Ephemeral Art and Performance in Africa

Ephemeral art presents an interesting and not often covered lens in the field of African studies. It provides insight into the values placed on materials and the opportunity for deeper understanding of cultural traditions, spiritual beliefs, or individual philosophies. Ephemeral art may include transient materials intended to decay, those created in order to be destroyed, or even a piece marking a temporal instant, as in performances and site-specific installations. The ephemeral is what is seen, used, or performed until it decays, is buried, destroyed, or completes its durational moment. Performances exist as a moment in time—once past, they remain a memory. In this sense performance is ephemeral. While there is a great deal of scholarship on performance traditions, there is very little on African ephemeral art. The two topics remain distinct in the scholarly literature with overlaps in studies on the symbolism of ephemeral materials in performance traditions. The following bibliography is organized in two separate categories: ephemeral art and performance art, each connected through the trope of transiency.

Alfombrismo: Ephimeral Art Utopia

The way in which we experience public space is closely related to the sociocultural and environmental conditions of the context. Similar to the garden – in the strict philosophical sense- Traditional Tapestry ephemeral art represents a utopia; it stands for an aesthetic theory of beauty and a vision of happiness. Traditional ephemeral art is conceptualized as a utopian space where diverse elements, people, as well as a wide variety of activities converge; those are the ones who transform reality through cultural expression, exploring habits and values which pursue a common goal in a livingly way, and improve social coexistence. Tapestry ephemeral art temporarily and actively transforms their surroundings. It is in that public space where it is embraced that a dialogue is modelled; a dialogue where not only formal appearance but also designing constructive one converge, as an artistic, philosophical, and spiritual expression of its community itself. Such artistic intervention allows physical proximity; in a whole overview vision of urban context, design displays Mexican art values and transforms public space. The greater the proximity, the greater the change in the scale of the work, therefore, it is possible to feel immersed in the piece and identify the natural material, which in its arrangement and place, reveals the garden utopia –symbol of harmony between itself and the atmosphere portrayed in a living work of art. Nowadays, the isolated streets in many different parts of the world reflect a universal reality which urges a re-connection with the natural environment to which we belong, as well as a transformation of the sociocultural interactions that emerge from responsibility, equality and the common good.

LEGALIMPLICATIONS OF STREET ART AS A ‘DEMOCRATIZED’/’OPEN’ FORM OF ART

The prestige of street art as an artistic expression has increased year after year. The analysis of its legal implications must take into account the difficulties in reaching a general operative concept of street art and the need to legally frame the creation, preservation and transaction of street art productions. Since the legal concept is not equivalent to the theoretical concept or the history of art, each State and even each municipality can create their own legal concepts, acting in accordance with these specific concepts in order to control production, to punish execution as vandalism or, in contrast, to protect works produced as part of their cultural heritage. Although street art is created in and for open spaces, usually as an ephemeral art, the commercial interest in street art productions raises questions of due diligence during its transaction, such as those related to ownership, authenticity and even provenance. As an expression of an artistic movement started about half a century ago, can street art works be equated with “traditional” works of art (such as “goods” or “merchandises”), being subject to ownership, commercial sale and copyright, or must they be appreciated as artifacts that can be preserved as part of the cultural heritage or, alternatively, starting from the specific artistic and creative intent of the artist, be understood as a type of works of art that require the creation of new legal categories and forms of understanding its meaning?

When the Image Takes over the Real: Holography and Its Potential within Acts of Visual Documentation

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes discusses the capacity of the photographic image to represent “flat death”. Documentation of an event, happening, or time is traditionally reliant on the photographic to determine its ephemeral existence and to secure its legacy within history. However, the traditional photographic document is often unsuitable to capture the real essence and experience of the artwork in situ. The hologram, with its potential to offer a three-dimensional viewpoint, suggests a desirable solution. However, there are issues concerning how this type of photographic document successfully functions within an art context. Attitudes to methods necessary for artistic production, and holography’s place within the process, are responsible for this problem. The seductive qualities of holography may be attributable to any failure that ensues, but, if used precisely, the process can be effective to create a document for ephemeral art. The failures and successes of the hologram to be reliable as a document of experience are discussed in this article, together with a suggestion of how it might undergo a transformation and reactivation to become an artwork itself.

The Matter of Ephemeral Art: Craft, Spectacle, and Power in Early Modern Europe

Through a close reading and reconstruction of technical recipes for ephemeral artworks in a manuscript compiled in Toulouse ca. 1580 (BnF MS Fr. 640), we question whether ephemeral art should be treated as a distinct category of art. The illusion and artifice underpinning ephemeral spectacles shared the aims and, frequently, the materials and techniques of art more generally. Our analysis of the manuscript also calls attention to other aspects of art making that reframe consideration of the ephemeral, such as intermediary processes, durability, the theatrical and transformative potential of materials, and the imitation and preservation of lifelikeness.

D-ark—a Shared Digital Performance Art Archive with a Modular Metadata Schema

Digital objects and documentation of intangible cultural heritage pose new challenges for most museums, which have a long history in preserving tangible objects. Art museums, however, have been working with digital objects for some decades, as they have been collecting media art. Yet, performance art as an ephemeral art form has been a challenge for art museums’ collection work. This article presents a method for archiving digital and audiovisual performance documentation. D-ark (digital performance art archive) is based on a joint effort by the artist community T.E.H.D.A.S., which has created the archive, and Pori Art Museum, which is committed to preserving the archive for the future. The aim is to produce sufficient standardized metadata to support this objective. This article addresses the problems of documenting an ephemeral art form and copyright issues pertaining to both the artist and the videographer. The concept of D-ark includes a modular metadata schema that makes a distinction between descriptive, administrative, and technical metadata. The model is designed to be flexible—new modules of objects or technical metadata can be added in the future, if necessary. D-ark metadata schema deploys the FRBRoo, Premis, VideoMD, and AudioMD standards. Administrative and technical metadata modules abide by Finnish digital preservation specifications.