**Giovanni Battista Piranesi**, *Arch of Titus*, 1760. Engraving, 40.5 × 61.8 cm.

“All art is a revolt against man’s fate.” [1]

As one of the more original and provocative ruminations on visual culture, French critic André Malraux’s Les Voix du silence (1951) surveys the unfolding history of human-made objects from across time and place. Malraux also engages with questions of interpretation, display and, perhaps most importantly, the idea that the tangible consequences of creativity constitute declarations against the inevitability of human mortality. If the unavoidable fact of life is death, then the making of art (which includes works of design, architecture and craft) challenges human destiny by existing beyond the lifespan of their creators.

For Malraux, esthetic objects not only embody the values and temperament of the time of their making, but their existence challenges the forces of entropy (or the laws of decline). In acknowledging art’s power of endurance and survival, Malraux confronts what he regards as the insignificance of humanity in the context of the largely unknown immensity of the universe.

While Malraux holds that the making and existence of art challenges the inevitability of people dying, his thinking also makes clear the significance of the philosophical and historical implications of objects surviving. Indeed, it takes very little effort to grasp the incalculable volume of what can be understood as the tangible survivors of past ages to understand both the drive of humans to make things. The power of Malraux’s observations concern human agency, the drive against mortality, and the fact that the objects outlive people. Handmade objects invite consideration as testaments to the need to record experience, values and patterns of thought that can mark an era, age or epoch.

But what of works that are designed to perish? What are the implications of ephemeral things, works of art broadly defined that, within their very essence, capture the fleeting and fugitive character of life? What are the philosophical, moral and cosmological implications of embracing the inevitable transience of the world?

As an artist whose practice is primarily concerned with communicating ideas of impermanence, English sculptor Andy Goldsworthy creates works in natural settings, using natural materials that cannot help but decay and disappear: a ring of carefully arranged leaves that will disperse in the wind or sculptures made of ice and snow that will, at some point, melt away. Goldsworthy’s works balance the translation of ideas into form — he acknowledges in the most poetic, perhaps elegiac ways, how, in the words of critic Gillian Orr, “most things in life do not last.” Goldsworthy’s works of art can only ever be experienced for a while — contemplated and perhaps enjoyed before, as Orr notes, “they fade away.”[2]

**Sarah Beck**, *Mille Livres - Beirut*, 2009. Coloured sand, Height x Width x Depth in cm. COURTESY OF THE ARTIST.

For Canadian artist Sarah Beck, the abilities of ephemeral artworks to offer (vanishing) points of entry into considerations of power and the impermanence of the world was powerfully realized in her use of the ancient, time-intensive, contemplative, mind-absorbing work of making sand mandalas. Over the course of several years and marked by extensive travel, Beck created currencies of several nations using fine coloured particles of sand, including the “mille livres” bill from Lebanon and the Canadian five-dollar bill. The latter was included in the cultural programming for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, B.C.

“While producing the labour intensive sand dollars,” Beck explained in an interview, “I interacted with audiences, discussing the transient nature of money, art and material goods in our societies.” Her creations would invariably, and literally, be swept away shortly after their completion.

In similar ways, the brilliant British artist Barbara Walker painstakingly uses charcoal pencil to draw astonishingly intimate and powerful portraits of Black people on the walls of galleries which will, at a predetermined date, vanish by her own hand. At once durational and destined for obliteration, Walker’s work speaks to figurative and literal erasure, the urgency of reflective engagement and the savouring of ephemeral moments.

***

How to explain the alluring, seductive power of decay, dilapidation and destruction? One only needs to think of Georgian landscape architects incorporating collapsed or partially destroyed historic buildings into their designs. Or the appeal of empty palaces, the abandoned headquarters of regimes and weathered ghost towns. The lure of destruction may well be a type of schadenfreude, with ruins and rot serving as testaments to the flows and ebbs of life and power witnessed by the living.

