To: Grand Arts

From: Jesse Small

Re: Conceptual development

Vol.1

Issue.1.1

"Super-position"

The dialogue between an objects idealized permanent state and it's known demise is never resting, with many scales of ephemerality unraveling from the narrative. The essential life of a sculpture plays out through internal relevance rather than physical permeability. Without the supporting cultural understanding, sculpture may be perceived simply as an object, which is to say it is broken. Internal relevance means that even if the cultural support is, as in this case, mixed up, that the sculpture retains its inevitability and generates a fresh data stream.

By quantum impermanence I mean that apparent ephemerality and ultimate ephemerality are in super-position to one another, moment to moment in every single real thing.

Super-position is like simultaneity within a narrative, yet it refers to a physical dual existence, one object behaving like it was two, imbedded in interference patterns with itself. And if a sculpture is made in the likeness of antiquity, using an ephemeral substance, you have imbedded self denial, a reversed erosive process. The disagreement is not between opposites, but all along a sliding time scale, to the extent that the object has believably returned to us from a future state of singularity. It is believable that Victorian aesthics will become popular again in the future.

A sculpture made using solid titanium with the intention of lasting forever raises the image, at least in my mind, of a scorched Earth, the eventual end of everything. It is equally indicative of the ephemeral, and as a reaction to it, obtainable.

Sculptures that erode rapidly involve entropy in the aesthetics, and in breaking apart they become something else. Even advanced decay has itself been the subject of new construction, as in the Folly architecture of 16th and 17th century England. For once the irrational was made a priority, and the moment's mutation allowed to seek root. Folly architects from this period are among the earliest installation artists, within Neo-Classicism itself and yet already editing it down to ruin, with works that were neither architecture nor sculpture. What would the Folly of our time look like? That's what I want to make.