This week, MIT graduate students have created a temporary sculpture if there ever was one. IceWall is a wall made entirely of ice bricks which continue to melt and evaporate as it sits on campus, signifying traditions of ideas fading away and new generation of ideas blossoming (in conjunction with the MIT150 Festival of Science, Art, and Technology.) Frozen in the bricks are flower seeds and as the ice blocks melt, the seeds will drop to the ground and hopefully grow a flowering garden in a few months time. The sculpture reminds me of Francis Alys and Allan Kaprow's performance pieces that use the simple process of H20 phase changes to say something about life.
Here's IceWall:
In 1997, world famous performance artist Francis Alys labored to drag an ice block through the streets of Mexico until the ice got smaller and then disappeared, signifying a reinvention of the way you interact with your city. By the end, he was just kicking the ice down the sidewalk like a kid. The piece was called Something Making Something Leads to Nothing:
In 2008, Brazilian artist Nele Azevedo made dozens of ice-men and let them melt on the steps of a public street. What a sad affair.
The piece that started this all was made by artist Allan Kaprow in 1967, famous for basically birthing the genre of performance art, who built an ice wall and let it melt, signifying art as a part of life in all it's transformations and fluidity rather than art as the making of a specific form in a specific circumstance. The exhibition was titled Fluids: A happening by Allan Kaprow and was recreated in 2007 in New York and in 2008 in Los Angeles.
Of course, ice sculptures have existed for decades as a decoration for weddings and sweet 16 parties. If only we knew that the melting signified the temporary-ness of our existence: parties come and go so enjoy it while you can, says the sad, melting swan:
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