Urs Fischer Has it in the Bank: New Gagosian Gallery Pop-Up
I really like what this describes about Urs Fischer’s push at ephemerality. And maybe it seems unique to the art world (through use of a degradable material? maybe through site-specific installations?). But what would ephemerality feel like in the poetry world? Is it the internet? Where social media gives us this parade of twitter darlings, whose whole point seems to be overflowing text as testament to their talent, or illimitable energy, or as persistent / constant relevance to a limitless “conversation.”
I guess you could say that it feels like poetry has always been ephemeral. Just because it’s hard to see where poetry fits into the contemporary conversation. Poets talk about poetry. They talk about poems they like. And they talk about who-poetry, like who is hot, who is worth snarking about, who is who. There is culture to poetry. But a sustained conversation where poetry fits into some aesthetic matrix of other-than-poetry-mixed-with-poetry feels almost impossible to find. It exists, of course. But what I would like to see introduced is the real crisis of ephemerality. Oblivion is the constant threat to a poem. “Please don’t let my poems disappear!”
For Fischer, oblivion and that tip into oblivion is just a big joke. “Will my art disappear? Ha ha! I meant it to disappear!” But then it won’t disappear. And that makes the joke more complicated. Fischer is safe to taunt oblivion, because there is a larger art market.
It strikes me that Katie Peterson’s review of Lost and and The Gorgeous Nothings presumes the life the writer / photograph / curator brings to pieces that could have been lost. Her review treats us to the delight poets find in ephemera, but this still leaves out the issue of ephemerality. But how does a published poem taunt oblivion? How does a poet strike his or her Ha ha! stance? And, to be clear, the issue is not subject or style, it is material existence. Is the answer conceptualism? It’s the only answer I can think of right now.
