Now You See It

BY Lucy Modra

This article will be rained on, pissed on, torn, graffitied and ultimately postered over.

In theory it’s got a lifespan of about one month, and I’ll be kind of disappointed if it endures much beyond that. Because I have a growing fascination and respect for people who invest hours, days, years, in fleeting things. Like spending months carving an ice sculpture that melts in a day. Launching an exhibition of new paintings that are destroyed after an hour. Spending a week chalking a pavement that gets trampled on the moment you leave. In a world intent upon investing time wisely, these fleeting creations are extravagantly inefficient.

Compared to enduring art (think David, the Sistine chapel, Don Quixote), ephemeral art (think ice sculptures, stencil art, Is Not Magazine) is gloriously insolent. And street art is one of the great ephemeral art forms. Where ‘gallery art’ is carefully preserved to ensure its longevity, street art is left to rot in the elements. Because it is supposed to be transient – popping up on your way to work one morning, and disappearing a few weeks later. That’s why it’s cool.

So I think that the Games clean-up campaign is one of the best things to happen to Melbourne’s art scene for years. Rather than destroying street art, it’s protecting street art’s definitive feature-transience.

Unlike enduring art, fleeting art has the evanescence of a performance. Creating such art requires a performer’s arrogance, because it takes an enviable confidence to let a newly created, well-loved piece of work get swiftly destroyed. It’s simultaneously selfless and selfish – shunning all praise, celebrity, yet creating for just a few. The ephemeral artist eschews symbolic immortality and avoids the posthumous slide into obscurity.

Working this way, the artist returns to the moment – living in and creating for the moment. In contrast, the artist creating an enduring work is necessarily somewhat from the moment. Like missing a sunset whilst you’re reaching for your camera, enduring art invests in the future at the expense of the present.

At its best, fleeting art disappears without a trace. The fleeting artist takes no memento of the creative act. I don’t need to hold on to this, I need no proof of my talents, because I could do this again. I shall be happy again. Fleeting art knows how to let go.

And for this very reason, it’s liberating. Like writing for Is Not – an opportunity to write like a graffiti artist with the cops on their tail. To write like there’s no tomorrow!! In the words of the late Philip Hodgins, “When the end is really nigh, there won’t be any standing back to write like no one else.”

And for the viewer of fleeting art? Freud thought that in experiencing ephemeral beauty we glimpse our own mortality. In that bittersweet moment, we are at our most human. Truly relishing a moment of beauty, in the full knowledge that it will pass, brings you that much closer to accepting your own demise. Moreover, when you’re looking at art that disappears quickly, you just can’t think too much – you’ve got to let your intuition decide. Like reading this article. There is no time for it to grow on you. You could come back tomorrow, but it might not be here. You either liked it or hated it.

So really, the Commonwealth Games clean-up is for street art what the National Heritage Trust is for historic buildings and big old rocks. It’s protecting the divide between the enduring and the ephemeral and preventing us turning street art into institutional Art. I mean, first we start bitching about the clean-up campaign and the next thing you know, we’re heritage-listing stencilled walls and building little protective shelters around our favourite tags lest the wind blow too hard. When street art endures, it loses something, and we lose something. So I say, let ‘em clean.