I heard, the other day, that the climbing wall in Leeds has changed hands. This is of interest to me for at least two reasons. As the nearest indoor climbing venue to where I live it is probably the one I have visited the most. Not long ago, however, it closed, but I am told that it has now re-opened under new management. If all goes according to plan my regular climbing partner will have recovered sufficiently from his hand injury by next week for us to make another visit.
The other reason for my interest (as regular readers will recognise) is that the Leeds Wall was the place in which I did a large commission last year, designing a new area in which young children could be introduced to the sport. Ten panels, illustrating children’s stories and things that usually interest them (such as dinosaurs) made up a new dedicated “adventure zone”. I gather that it was quite popular before the wall closed. I did wonder what had happened to my designs, and heard two very different stories. The first said that this section of the wall had gone to a local school. The second that the entire internal design of the wall had been scrapped, implying that my work had just been junked. Of course, the two are not mutually contradictory. I’m not sure that I will ever find out, but the situation has set me thinking.
Not surprisingly I have a pang of grief about the thought that possibly my work has been destroyed. Then, however, I started to reflect on the importance (or lack of it) of the endurance of any art work. Several things fed, quite by accident, into this train of thought. I read the other day about the recent discovery by archaeologists of a significant find of an incredibly ancient figurine. Of course, my recent holiday in Sicily introduced me to some wonderful mosaics from the Norman period. Whether or not the original artists ever thought about the idea that their work might go down to a remote posterity we will never know.
Then, on the other hand, I thought about stories of the deliberate destruction of art works. Girolamo Savonarola, the fifteenth century Italian religious reformer, has gone down into history as the initiator of the “bonfire of the vanities”, in which repentant Florentines consigned to the flames all those things that they had been led to believe represented their commitment to worldly things. There is no way of knowing what wonders of mediaeval art perished in these holocausts. Savonarola was not the first to look at art in this way, as an offence against true religion. In the 8th. and 9th. centuries the Byzantine Empire was rent by the “Iconoclastic Controversy”, initiated by a group of clerics who insisted upon taking literally the injunction in the Ten Commandments that believers should not “make any graven image”. This was extended from objects intended specifically for religious veneration to all kinds of representative art. (Fortunately the Empress Irene put a stop to all that!) Again, it is impossible to even guess at the treasures of Byzantine culture that were destroyed at this time.
In more recent times, of course, the German Nazis attempted to root out all “degenerate art”, and in addition to mounting exhibitions that (some might say, perversely) “demonstrated” its perversity, conducted public burnings of paintings and books that fell under this designation.
In addition to these periods in which works of art have been the object of campaigns of deliberate destruction, history furnishes us with a sad catalogue of accidental destruction, from natural catastrophe or human ignorance, of countless items perviously valued, as well as those less celebrated pieces that, although possibly worthy of attention, have simply faded from sight. A good proportion of those things we treasure today has survived by fortunate accident rather than because of thoughtful conservation.
Reflecting on these things I started to ponder on the question of whether “posterity” matters. More particularly, should it matter to me as an artist, whether my work survives or not? Is it the fact of its having been made that is the significant thing about any piece of art? Some things that we might consider to be works of art have been made deliberately in the expectation that they will be destroyed. The original inhabitants of the Pacific coast of the USA and Canada, such as the Kwakuitl people, engaged in ceremonies known as the potlatch, in which large quantities of goods such as woven blankets were ceremonially burned. These were not the equivalent of old army blankets, but craft items specifically woven for the occasion. Clearly to the Kwakiutl the connection between art and posterity was not an obvious one. It seems that the making was what endowed goods with value, not their survival.
I doubt hat I have reached the end of this thread of thought. It is an interesting one, and it continues to puzzle me.