The perfect defect of decay: Ephemeral art in an ecological age

 

'It is not through a higher perfection that artworks separate from the fallibly existent but rather by becoming actual, like fireworks, incandescently in an expressive appearance.' - Theodor Adorno, Aesthetic Theory.

As art is anchored more and more by the orbit of our ecological age, transience and impermanence find themselves being more aesthetically significant than perhaps ever before. One only has to think of Olafur Eliasson's Ice Watch, a cluster of ice blocks which travelled from glacial Greenland all the way to the Tate Modern, where they slowly met their inexorable end, as patches and puddles that would soon dribble into the nearby Thames. This aesthetics of the ephemeral can be contrasted with the Hegelian glorification of art as a truer expression of the beauty of the spirit, when compared to mere 'nature', engendering a historical lament from environmental aestheticians, as longevity and the putative infinity of cultural beauty is praised over and above the transience of its natural manifestation. This is encapsulated in Hegel's Lectures on Fine Art, where he comments on the ways that art dialectically morphs into 'its infinite form' out of its 'immediate natural and sensuous existence', as 'humanity' putatively 'constitutes the centre and content of true beauty and art'. Humanity therefore acts as the requisite conduit for the manifestation of true and in turn infinite beauty, which purifies, according to Hegel, 'the defect of finitude'. Finitude as defect might well be what constitutes the cleavage between art and nature in many respects, hence why the preservation of art works is such a indispensable part of aesthetic appreciation, certainly in the context of a gallery or museum, and why the conservation of nature can only last so long. This sentiment is reflected in the work of notorious 'YBA' artist Damien Hurst, for example, whose preserved tiger shark embodies the Hegelian sprit of art with the name 'The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living.' This formaldehyde filled apex predator was caught by a commissioned fisherman in Queensland, Australia, ultimately funded by businessman Charles Saatchi, whose opulence bolstered and fuelled Hurst's career. Eschewing the defect of finitude was seemingly consolidated in the foregoing artwork, transforming this mere 'natural and sensuous' existing and decaying creature into a ostensibly permanent and in turn lucrative object.

The sheer permanence of art, however, is always tenuous, fickle like the value of stocks and shares. As Theodor Adorno delineates in his book Aesthetic Theory 'Artworks have no power over whether they endure'. As he continues 'For that can only take place at the cost of the work's relation to those contexts in which permanence is exclusively constituted'. In a world of ecological demise, Hurst's tiger shark leaves a sour taste in the mouth, as this epoch loosely termed the 'Anthropocene' makes the sanctitude of the infinite appear less and less tantalising and indeed convincing. The willingness to preserve now seems like an ill conceived effort to eschew the powers that ultimately envelop all living things. As Adorno puts it 'Through duration art protests against death' and yet 'as soon as artworks make a fetish of their hope of duration, they begin to suffer from their sickness unto death.' There is something ailing about striving for permanence, especially when these formaldehyde corpses are denied of their own death. In heavy contrast to Hegel's desire for the infinity of beauty, Schiller writes 'Weeping that Beauty must pass, what is most perfect must die', a line that expresses a nascent aesthetics of finitude, congruent for our ecological age. The finitude of beauty for Adorno 'holds not only for those who are beautiful, not simply for works that are destroyed or forgotten or that have sunk back into the hieroglyphic but for everything composed of beauty and of what according to its traditional idea was meant to be unchangeable, the constituents of form.' If beauty must die, one is paradoxically provoked to smash the glass panel display case that Hurst's tiger shark is encaged, letting it go to die its death freely in the pacific ocean. Of course, such wishes might seem trivial in the context of 'real' sharks endangered across our seas, but the freedom to live and the liberty to die are not as incommensurable as they might seem. Death is not just an event, but a process like life, as the body disintegrates like the gradual decay of an apple.

Apples are it would seem, at least culturally so, to be at the bedrock of our very concept of finitude, as famously represented in Genesis, whereby Eve's hedonistic shaking of the apple tree's bough sends fruit flying down onto the primordial couple's heads, turning their halcyon fantasy into shameful naked timidity, with Eve being the finite body and Adam being the infinite mind. A curtain of apples hang from the ceiling of a capacious room in Margate's Turner gallery, emitting a fetid aroma of death and decay, with a hint of bitter and sultry cider, fermenting into something living and dying, abject and yet desirable. Anya Gallaccio's exhibition 'Preserve' encapsulates Schiller's aphorism, as the preservation of beauty always leads to its inevitable end. Filled with organic objects including decaying trees, whose branches are slowly wilting from the weight of moss and lichen, as well as melting candles and chalk, Gallaccio creates a space that is alive and yet concurrently dead. It is an eerie, multisensory environment, but not some contrived 4-D space that forces an engagement with the senses beyond the ocular. Rather, it is one that seamlessly infiltrates the membrane of our bodies as we sense and breathe in the atmosphere of these living and dying objects. Are these apples artificial, I speculate? Upon closer inspection, I can see and smell the fungi and maggots burrowing into their tart dwellings. The finitude and decay of the organic is intuitive, not intellectual. This is a process that is as natural as our perception of the waxing and waning of the moon. We are not like David Hume, waiting for the sun to rise across the Scottish peaks to know that it will. We know this apple is dying and decaying and will one day disappear, only to leave a trace that is spectral yet not spiritual, in the way that Hegel might see it for instance. Here in this gallery, laying on the foundations of the British tradition of landscape paintings which are tirelessly preserved, is a sweltering cesspool, one that is leaking through the earth, as organic materials splinter off into minutia. This is the defect of decay, the beauty and perfection that must die if we are to truly live through this ecological age.

