Many artists, but some of the most important ones are called land artists, or they've created what we call earth works or land art, thought, "Actually, no. These kinds of massive or highly public artwork should also exist outside the city in far removed areas." And the key example of this is an iconic artwork that Robert Smithson did, called Spiral Jetty. Where he basically built this, it's exactly what it sounds like, it's this enormous jetty built with rocks inside it. And he built it to be permanent, to become something that is visible from outer space. He was very interested in the relationship between not just agriculture and how humans have transformed agriculture, but whatever you can see from outer space but also post-industrial landscapes, right? So, Spiral Jetty very quickly became this iconic. What do you mean post-industrial landscapes? Smithson would often explore areas that had been used by a certain type of mining and so on and thought, "Oh, can I make an artwork right there?" And so a land artist Nancy Holt, many artists of the land art movement, intensely went out far outside of the city to find cool sites and bank art for them. Now, is it me or is it land art often have a real kind of play with the idea of long-term time too? Time was a big part of that. I don't know what it is between the kind of short time of the city and the long time of nature, but it certainly played within the land art kind of aesthetic sensibility. In our introduction to this module, we spoke about how spatial politics can deal with the visible and the invisible, the rural and the urban, but it also, you're right, it has to do with the past and the present. So, many of these land artists cared about archaeology and its relationship to contemporary art, right? Too many people assume that if it's contemporary art it can't deal with history, but they were super inspired by Mayan temple or the Nazca Lines in South America, all kinds of other archaeological facts. You know what's so funny about me? I don't know what it is, but whenever I think of land art, it's a bias. But I always think it's like somewhat spiritual art or whenever I think of people really into long-term time, I think it's like avoiding political contestation. Because, of course, often the desire to get to the country feels like you're avoiding the politics of the city. But land art certainly has some of those concerns in it or problems in it. And remember that in other parts of our MOOC, we talked about communes. And communes did precisely that in many places. They left the city to build projects outside of it, right? A re-imagined society. So land artists were trying to do the same. So Nato, and especially in the last few decades, public art isn't always permanent, right? What other kinds of public art genres. So, we're going to talk about ephemeral art. But also too I'd say there's a variety of reasons why someone might do something on a short-term basis. One being, perhaps, if you can imagine just think about the negatives of public long-term projects. You got to go clean them, they get graffitied. If you're going to have something that's gonna last for 30 years you have to build it in a different way. It's got to be sturdy. So there's just a certain cost and like upkeep question. Or you need permits to the site for indefinite amount of time, whereas ephemerally you could like say, "Hey, can we use this space for 30 days? Hey, can we use this space for 60?" Or maybe the artist is perhaps wanting to do something that kind of disappears, that isn't object-driven. Or perhaps, on another level too, sometimes the artwork speak to the political kind of questions of that particular time, and though some people think great art works need to speak to political issues for all time, there is a different opinion which is, some work speak to a particular moment in time and then it disappears. And then also, you know, sometimes the artwork is supposed to be in different places, right? While their site specificity and often monuments have been associated with a particular location, sometimes the art work wants to travel as much as the artist wants it to exist in different settings. There's a whole variety of reasons as you can might well imagine of why someone might work that way. And also the advantages and disadvantages of working this. So we're going to talk about that in this particular section. So, let's go to our case study. So, in terms of ephemeral events, we thought we'd move this along the trajectory of super short-term and then extend that kind of time frame out. Because at the end of the day, humanity itself might be a temporary art project. It's just the time frame is different. So like in terms of the first one we're going to go with is Cai Guo-Qiang explosion events. And this artist, Cai Guo-Qiang, basically uses fireworks, the gunpowder that you know, in terms of like gunpowder is a material that produces elaborate displays of like boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom at night. And he's done fireworks that are like black fireworks during the day that streak across the sky to a circle of fireworks that blow up at once. This is a kind of what you might call an ephemeral, super ephemeral short- term thing. But it's also something we would call properly monumental, right? Because they're enormous. In terms of the scale. So, they're still monumental but ephemeral. Yeah. And they are political but it's a little less, I kind of think that it is a little more poppy. You know, and the politic's more subtle than some of the other stuff we might discuss. So, then we have another project by Nina Katchadourian, Steven Matheson, and Mark Tribe called Carpark, from 1994, which is a very fun sweet project, where they basically took a parking lot at a school at Chula Vista, Southwestern College