ABSTRACT
An established category in contemporary art, ephemeral art is neither a clearly defined genre nor a movement, but is invoked in wider discussions of art that no longer exists, or art that exists for a finite time period and is contingent, dependent on human agency and placement in space and time. As a descriptive term, it includes any artwork with a limited life, from a temporary installation to a performance. Ephemeral art speaks to the wider concept of the global contemporary used in this book, for we, and our institutions, are increasingly preoccupied by the moment, the performance and the experience.
This chapter considers the afterlives of installations and focuses specifically on their fragmentation and disappearance. Some installations are acquired and some are lost, but many fall in between these two poles, with some elements surviving through recycling, dissemination or sale, and others leaving behind no material trace at all. It examines the significance of the institutionalisation of materially ephemeral installations – both their proliferation and the challenges they present for the artist and the art museum. It addresses the forms and material practices as well as the institutional strategies that bring into being but also bring to an end transitory art objects or installations, artworks that are distinctly different to historic works in museum collections. Rather than presenting a broad survey, this study focuses on the work of Walead Beshty, Michael Landy, Phyllida Barlow and Lucy Skaer – four contemporary artists whose artworks represent a spectrum of forms of and approaches to material loss which both momentarily conform to and contest the museum’s longstanding institutional constraints. Such constraints 106 107include the museum’s desire for material stability and historical fixity; its paradoxical attitudes to temporality, duration and change; and its conflicted attitude to site-specific and precarious projects.
