemeral and durable. In this work by Fischer, we can find different layers of materiality not only in their real-world manifestation but also in their meta-physical representation.3) As much as Urs Fischer’s modern vanitas wax candle was bereaved of the possibility to ‘age’ slowly, it visualizes the tensions that arise between ephemerality and durability not only on the level of materiality but also on the theoretical and ontological one. As briefly outlined, my research project focuses on the concepts of transience and temporality within artworks of the 20th and 21st century and, more specifically, it studies the materiality of ‘aging’ by looking at objects and how they age over time, both metaphorically and literally. My research advocates that aging, not only as a literal process but also as a metaphor for the transient nature of artworks, deserves to be approached from multiple angles drawing from both art history and conservation science. The seemingly simple question ‘How does art age and what does it mean for our profession?’ touches upon a fundamental issue that affects not only works of art but also cultural heritage in general. As Aristotle points out, decay is one of the nature states of matter. By looking at selected case studies in my research project, I scrutinize different categories, or rather concepts, of ephemerality and fragility within the 20th and 21st century that approach the question of transience and temporality in its material manifestations. In doing so, I will bring forward issues like the ‘phenomenon of patina’ as a critical rather than a physical or chemical concept, the conceptual dematerialization of an object, and the aesthetics of disappearance and how these concepts have changed within the long twentieth century. My research offers insight into how contemporary artists strategically employ concepts of fragility within their made objects, thus invoking not only the transience of materiality, but equally important, the metaphysical discourse deterioration and decay provokes in contemporary art and society and how this both affects and is reflected in the work of art historians, conservation scientists as well as museum professionals.

1.) Georges Didi-Huberman, The Order of Material: Plasticities, malaises, survival, in: Sculpture and Psychoanalysis, ed.by Brandon Taylor, Aldershot 2006, pp. 195-212, here p. 195; originally delivered as The Warburg Lecture in 1997 at the Warburg Haus in Hamburg.
2.) Peter Selz, then curator at MoMA, underlined the metaphor of the dying object when he remarked of the work: “Its dynamic energy as well as its final self-destruction – are they not artistic equivalents for our own culture?”
3.) Wax is a soft and malleable material and “a substance between two states,” in the words of Georges Didi-Huberman, is often associated with memory (‘memoria’) and metamorphosis and this becomes especially evident in Fischer’s trias of the materials used and the materials alluded to: from marble to flesh via wax so to speak.