Alive...

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.

Arts Evolution

At the end of April the Frankston Arts Centre is presenting an award winning comedy by the hilarious Fiona Scott-Norman.  The show bemoans the loss of the vinyl record and blames that loss and the development of electronic music on the increasing unease and violence in club culture.   Through her warm and charming manner and comically delivered arguments, Fiona proposes that the demise of partner-dancing and disco music has paved the way for electronic dance music and has encouraged social anarchy.  “If we brought back light-hearted disco music, street violence would disappear; if we brought back partner-dancing, social order would resume.”

This got me thinking about evolution and ‘progress’ in a broader arts arena.  What impacts are new technologies and new art forms having on the evolution of art as we know and perceive it?

I think of something like the Mona Lisa.  An image we are all very familiar with because multi-media, photography and printing exist.  In the not too dim past – we are only talking a mere 100 years or so – we have gone from perhaps not even knowing that the Mona Lisa existed or  to being able to have the image at our fingertips whenever and wherever we want without having to stand in long lines at the Louvre.  Does the experience of seeing the painting reproduced; diminish the experience of it in ‘real life’ – or even the impetus to want to see it in real life?  I guess the lines at the Louvre speak for themselves in answer to that, and I think that having the ability to have the Mona Lisa as the wallpaper on my computer actually enhances my engagement with it.  I for one am still keen to stand in line.

So then, there is the whole concept of new art – or digital art; art that is created and facilitated by new technologies.  Frankston will be exploring more and more digital arts as expressions of our culture over the coming months as an extension to the digital arts we have been presenting in the past.  Digital art is still a very new and fresh field and brings an opportunity for dialogue about difference and relevance. There is no difference to me in how a piece of art is created – and that goes for music as well.  There are just different expressions of the same journey.  Whether art is created by getting my hands dirty or by taps on a keyboard is irrelevant.  Whether I look or listen to that art on a vinyl record, paint on canvas or as a digital image on my computer is also neither here nor there.  As we engage more with the digital world every day, I would think that digital art is potentially more relevant.  Whether or not it is responsible for the demise of a decent society is a much broader question.