Shilpa Gupta’s "Untitled" consists of a mechanical residential gate swaying back and
forth, with each movement it crashes violently into the gallery wall behind it, slowly breaking
it apart.
I don’t think the sculpture itself is a great work of art.
The form in the middle of the gate puzzles me, and not in a good way, it comes across
like a random addition to make the damage the gate leaves behind more interesting, though
I can’t know for sure.
The explanation given for its inclusion seems like an afterthought.
Additionally, the overall themes of the work are shrouded in word salad.
Despite this I think the sculpture has at least one major point of merit and that is
the gradual damage that the gate leaves on the gallery wall each time it swings.
This is not an ordinary gate.
It has been modified with knife-like extrusions and the spikes are exaggerated in length.
The imprint the gate produces is less defined closer to the hinge, more defined in the middle,
and then makes a severe hole at the edges that even goes past the boundaries of the
gate.
In some pictures you can see a tiny imprint of one of the spikes at the very end before
it really starts to wear away at the wall.
This, in my opinion, is the overwhelming appeal of the work: the unexpected and captivating
pattern of erosion that is produced by this contrived setup gradually unfolding over the
course of hours or days.
It is an artwork that is not completed by the direct hand of the artist.
It is an artwork that cannot be fully captured in a single photo or even a brief visit in
person.
It is an artwork that is sculpted by a single repetitive action, across time.
Behind a glass bell jar in a foyer of the School of Mathematics and Physics at the University
of Queensland, is a glass funnel filled with bitumen or asphalt, also known simply as pitch.
Since pitch has an extremely high viscosity at room temperature, 100 billion times that
of water, it has been allowed to slowly drip out for 94 years.
Since 1930, only 9 drops have fallen, an average of one drop every 10 years, however it has
slowed down recently because it was moved to an air conditioned display somewhere between
1988 and 2000.
The next drop is expected to occur sometime in the 2020s.
This is not an artwork, in the traditional sense, but rather a “long term experiment”.
A long-term experiment is an experiment that tests a hypothesis or observes a phenomena
at an extremely slow rate.
The “Pitch Drop” is one such experiment, others include a battery that has been faintly
ringing two bells since 1840 and a box full of vials of two types of microbes to be opened
periodically over 500 years.
This experiment is designed to test how long these microbes can survive being dried out.
An even older experiment, Lord Kelvin’s Pitch Glacier, is a wooden ramp filled with
imperceptibly slow moving pitch that mimics the movement of glaciers.
It began in 1887 and is still moving ever downward today.
If you go to thetenthwatch.com you can watch and see the tenth drop from the Pitch Drop
experiment, which could happen any day now.
You will find yourself staring in anticipation for the slightest bit of movement that will
likely never come before your attention span run outs.
You also likely won’t be watching alone as people at the university are also frequently
interested in the display.
While the Pitch Drop will eventually run out of material, Bogomir Ecker’s "Tropfsteinmaschine"
is designed to slowly add material.
The “Dripstone Machine”, started in 1996, is an artificial stalagmite machine.
It slowly drips rainwater passed through carbon dioxide and calcium carbonate from the ceiling
onto a base.
The machine is designed to last 500 years by which time the stalagmite formed should
be a staggering 5 centimeters (1.97 inches) in height.
I had two people look at the machine in its current state.
The stalagmite right now is nothing amazing, just a moldy hill on a marble plate around
5 milimeters in height but the machine itself may be more remarkable—it took 13 years
of designing and consulting to create—including getting insurance for the maintenance of the
machine over the next 500 years.
Stalagmites can be grown in a lab at a much faster, though unnatural rate, while this
machine forms them at an appallingly slow natural rate.
The machine drips once every 36 seconds.
The art piece is a reflection on the natural processes that occur over mind boggling lengths
of time.
If the machine had started in 1524, a time when Conquistadors were still traversing the
New World, it would be done this year.
I am waiting for an artist to take on the opposite challenge; a slow drip machine using
water passed through sand particles to wear away at a rock.
In my video, Journey’s to Hell I mention a story of a bird that every hundred years
sharpens its beak on a mountain.
