Ephemeral Effects

EPHEMERAL EFFECTS source: Sculpture Today – Judith Collins

Certain contemporary artists deal with transience and decay, themes that underscore the provisional nature of our lives, our homes and our possessions. Artists have turned their attention to these matters before, but not usually in the world of sculpture. The transience of pleasure was a favored subject in European still-life painting from the fifteenth to the seventeenth century, especially among Dutch artists. The term 'vanitas' (In the arts, vanitas is a type of symbolic work of art especially associated with Northern European still life painting in Flanders and the Netherlands in the 16th and 17th centuries, though also common in other places and periods. The word is Latin, meaning "emptiness" and loosely translated corresponds to the meaninglessness of earthly life and the transient nature of vanity.) was used to describe memento mori (remember your mortality) of this kind, in which a range of objects (broken pottery, flowers, fruit, flickering candles and shiny bubbles) served as allegories of human frailty. The ultimate motif evoking the fragility of human existence was skull. 


If today artists work with organic, ephemeral materials, it is done in the spirit of revisiting the work of artists from the 1960s, such as the Italian Arte Povera group and Gordon Matta-Clark who were among the first to use fugitive, natural materials for sculpture; the Italians used fruit, vegetables, animals, fire and chemical elements, Matta employed only food.

Jannis Kounellis - incorporated a gas flame, and animals named 12 horses 1969  
Gilberto Zorio - Acidi 1985 - alchemical transformations such as evaporation and oxidation
Pier Paolo Calzolari - Homage to Fontana 1990 - lead, copper, refrigeration unit
Roger Hiorns - Vauxhall 2003 - rectangular sheet of steel anointed with a perfume
Dennis Oppenheim - Digestion, Gypsum Gypsies 1989 'the deer into furnaces, they are burning themselves up. In doing so they're digesting the room.'
Mario Merz - Spiral Table 1982
Anthony Gormley - Bed 1980-1- He ate his own shape out of the bread, leaving negative impression as thought he had lain there. He preserved bread by soaking them in wax, although this has not prevented the growth of mold. Bread is one of the staple foods of many countries of the world, and it is commodity that comes with its own particular social, political, economic and religious resonances. 
Victor Grippo - Analogy I - Besides bread, another basic universal foodstuff is the potato. Grippo was trained as a chemist. He believed that the artist should act like a medieval alchemist, working to transform substances and ultimately societies.
Janine Antoni  - Gnaw 1992 - large cube of chocolate weighing 300 kg and cube of lard, gnawed by the artist and than reused for lipsticks and candies. Antoni's act of gnawing aped  the more traditional 
sculptural practice of carving, which removes material little by little. With this work she was as interested in the sculptural process as much as the material.  
Jana Sterback - Ctacombs 1992 - Partial human skeleton cast in high grade chocolate that is displayed scattered on the gallery floor. She said of the work: ' It renders (transient) the only part of our being that survives long beyond our life....It also raises the specter on cannibalism of necrophilia' 
Egle Rakauskaite - Chocolate Crucifixes 1995  - She cast them from and existing crucifix and then laid over two  thousand of them head-to-toe in a striking, formal pattern along the walls. These little chocolate figures of Christ provocatively merge the central icon of catholic culture with that of western hedonism , and make reference again to the Eucharistic practice of eating morsels of the body of Christ during worship.
Thomas Rentmeister  - Nutella 2000. He works with sugar, chocolate and baby lotion. He poured 100 large buckets of nutella directly onto the gallery floor. The raction of visitors to the work veered between attraction and repulsion, because although it was made of something sweet, its form and colour recalled a mound of excrement. 
Gay Outlaw - Dark Matter Redux 1998 (serpentine wall made from fruitcake in trench eaten by the local wildlife). Took a course in French cooking and used this training to explore ideas about materiality and mutability, working particularly with pastry and caramel sculptures.  
Nayland Blake- Feeder 2, 1998. House made from slabs of ginger bread, which made reference to the gingerbread house in the fairytale of Hansen and Gretel, and to Uncle Tom's Cabin, both stories that he treasured from his childhood. Visitors to the gallery were overwhelmed by the sensual and oldfactory experience of the work; the were unable to stop themselves from breaking bits off the house and eating them.
Rirkrit Tiravanija -bacon-flavoured cirsps in two suitcases, invited the public to eat the work. Untitled(view) 1993 - ICA London, he cooked and served curry to the crowds who attended, selling vacuum packs for those who wanted to take the artwork home. Untitled (Free) 1995 - He transformed the back room of the gallery into a kitchen with a refrigerator, tables and chairs, electric hot plates, cutlery, cutting boards, woks and teapots. Bags of rice, spices and packets of bouillon cubes were the basic ingredients of a meal that was served to all who came during seven-week exhibition. Uneaten meals, the plates and cutlery remained unwashed and piled up in the gallery, and these deteriorated into a pile of smelly garbage. 
Helen Chadwick -Of Mutability & Carcass 1986 ( a phrase from Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene 1590, in which poet writes about how all things are subject to change. Chadwick stated: 'My work is to do with the burden of physicality and sentience, and how desires and pleasures are very fleeting. How all human experience seems to be very frail, like a bubble', recalling the idea of the vanitas. A large glass column, Carcass (visible behind the golden spheres), was filled daily with food waste from her own street in East London. The column sprang a leak, flooding the gallery with foul-smelling fluids. 
James Lee Byars - The Rose Table of Perfect 1989. 3,333 fresh and perfect red roses set in a Styrofoam ball. Most of his work was directed at examining the 'Perfect', probably an unattainable state on this earth, and works like this give evidence of this as they decay. 
Anya Gallaccio- Red on Green, 2002. She also looked at the spectacle of entropy, and has come to the same point as Byars, but from a different path. She, too uses seductive objects like roses to demonstrate this. In works such as Red on Green, she arranges a large number of brightly coloured flowers in a geometrical formation on a gallery floor, sometimes covering them with a sheet of glass. The flowers progress from florist-fresh to shrivelled stalks, losing their colour and becoming smelly and mouldy, revealing the 'physical transformation of matter from artificial symmetry to artless disorder. Gallaccio has also worked with fruit, sugar and ice.
Damien Hirst- A Thousand Years, 1990.(uses living and death material to make its point about the life cycle; within a divided glass-and-steel vitrine lies a rotting cow's head infested by a colony of maggots, which hatch into bluebottles, only to be immediately electrocuted by the insect-o-cutor that hangs above.) Concerned with the transience of life and the permanence of death. He launched himself into London art scene in 1988 by curating 'Freeze', an exhibition of his own and fellow artist's work.
Wim Delvoye - Cloaca, 2000. He is interested in the scatological nature of man. In 2000, he collaborated with scientists at Antwerp University to construct a machine that he called Cloaca, which replicates the functions of the human digestive system, producing human-like excrement after being fed two cooked meals a day. 
Piero Manzoni - precursor to the Arte Povera Movement, took subversive step in 1961 of tinning his own excrement and offering it for sale by the ounce, and works involving ideas about excrement usually pay homage to this. 