in Chula Vista, and they decided to color code the entire parking lot. So, students would come in and they would be like, ''White cars over here. Okay, yellow cars, you got to go to this section.'' And so it was a kind of participatory short-term work. And it's also, I think, a very nice example because we are talking about land art before, and this notion that great contemporary art or public art doesn't always have to happen in the city. Well, few people would have expected that a great contemporary artwork will happen in Chula Vista, right? With students driving their cars. But here it is, right? So these types of artworks, the ephemeral ones, often challenge the very associations we have with the more permanent type of the monument. As we go through time, I think one of the things you find is a lot of the early public art was really stuff that came out of a studio practice for galleries and museums, and then found their way into the world. Whereas, Carpark clearly is using the vernacular materials of everyday life as material itself. So, the car, parking lot, not only the place but the materials. And this takes us to another reason for why many of these artists did not want to make the more permanent object base type of public art and that it has to do with its market circulation, right? These artists often wanted to defy capitalism, the market, the idea of these big commissions. Instead, they wanted to do something that intentionally would not participate in that type of market culture, right? And as one of the formulations of that, well, so far we've talked mostly about large public art whether it's ephemeral or more permanent, there's also the idea of an individual or a small group of people intervening in public space and making art that way, right? We certainly can call that public art. And so, as one example we have the artist Sophie Calle who collaborated with the quite famous author of novels and other text, Paul Auster. They had this ongoing relationship over the years where he would create characters for her in a book, and then she would create an artwork and dialogue with him. And so they call this series Double Game. And for one of them he actually wrote this character for her and then she enacted it in a public space in New York. He basically said, "You should take over something that is highly public and just make it nicer for people, and engage with them on an everyday basis." She decided to choose a public phone booth, right? One of those we don't have any more because we use cell phones. I thought about them. Now every time I see them I'm like, "Are you making a drug deal?" No. Basically people perhaps thought she was homeless or something, but she decorated this phone booth with very private items, and then she would engage with people on an everyday basis for couple of minutes of each day for quite a long time. So, is this idea not only of the individual in space but, not permanence, but duration. You talked about a time before, right? But so many of these artists, not only do they want to do something in public space and public time, but also the idea of repeating, of coming back to a routine. And you know just to say too, these definitions that we have are very fluid. So certainly within this ephemeral thing you have performance, which it intervenes in the public space. So Adrian Piper had a project for 1970 called Catalysis 1, where she rode in a rush hour subway in clothes that she'd soaked in vinegar, eggs, milk and cod liver oil. So, just became this kind of grotesque, smelling person on the train and subway, but also began through this project basically intervened in the kind of a psychology of space. And what's really important about her early performance work, that I think is important for us to think there too, is not only is space loaded in terms of money and finance, but also through gender, and through race, and that all of these things are already happening. And sometimes artists by either performing or even sculptural, or whatever are basically highlighting that the nature of making us aware that these kind of forces are working in the public sphere. And also through the senses, right? In this case particularly smell, in this Adrian Piper intervention. A theorist who has been very influential, not just to the artist but to many other people who think about space, is Henri Lefebvre, a French thinker who wrote this book called The Production of Space. And in it he argues something that is certainly applies to most of the cases that we've studied so far and will study in this module, and it's this idea that space isn't just something we can take for granted. It is something that is produced just like sausages are produced or cigarettes are produced. Space is produced by us as societies and that's different depending on what society we're looking at, right? So, many of the artists who were studying basically want us to put attention on how space is produced. Not just that it is there, but how it is produced. And it's interesting too, because often I just find too, [inaudible] always really interesting. And working in public arts is interesting because the spatial dimension is always a valuable tool when thinking through most classic political issues. If you talk about race, but you talk about the politics of space as it applies to race, it's a very different kind of concern, because often the conversations of race focus on representation, image, body, visual. But the spatial dimensions, how cities are constructed, or how people move through space, or how gender is constructed through space, how people move, how male patriarchal dominated space can be. Well, in many subways around the world, actually the very trains are divided by gender. So, this is definitely something that feminist theories have also written a lot about.
