Permanent vs. Temporary

This weekend was a rare beauty here in CNY. It was bright and sunny, but not too hot with not even the tiniest threat of rain either day. Perfect sidewalk chalk days. Which just so happens to be exactly what I did.

I'm the one in the black and white tops. My apologies for the crappiness of the images...it was REALLY bright and I was trying out the web cam on my laptop. I didn't even think to bring my digital.

We packed the family into the car and went over to the in-laws. After not too terribly long my mother-in-law wandered off with Midget #1, so Hubby, Baby, and I found our way down to the Seneca River. There's one good chunk of river bank between the cemetery and the lock that's cemented and has ropes for boats to dock for short periods of time. For a few years now this has been a favorite drawing place for me...there's the serenity of the cemetery, the zen-ness of the river, and not too many yuppies (the last point alone makes it a rarity in Syracuse suburbs). This cement bank is an especially nice surface for sidewalk chalk. A bucket of which I just so happen to have nabbed from my brother-in-law. Hubby wasn't feeling it, but I was shortly joined by my friend Kelsey (aka Lvhg17 of Deviant Art and Live Journal).

It was overall a pretty good day...my plans for sidewalk chalk nudity were ruined by the docking of a large boat with several small children who wouldn't freaking leave, so my pin-up girl needed a bra, but other than that it was fun. And it got me thinking about the permanence of art.

Should art be permanent? Is art that degrades or is only physically temporary somehow less important or less “art” than that which is permanent? The other way around?

(I should note that these questions are mostly only relevant to the fine arts. Music, film, and literature require preservation largely by their definition, as theater and performing arts are completely temporary largely by their definition.)

Because you think about it, and people spend nearly a dozen years of college to become art restorers. Art preservation techniques are experimented and tinkered with for years in effort to perfectly preserve pieces. Is this really the way we ought to go? In this age of digital documentation, is the physical piece really necessary? We take Painting A done on canvas or Photograph B on film. We document, scan, get digital pictures of Painting A and Photo B. So then do we need the physical canvas of Painting A or the physical film of Photo B anymore? Why not let it rot?

3-Dimensional art is the obvious exception (aside from those mentioned above). 3-D pieces are often made to be viewed by multiple angles, something usually lost in a mere photograph, even in digital 360° views. 3-D just has different space than 2-D. Preservation also comes easier to 3-D art, as (traditionally at least) those pieces are made from more permanent materials from the get-go.

But even if we didn't have the ability to document pieces so thoroughly, why not still just let pieces rot when their time comes? Or out and out destroy pieces after a period of time? A dear professor of mine told me once that he has a day set aside every year that he, and sometimes some fellow artists, get together and have a bon fire where they burn all their work since the last fire that they didn't like, didn't work, was never able to be realized to its expected potential, etc. He referred to it as “a great zen cleansing” that gave them leave to reuse, reinvent, or retry the concept in a new piece.

Why only do this with rejected work? This bon fire story was given during a discussion about allowing your art to become too precious. Why do we, as artists, frequently allow our art to become so precious? Why do we allow any of our art to become precious? I'm not saying your art shouldn't be important, but why not burn more of it? I know all of us that feel art passionately have pieces all over the place. Burn them! Paint over them! Free yourself from that piece and redo it differently.

As a regular diet or modus operandi this probably is more harmful than good. We do need art floating around in society to enrich our culture and exchange of ideas. But my point is that so much value is put into the physical object, when it really ought to be the image, the concept that's valued. Create, document, burn, repeat. I bet you can't bring yourself to do it for one whole month, and I'd love to be proven wrong.