What drives artists to create transient art? I’m talking about the kind of art that is there one minute and gone the next. There are many examples of what I call transient art. It is not the kind of art that you hang on your wall. Not the kind of art that you can store on a shelf and revisit – like a movie or a book. I think about installations created for a specific length of time. Like a festival that happens over a weekend. Like a musician playing live, or a performance artist on the street.
Like theatre.
Theatre is akin to a sand mandala. It is created from scratch – out of nothing. People come together to build something that has a life – long or short. It is often an intense personal experience and is born of the human experience.
Theatre is a pattern – a template created by a script and a direction, then every night the coloured sands fall – slightly differently than the night before – and a mandala is created, held for a moment and then put to the wind, never to be seen again. The template still exists, but the expression will always be different. Never again will the same people experience that same thing. Never again will the grains fall just so. Live theatre is a shared group experience, one that can be translated each night but never completely replicated. The cast and crew are sharing that experience with the audience, and vice versa. The audience is sharing it together. It is start and finish and will never be the same again. That is the nature of the human experience. Change is the one reality.
So perhaps there are 2 kinds of artists.
The first kind of artist is one who likes to make something permanent. Something that can hang on a wall or sit in a garden in perpetuity. Something that can be taken from the bookshelf and revisited time and time again. A statement and something that will leave a lasting legacy. A bid for immortality perhaps. Even from an ego-less perspective, who doesn’t want to think that they will leave something behind that will make the world a better place after they are gone?
Then there are other artists. The kind who create the sand mandalas. The actors, the dancers, the musicians, the directors,the monks, the ephemeral installation artists. All those whose work is created in the present moment and then gone. Relationships are built and disappear. Stories of the time when…are shared and laughed about. The art only lives in the reminiscence.
So what drives the artist of transience? I would like to think that it is the love of the present moment. Like the sand mandala, perhaps it helps us to realise the impermanence of reality and everything. I love to adorn my walls with beautiful art, but most of all I value the experience of the alive in transient art.
