What is today’s life of a work of conceptual art and how it persists in the public space?

Once in the art is permitted everything, and post-media reality allows us to use the media (means of expression) without any restrictions (often they go beyond the art itself), many art works have acquired a particular form of existence.

As a result of the emergence of conceptual art in the 60s the idea of the work became the most significant for the artist. Today, there is usually no need, or for various reasons it is not possible, the idea to be expressed with a specific material form stable over time. Work of art often appears as a short creative action, dependent on the presence and participation of the audience and it’s personal experience and perception. For this reason, the authors begun to leave the standard galleries, looking for places in urban spaces. They use the environment to create a relation with people and their everyday lives.

But this type of creative interventions are materially present in time only for a moment, and then quickly „disappear” with the author and participants. Thereafter, at a particular place remains only the urban wilderness devoid of a certain artistic/spiritual sense. In this case, wilderness can be understood as a deserted space, which thanks to the artistic action was visited by people before. On the other hand, wilderness can be seen as an environment cluttered with information, where the chaos of produced inducements doesn’t allow us to capture a particular thought/idea. In an such environment a similar creative intervention redirects the viewer’s attention, makes his mind focused on one particular problem.

This type of artistic actions are often used by artists, but the truth is that they are regularly confronted with the lack of participants/spectators. People are still not used to participate actively
in art and prefer to stay „safe” observing the art event from the distance.
In this case, we must ask ourselves the question: how this type of work can continue to exist, since it failed to reach the large number of people and wilderness overcame it’s physical presence?

The only form in which it can extend it’s life is a documentation of what happened, of the idea, of this short moment of it’s physical existence. But that does not guarantee that the idea will spread and that it will reach a wide audience. Documentation in form of photos, catalogs, videos and more often remains forgotten, disappears into the wilderness. Therefore, there is a need to promote it and to share it. In this way we may give a better chance for an art concept to don’t die, and to continue to achieve it’s results in time.

Thinking philosophically, this type of works are similar to the wilderness, which in Buddhism refers to things that appear for a short time, but always depend on certain circumstances, and then disappear. They can not be specified as existing or non-existing. This kind of art works are situated in the uncertain space „between”, constantly fighting for a little more time.