When the mountain is completely worn down into nothing than supposedly “one second”
of an eternity would pass.
The story has many problems aside from the metaphorical meaning.
The outside of a bird’s beak is made of keratin, the same material that makes up your
hair and fingernails.
Keratin is 2.5 on the Mohs Hardness scale, while most mountains are made of rock that
is harder than Keratin.
So “a normal bird would probably deposit more beak material on the mountain than it
would wear away.”
Furthermore, the mountain would certainly be worn away by natural weather and erosion
long before the bird ever made a significant dent.
If the bird’s beak was made of sandpaper containing abrasive particles harder than
most mountain rocks this scenario would work.
You’ve probably heard that the only thing as hard as diamond is diamond, which means
in order to cut and polish diamonds you simply have to use a rotating diamond abrasive wheel
and diamond paste, and rub the diamond on them over and over again.
We use an abrasive paste regularly on our bodies.
Toothpaste contains abrasive grits which are put in to help remove stains and debris from
teeth.
In one episode of Mythbusters it was shown that by using a combination of toothpaste
and floss you could very slowly cut through a steel prison bar.
Though it would take someone 293 days, flossing 8 hours a night and by that time you would
have only cut through one bar.
This scenario is still a thousand times more plausible than the bird’s, but the bird’s
scenario grips our minds not because of its realism but because of the huge scale of time
that this repetitive action would occupy under ideal circumstances.
When I think of “Long Term Art” I think of this bird, I think of art that is created
slowly but diligently over the course of many hours, days, years or even decades, typically
through a single repetitive action.
Yayoi Kusama’s Obliteration Room, is another example of such a work.
Over the course of several weeks, each visitor is given a sheet of colorful dot stickers
to place anywhere within an entirely white furnished room.
Dot by dot, the room becomes more and more colorful, getting to a point where the color
is overwhelming and objects begin to disappear into the background.
r/place, created by Josh Wardle, functions like a digital counterpart to the Obliteration
Room in that any registered user on Reddit could change the color of a single pixel on
a huge canvas at a rate of every 5 to 20 minutes over the course of a few days.
However, because it was on the internet, collaboration in creating representational images was possible,
and different groups frequently contributed their own pixel art.
Since it opened on April 1st, 2022 and July 20th 2023, we may be approaching another opening
very soon.
These works are impressive demonstrations of the power of collaboration but these two
only last days, some projects shoot for more ambitious time scales.
On September 9th, 2023 a concrete block was set down next to three identical concrete
blocks on a platform in the town of Wemding, Germany.
The last block was set down ten years earlier.
This is the Zeitpyramide and it started construction in 1993 and will only be complete in the year
3183 after the next 116 blocks are added, one every ten years.
The project was designed to last as long as the town of Wemding has been around: 1200
years.
Though the project will actually be complete in 1190 years because they were off by one.
The artist who proposed the idea, Manfred Laber, already died in 2018.
It is now up to the town and future generations to complete the project.
The time pyramid is an admittedly boring structure, though it has been specified the blocks can
be made out of different materials later on as long as they are the same dimensions.
However, its uniformity is its advantage.
Already one can see the discoloration and weathering of the first and second block compared
to the cleaner third and pristine fourth.
On the subreddit r/wellworn you can find images of objects that have been torn apart by continuous
use, floors scraped away from daily walking, a donkey sculpture made to be touched, staircases
worn away from years of human footsteps and things that have been relentlessly eroded
by nature.
On the one hand these are pictures of objects ravaged by time, on the other, in a world
defined by impermanence, it is a celebration of things that have managed to endure long
enough to be sculpted by the routines of human lives.
Weathering is fascinating and dare I say desirable, so desirable that even artificially weathered
things exist, from pre-ripped jeans to the kind of weathering painted on countless plastic
armor and vehicle models that is added for realism and character.
While many of these products are mass manufactured and identical—no two worn down objects are
exactly the same.
Objects will be worn down in similar places, buttons and sharp edges especially, but unless
you can find me two human beings with the exact same lives I guarantee that there are
numerous scratches, paint chips, and dents that are unique to an individual’s routine
with that object.
