The Paradox of Permanence

Abstract

This article considers sculpture parks through the lens of temporality, focusing on select outdoor artist projects of the 1970s and 1980s: a permanent installation by Donald Judd in Marfa, Texas; and ephemeral works by Alice Aycock, Mary Miss, Jody Pinto, and Michelle Stuart at Artpark, in Lewiston, New York, and Manhattan’s Battery Park City landfill. While Judd intended to ensure permanence for his works, Aycock, Miss, Pinto, and Stuart created important early works that lasted for shorter periods of time and endure only through documentation, or “ephemera.” These examples, I argue, illuminate permanence’s inherent paradox: sculpture parks and the art in them must change to stay the same under fluctuating environmental, institutional, and social conditions. Placed in sculpture parks distinguished by varying relationships to matters of duration, each artwork discussed in this article also engages forms of enclosure—especially walls, natural or manmade—and openness to heighten a viewer’s situated sense of space and time. Crystallized in artworks consisting of crumbling walls, punctured fences, and dissolving paper, the paradox of permanence requires critical rubrics that can bring permanent and ephemeral work together on a spectrum of impermanence, enabling scholars to generate a fuller and more inclusive history of sculpture, “parked.”