Framing the Ephemeral

Abstract

Allyson Purpura The articles assembled here and in a forthcoming issue of African Arts (vol. 43, no. 1, Spring 2010) explore the theme of ephemeral art, and are based on two panels co-organized by Christine Mullen Kreamer and myself for the Triennial meeting of the Arts Council of the African Studies Association in March 2007. Applying equally to studio and tradition-based practices, ephemeral art refers to works whose materials are chosen by the artist or maker for their inherently unstable characteristics, or which are created with the intention of having a finite “life.” As such, they cannot be collected as objects per se, and their configurations may change or degrade while on view—or in view, as the case may be. Indeed, their impermanence is a constitutive part of their aesthetic, and of the ways in which they come to act on the world. Ephemerality defies conventional expectations around the preservation, display, and commodification of art and confounds the museum’s mission to preserve works in perpetuity. Even the language conservators use to describe unstable materials—“inherent vice”— imputes a kind of immoral agency to ephemeral things. Our fascination with the topic was initially inspired by South African artist Willem Boshoff at the National Museum of African Art in 2005, while assisting him with his installation Writing in the Sand.1 Made entirely of fine, dry, black and white sand, the work comprised words stenciled directly onto the gallery floor (Fig. 1). The inherent instability of the sand—and of the installation itself—was a constitutive part of the work’s commentary on the vulnerability and disenfranchisement of “unscripted” languages in southern Africa. However, the installation was scheduled to be on view for eight months; while its gradual degradation was, for the artist, unproblematic, even desirable, museum staff was challenged with preserving the piece’s visual integrity for the duration of the exhibition (see Hornbeck this issue). In the end, the installation’s life history raised a whole range of provocative issues that concerned not only the museological challenges of exhibiting and preserving such work, but, more broadly, the idea of the ephemeral as paradigm and praxis.2 Amply evident in the pages that follow, the authors who responded to our call for papers engage the ephemeral to explore vastly different circumstances, featuring objects, artists, and artworks that resist easy categorization. Slippage between the everyday and the esoteric, portraiture and performance, and between 1 Detail, William Boshoff, Writing in the Sand (2005). Installation photograph, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution.