For centuries, the goal of an artist was to create something that would last. Greats such as Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci struggled for lasting pigments and lasting canvases, quietly warring against time, moisture, and light so their picture might be with us for centuries. The worth of the artwork was tied to its duration. This is the very antithesis of one of the central themes of modern and contemporary art, which struggles so vainly to find the opposite hypothesis. Rather than fighting against decay, such artists embrace it. They employ unstable substances, build chemical responses, and produce artwork designed to alter, decay, and even totally vanish. This intentional employment of chemical degradation is not a technical deficiency; it's an extremely strong philosophical statement, applying the laws of nature in order to make comments regarding problems of time, memory, transience, and what's ultimately what art even is.
This artwork process can be thought of as a resistance to the nature of the art object as an expensive, long-lasting commodity. The ancient marvel, secluded in its air-conditioned sanctum, is isolated from the flow of life. It is suspended in animation. Degenerating-materials artists maintain that this is a lie. Life is change, growth, and death. To produce a still object is to challenge this fundamental principle. By introducing change into their work itself, they make works that are, in a sense, alive because they suffer the same natural processes we do. It is not a contained moment, but an ongoing process taking place in real time, and thus cleverly puts the viewer acutely aware of the ticking seconds, minutes, and years.
Some of the most famous early ones are pieces by the Italian Arte Povera movement from the 1960s. Giuseppe Penone and Jannis Kounellis are two of the artists who worked with organic, transitory material such as wood, earth, plants, and wool. Penone formerly created pieces with living trees, and the tree would grow to consume the metal casts that he used. The project was man against nature, and nature prevailed. The project was never completed; it was constantly becoming. For the same reason, Kounellis also displayed piles of coal and bags of beans. They were momentary substances. They could rot, spill, or get devoured by insects. For that fleetingness, that was the message. It suspended the raw, unprocessed, ephemeral material of daily existence in the pure white domain of the gallery, against the pure and fixed state of traditional art.
Chemical decay is employed intentionally beyond organic substances. Volatile chemical reactions are their medium for others. German sculptor Wolfgang Laib creates austere, vivid works out of pollen, for instance. He laboriously collects pollen from flowers in the yard in front of his house and sifts it into fine, shimmering squares of intense color on the ground. The pollen is very delicate. A draft of air from an open door, a sneeze, or simply the passage of time will unsettle it. The work exists in a state of stunning tension, its perfection vulnerable to the same breath which must be drawn to see it. Its eventual downfall is a commentary on purity, vulnerability, and the cycle of life and death.
The most literal use of chemistry can be observed in the method of artists who play with oxidation as art. Rust, which forms when iron, water, and oxygen chemically interact, is something that sculptors typically attempt to avoid. Yet it is utilized consciously by British sculptor Andy Goldsworthy. Goldsworthy shapes intricately beautiful sculptures in the great outdoors with found material on site: leaves, icicles, rocks, and mud. And then he photographs them as they rust away to nothingness. A tender icicle arch will melt in sunlight; a foliated shape will be blown away by the wind. The photo is all the evidence that can be captured, yet the artwork itself was the procedure and the ephemeral thing. Rot is the completion of the work. It is perhaps the most dramatic ecological consciousness of all philosophy, a reminder that human life is in nature, not apart from nature, and that our works are finally transient.
This philosophy brings to the mainstream museum an enormous challenge with an intrinsic mandate to preserve. What is one to do with a sculpture made of overripe fruit, or a painting done with spoiled pigments whose spoilage the artist requests? That sets up a strong tension of institutional responsibility and the artist's intention. Some artists provide very explicit directions. Brazilian artist Cildo Meireles made a piece of art titled Southern Cross, and it's actually a small charcoal and compressed wood cube in the middle of a room. The direction is to let the cube alone and to let it, if it breaks down into a clump of dust, be perfectly fine. The museum has to relinquish its authority, being the guardian of a process rather than the guardian of an object. This reconsiders the institution from being one that holds static things to one where the public can observe the poetry of transience.
The embracement of decline is equally a powerful rejection of consumer culture. In an age and age consumed by the new, the new, and the endless, art on the decline won't be a commodity. It can't easily be bought, sold, and warehoused as a money commodity. Its value lies in the pleasure of it, the memory that it leaves, and the questions that it provokes. It's anti-capitalist by design. It makes us ask ourselves why permanence matters so much to us. Is it fear of our own mortality? In making beautiful things that will perish, these artists are showing us a mirror on our own bodily mortal decline and urging us to turn toward beauty in not stasis, but in all of the process of being—creation to dispersal. Lastly, the intentional chemical decay in contemporary art is an internally deep act.
It is a rejection of the human egotism that assumes that we can immortalize something. It's an exaltation of humility before the power of nature. They work together with chemistry as a friend, not foes. The bleaching of color, oxidation of metal, and decomposition of wood are all co-creators of significance. The work, therefore, is something that occurs in time, a performance with a script provided by the laws of physics and chemistry. It instructs us to value the beauty of a moment, the patina of time, and the bittersweet truth that it all will have to go. And through it, it makes us more richly, more actually part of the world we inhabit—a world eternally, sublimely, irretrievably changing.