What's Up With That?: Art of the temporary variety

11/3/2008 3:32 AM

By Harry Funk, Online editor

Everyone knows what art is.

It hangs in galleries, behind velvet ropes and in ornate frames, for aficionados to enjoy for generations to come.

Sure, that's the way you learned it in school: da Vinci and Rembrandt, Manet and Monet, van Gogh and van Dyck. Art for the ages.

But what about that dragon you drew in fourth grade? That was art, at least until your mother took it off the refrigerator and tossed it into the trash.

More specifically, that was disposable art, even though you didn't intend it to be temporary.

Some artists do. To them, art is for the moment, not for posterity.

You see and hear temporary art in a variety of places, be it a spray-painted graffito that will be glossed over by the public works department, or a couple of guys playing guitar without a tape recorder running.

You even smell and taste it: Master chefs create culinary masterpieces, knowing full well that they'll end up in a series of stomachs.

Sometimes art reaches none of the senses. The late composer John Cage wrote a piece called "4'33," which is literally four minutes and 33 seconds of silence.

In the opinion of many a layman, that's the definition of disposable.

Temporary art can touch a spiritual side. Washington & Jefferson College recently hosted a group of Buddhist monks from the Gaden Shartse Monastery in India, men who spent four days working on a mandala, an intricately detailed sculpture of sand.

Then they swept it all away.

One of the monks, Jangchub Chopel, explained the ancient practice as a lesson in the temporary nature of life.

"We're going to dissolve the mandala," Chopel said in mid-project. "This means we'll have a very large ceremony. We'll bring the blessings of the Buddha of Compassion present, and at the end we'll symbolically take parts of the sand and put it in a special container, to make sure it lives on."

The closing ceremony drew a healthy crowd to W&J's Olin Fine Arts Center, to at least take photos and videos of the sand mandala before it was relegated to oblivion. Then came the brushes: ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

Or more accurately in this case, ground quartz to ground quartz.

Speaking of pulverized minerals, chalk serves as a fairly popular instrument for temporary art. Give a youngster a box of multicolored Crayolas, send him out to the sidewalk and watch him go.

But sidewalk chalk is not necessarily kids' stuff. Pittsburgh artist Conrad Quesen is among those who will take to the streets, painstakingly sketching creations that soon will disappear.

He also works in more traditional media, but he views that as somewhat disposable, too: "Once you sell a painting, it's gone anyway," he said after finishing a chalk mural in the middle of Shadyside's Ellsworth Avenue.

Perhaps Vincent van Gogh entertained similar thoughts as he took a blade to his ear.

His paintings might be here to stay in galleries around the world, but permanence is by no means a prerequisite for creating art.