References

Adorno. Aesthetic Theory. Bloomsbury: London. Tr. R. Hullot-Kentor. 2024.

Hegel. Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Volume 1. tr. T.M. Knox. Oxford: 1975.

The Insomniac Walk

I

A sleepless night had left me irritable and irascible. Feeling co-opted by sleepless forces, my body was left to wander on an aimless and indeterminate excursion; an insomniac walk if you will. Finding myself on the mossy borders of the UEA Norfolk broad, acquiescence soon turned to contentment as the downpour and freshly concocted mud percolated through both my shoes and socks. I was lacking functionality and worldliness, yet I was forced to face the bare bruteness of the present, what the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas would call the ‘anonymous rustling of existence.’ There is no escape in this condition, no safe chamber of slumber to return to, no sojourn of sleep to find solace. It became impossible to withdraw into my shell. I was vulnerable. Naked and exposed to the elements.

Robbed of the comfort of the habitual, however, my peripherals were infused with a different kind of vibrancy. The fringes became less of a backdrop, facilitating my worldly projects, but engendered a striking attunement towards the minutiae that inhabited this now quite explicitly shared space. A robin rustling in a thicket was so close in proximity, I felt stunned by this species’ trust, as if I was the wild boar that would unearth the topsoil, aiding the robin’s hungry search for earthworms. Scarlet elf cups began to appear and disappear in their droves, as I found myself thinking like this red blooded mushroom, attaching myself willfully to the moss covered branches. A shared atmosphere of elemental hunger hung in the air between me and the robin as I began digging in the earth for these cups of dew intended for the thirsty elf. 

A timely encounter with ‘the man of stones’, a sculpture made from bronze stationed on a quasi promontory of land between the river and the broad, lugging the seemingly cumbersome weight of flint, led me to identify with what at first seemed like a solitary figure. Yet on closer inspection, this figure was quite intimately connected with the reed beds and undergrowth with which it stood, his feet too sunken into moisten earth. A homology was drawn between our state of exposure to the elements. Referring to the statues of Auguste Rodin, Levinas suggests that ‘reality is posited in them in its exotic nakedness as a worldless reality, arising from a shattered world’. It too appeared as if this geological creature was emerging from a shattered world, perhaps a world not too dissimilar from our own. 

While the man of stones was seemingly burdened by evanescence, sinking gradually into the reed beds, he also appeared to carry the weight of a geological past, laden with the quarried flint of the palaeolithic and composed of the alloyed tin and copper of the bronze age. Bearing the weight of the past on his shoulders, he also seemed, more strikingly so, to bear the weight of the present. I felt a contiguous bond with this geological creature in the very anonymous elementality of insomnia.

In this piece of art, just as in insomnia, sensation had returned to the impersonality of elements. This impersonality fostered by insomnia no longer felt like a disorder, but roused a sense of adhesive intimacy with the other-than-human, an ‘elementality’, if you like, a mentality suffused with elements. The sheer nudity of the elemental, engendered by sleep deprivation, may well have forsaken me from the enclosure of my shell, and yet the composite shell of calcium carbonate, constitutive of our elemental bond with the other-than-human, endured obstinately. 

Insomnia quite felicitously captures the stickiness of our ecological situation, a situation we cannot merely escape from or wake to find that it was all a dream. There are no dreams here, yet this is not synonymous with the absence of hope. As Levinas writes ‘Hope hopes for the present itself.’ This bruteness of mere presence constitutive of insomnia may well encumber the worldliness of the world from operating and yet the anonymous rustling of the robin in the thickets and the anonymous elementality of the man of stones awaken us to something still more primordial. Bearing a handful of scarlet cups, I am reminded of alternative presents, a present that needn’t be endlessly deferred, nor relegated to the past. 

II

Something is consolidated in the very sedimentation of flint, a stable and sturdy present and yet this present is always vulnerable, always subject to being shattered into the innumerable pieces of quartz that compose it. Underlying the anonymity of the present is a capacious space of difference, where robins and earthworms, scarlet cups and moss reside, where reed beds, flint and bronze are cohabitants. In spite of the sheer anonymity of the rustling, something unique still makes itself felt. Notwithstanding the anonymity of the elemental, this geological creature still bears the name ‘the man of stones.’ 

The ancestrality of such a creature is neither archaic nor anachronistic, nor is it a petrified relic of a putatively stable past. It is very much part of the present, a sign of how one can live resolutely like the element and yet vulnerable like the stone. Being exposed to the elements does not equate to being resigned. The river will flood the promontory, as the man of stones accretes more miscellaneous objects, whether ephemeral like an autumnal leaf or enduring as a plastic bottle cap. As we too accrete more deposits of sediment, weathered by the elements, we must learn to coexist, to be laden with the other-than-human with little resignation. 

The insomniac walk, a rhythm without rhyme or reason, yet syncopated and uncannily attuned. Here, accents fall on the places we don’t ordinarily expect them to. A shattered world might look like a frightening place, but in stepping out of the groove of familiar rhythms we find ourselves on the most intriguing paths. Emerging from the detritus and debris like the man of stones, we find ourselves face to face with a present that can no longer be ignored, as it glistens like the incandescent ember, we are drawn into its molten core.

References

 E. Levinas, Existence and Existents, Kluwer Academic Publishers, tr. A. Lingis, 1988