Two sculptors who deal with the vanitas theme by using the form of the human body are Urs Fischer and Tom Friedman.

Urs Fischer - Untitled 2001- Life size wax candles in the form of unfinished female nudes, which self-destruct during their display as the wax melts and their limbs fall off. He feels that this is the age of a 'meltdown' of information, and his work in a way mirrors this feeling; he has spoken of wanting to make work 'that disappears into its surroundings'. He is also pleased to allow his work to escape from his control and follow its own path. 
Tom Friedman - Untitled, 1999 - three-quarter size self -portrait, made entirely from stacked white sugar cubes which crumble slightly during display, causing a white penumbra to from around the figure's feet. The crystalline nature of the sugar is an ironic allusion to the crystalline nature of white marble, the material used by classical sculptors for heroic male nudes.   

Xu Bing - Panda Zoo 1998 - he choose male pig, American York, and a female pig, a Chinese Changbai. The animals were breeder stock and, wearing panda masks, they were put in a pen and displayed. Bing intended the work to be a metaphoric manifestation of the differences between East and West, and the ways in which the opposing cultures try to interact. 
 Yukinori Yanagi - One Dollar, 1999 - consists of a US dollar bull sculpted in coloured sand, held inside clear plastic boxes. When the work goes on show, a colony of live ants is introduced to the boxes and for the duration of the exhibition they tunnel though the sand, gradually destroying the image. The ants' tireless labour undermines the symbol of American might, power and money. When the image has virtually disappeared, Yanagi releases the ants outdoors.
 Rivane Neuenschwander - Spell 2001 - She brings to here work a delicate balance between the fragile nature of the material and the geometric, repetitive aesthetic order she imposes on it. This structure helps counterbalance the evanescence of the materials. For a handful of shows, she has spelt out the alphabet, filling the letters in with spices, from acafrao to zatar, and suffusing the gallery with a minglead aroma. 
 Cai Guo-Qiang - Project to Extend the Great Wall of China by 10,000 Metres, 1993.(western end of the Great Wall in the Gobi desert - smaller charges placed in intervals of 10 meters and larger ones at 1000 meters.) Wariety of works using gunpowder, which was invented in China as a by-product of alchemy. He was attracted to the unpredictable energy of the medium, with its destructive and constructive natures, and probably bad a little knowledge of Takis's work with fireworks when he began his own experiments. He has used gunpowder to make paintings, and also huge outdoors projects.Twenty years before Guo-Qiang , Roman Signer began to work with explosive materials - Water Boots 1986. His favorite materials are water, fire and air, as well as time, and he is a master in working with dynamite. Presentation of an exploding umbrella, which shoots up tho the gallery ceiling and remains there without blowing up the rest of the building.
Giuseppe Gabellone - Untitled 1999- He makes both, minimal structures and earthy, biomorphic sculptures, which he photographs, but after clicking the shutter he usually destroys them. The photograph on the gallery wall records the absence of a presence. Gabellone denies the viewer a direct encounter with the work, offering instead a flat image, which is more often the way in which we experience sculpture. in this time of virtual reality, he asks the gallery viewer to consider which work is more real: the photograph on the non-existent sculpture.