A type of artwork, the Efemerata have no specific medium, scale, material or… Rather, they are characterized by their ephemeral aspect.
Ephemeral and undocumented artworks that redefined the notions of the art object, the artist, and the collection, exhibition and other parameters of the experience of art. Make them exist, after. In fact, it’s only with the efemerata that I discovered there was something else, before. Before the object, yes, but even before the creating, the making act. Before the act, and even before the conception. Thank the efemerata, thank them for the glory of the finding of the anagrapfika. (There have been no documentation of the efemerata, and no lists have been fashioned to even refer to the works.)
A large number of Efemerata (with their own titles and differing in various ways, from medium to materiality and duration) were composed and made manifest for a short period of time in the mid-aughts, and subsequently had a finissage at the Nelson Hancock Gallery in 2008.
The foundational components of Efemerata contributed to the creation of the Nothing Doings.
(And in a grand parenthesis, the Negatia: It might sound a bit, well, negative, but I was always fascinated, still am, by the virtual, and judicious, doing of nothing. And the mastery, at making people think you actually are doing something. Civil servants are great at this, and so are children (and teens). Come to think of it, everyone is really good at this. In galleries at museums, I’ve been fascinated at how fascinated people get at, and during, the installation of a work. All the stuff that goes on: the crains, the porters, the workers . Same with car wrecks or other types of vents where the voyeur is at play. I could not resist, in fact, was doing nothing other than making this process of the illusion of doing something, the works itself. And the subsequent movements, and the interactions, and the modalities of silence that it invites, into the work. I got such a kick out of it, that, in many situations, and in many places during travels for other work, and with different audiences and age groups, I asked people to pretend to be doing a thing for a period of time, but not really cumplir lo. That was variation one on negatia. The other, much simpler, was to document ongoing negatia, and make it variation two: the guy at the bank hammering away but knowing that the hammer wasn’t working, the… The negatia, in essence, became part of the Efemerata, kind of, and ultimately were folded into the grand framework of the NothingDoings…)