Such feelings — perhaps not so far removed from the inability to avert one’s gaze from car crashes and other tragedies — might well explain the reactions occasioned by a reading of Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem Ozymandias. Shelley — using the pseudonym Glirastes — writes about the implications of large fragments of an enormous fallen statue of a king scattered across an empty desert.

“Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed
”

Who was this mighty monarch? What happened to his power, his kingdom, his people? Shelley’s single verse poem appeals as much because of the mystery not explained as the delight in witnessing the consequences of the hubris of power, the folly of ideas of immortality, and the doomed fates of countless once important, almighty people, as well, perhaps, in how anything may be remembered or forgotten.

In 2002, for his graduate thesis work at Design Academy Eindhoven in the Netherlands, which considered physical perfection and ideas of beauty, the Dutch designer Maarten Baas took a blowtorch to Baroque revival and other pieces of furniture. Taking care to preserve the recognizable form of his immolated chairs, commodes and tables, Baas burned the pieces, covering them with textured charcoaled surfaces. Baas’s work turned on the idea of what he termed “flux.” He writes: “It’s a very human tendency to keep things as they are supposed to be and keep them beautiful as they originally were.”[3] His work attracted the attention of critics — it was unexpected and unsettling, as well as a wry and subversive commentary about esthetic fetishism.

The Dutch furniture company Moooi produced Baas’s burnt and lacquered objects with charred “classic” pieces of 20th-century design by the likes of Charles Rennie Mackintosh, Gerrit Rietveld, Ettore Sottsass and Marc Newson. This expanded Baas’ original idea (and product line) into an ironically profitable rumination on object fetishism, patina, the antique, and the perhaps opportunistic operations of design fame.

Notwithstanding whatever cultural or economic consequences may attend efforts to depict degradation, the lure of destruction is a central condition of human experience. And while there may be value in speculating on how Malraux would respond to Goldsworthy’s leaves, Walker’s short-lived faces or the fire sale of Baas’s practice, a creative work being temporary or purposefully short-lived could be understood as the expression of Sigmund Freud’s thinking about the essential self-destructive character of humanity.

For Juree Kim, the Korean artist known for her carefully and exquisitely detailed clay buildings which are massed together to resemble villages and then intentionally dissolved in water over time, her interest is in “impermanence and the changing nature of our environment.”[4] As investigations of the forces of thermodynamics, material fragility and ecological change, Kim’s dissolving clay houses knowingly recapitulate the cycles of formation and deformation that mark geologic and “anthropocenic” time. Accordingly, Kim invites contemplation of the causal relationships that define all events, and how the products of such relationships may endure as testaments or suffer obliteration.[5]

And here the eternal logic of Malraux may well falter. If art is intended to endure as a challenge to death, then art created not to last may well serve as more accurate representations of the destructive trajectory of the contemporary world and the possibilities that all that might be able to be done is to look and watch.

[1]. André Malraux, Les Voix du silence (La Galerie de la Pléide, 1951), part 4, chapter 7, p. 637.

[2]. Gillian Orr, “Andy Goldsworthy's Ephemeral Works: Artwork that is a testament to passing time,” The Independent, 17 October 2015. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/features/andy-goldsworthy-s-ephemeral-works-artwork-that-is-a-testament-to-passing-time-a6694826.html.

[3]. See Maarten Baas, “Where there’s Smoke,” https://maartenbaas.com/products/where-there-s-smoke-1.

[4]. See “Juree Kim 김주리,” CrimsonEarth, last updated 2018. https://www.crimsonearth.co.uk/juree-kim.

[5]. For a discussion that contextualizes Kim’s work nationally and internationally, see “Displacement,” in Elisabeth Agro, Hyunsoo Woo and Taeyi Kim, The Shape of Time: Korean Art after 1989 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023), 160–189.

This article is available in print in the Spring/Summer 2024 issue of Studio Magazine.