In a sense, well worn objects are long art, made by accidental artists.
I am a long artist.
Early in my life I recall seeing a replica of an oil drill spinning in a rock as a display
piece in a museum to show what one type of oil drill looked like.
While today I’m certain the drill replica did not make the indentation in the rock it
was spinning in, back then, I thought it did and I wanted to stay there for hours, days
even to gradually see if the drill would slowly scrape away more material and go deeper and
deeper into the podium.
What caused this desire I can’t say for sure but maybe it was the satisfaction in
knowing something in the world was progressing; the assurance I will have something to look
forward to no matter what happens in the world around me.
That one day the rock would have a giant perfect hole carved straight through the center of
it.
There is a certain satisfaction in the incremental progression of something over time, regardless
of how pointless that thing is, you are given more time to contemplate, more time to notice
and appreciate details, more time to contemplate time.
During my incarceration in school I came up with many long term artworks to pass the time.
I drew a custom pocket calendar in which I would cross off each day, sometimes adding
little illustrations for holidays.
I once took sheets of graph paper and each day I would cut out a few dozen squares and
glue one on top of the other until eventually this incredibly thin piece of paper became
a tower 2-3 inches in height.
At that point I must’ve stopped...and just recently I’ve begun another tower.
I have been chipping away at it week by week.
Between the start of the last video and the release of this one I’ve been stacking ZYN
cans to make a tower of ZYN.
A ZYN can is simply a plastic container filled with nicotine pouches, I don’t have a nicotine
addiction but two co-workers do, so I take their empty ZYN cans, drill holes through
the center and then stack them on a PVC pole.
I collect about 4 cans a week each one is 2 centimeters (0.787 inches) tall, this room
from floor to ceiling is about 7 meters tall—at this rate it would take a year and a half
(76 weeks) and 350 cans to reach the ceiling.
Recently I decided the base of the tower should be filled with sand so I can make some smaller
ZYN towers and make it a ZYN garden.
It is no mystery what will happen if I keep stacking these plastic pucks.
Eventually my tower will reach the ceiling and beyond.
But it is not the end product that matters to me.
I get enjoyment from the task itself.
The sculpture is a physical record of the cost of addiction and, more importantly, of
time passing.
The tower and base is mainly made of four ingredients, wood, latex paint, pvc, and polypropylene.
The plastic will outlive all of us.
The wood will probably last for decades, the paint up to ten years, the pvc up to 100,
and the polypropylene up to 500 years or more--all depending on the environment.
In that time the Dripstone machine will have produced a stalagmite 2 inches (5.08 centimeters)
tall.
The pitch drop will have dropped about 39 times.
The time pyramid will have 50 more blocks.
Future generations will need to complete these artworks.
The pitch drop live stream will have to be serviced; the jars at the bottom changed out
when they get full.
The drip stone machine requires maintenance--which the artist provided instructions for.
The time pyramid must have the town get together to place the last block, if humans are still
around by then.
In the Namib desert, the oldest desert in the world, Max Siedentopf hooked up 6 speakers
to an mp3 player to play Toto’s Africa on loop for as long as he can hope.
Max Siedentopf is a multi-disciplinary conceptual artist, notably a creator of absurd objects
and biting satire.
While the premise of Toto Forever is goofy, I think it stumbles onto something quite solemn.
The installation is powered by solar panels and the exact location of it is unknown.
In Randall Munroe’s book What if?
the author explains that if all humans were to disappear suddenly the last light from
a machine on Earth to go out would be those on emergency call boxes in remote locations
powered by solar panels.
Toto Forever, will not last forever, just from looking at it, the construction seems
fairly shoddy.
Even if it was structurally sound without proper maintenance eventually the solar panels
will become covered by sand or the electronics will corrode, whichever comes first.
However, if all human beings were to disappear suddenly, depending on the quality of its
construction, an artwork like this might be one of the last machines functioning on Earth.
And so I listen to that 80s hit playing alongside the ancient winds of the Namib desert and
wait.
Eventually the solar panels will become covered by sand: then they will truly become the Solar
Sands.