Bryan Long on "Art and Transience"

Once a year, I am an artist.  I transform large orange pumpkins into Halloween Jack-o-Lanterns.  The low-watt fluorescent bulbs inside them light up grotesques or careful portraits, sailing ships or zebras, or even the entire Earth, rotating slowly on its axis.  It usually takes me about four full days of scraping and carving to have them on display a day or two before October 31st.  For a few days, I am celebrated for my work. Hundreds of trick-or-treaters and parents marvel and comment, take pictures, and sometimes remember and comment on prior years’ work as well.  By the 2nd of November, the pumpkins are turning soft and mouldy, and are unceremoniously transferred to my compost bins.  

I do not mind.  If they lasted I would become bothered by the flaws, tired of their persistence.  All art is transient, of course.  Even the carefully preserved Rembrandt will not last forever. But there is something poignant to me in art that cannot be preserved, but lasts only a few hours or days, and then dissipates.  The amazing transient art of Andy Goldwater touches me deeply. It reminds me that my life is hardly different; I am born, I live and love, and die within a lifetime that is but an hour in the scope of human history, and but a nanosecond in the scope of life.  

Each day I wake from unconsciousness, and my identity is reconstructed, my life remembered.  “Permanent” art helps to tie us to our personal and cultural past; it is a memory that helps us reconstruct ourselves in a continuum of culture, a context larger than our present existence, a meaning larger than ourselves.  Permanent art breaks our fixation on our small lives, and brings us into a larger scope of history and meaning.  Transient art slaps us back into the present moment, and reminds us that we have only this day in which to know and appreciate that larger context.  To be here now.  

Art is not for art’s sake, but for ours.  To know ourselves as larger than ourselves.

Bryan Long

www.econosystemics.com