Josephine Condemi
Have you ever seen a monument disappear? Jim Denevan’s ephemeral sculptures are designed not to remain the same and require an effort of regeneration that is always a choice. We met him
«My shoulders are in pieces»: Jim Denevan cannot afford to ignore the physical component of his art. His last work, Self Similar, created in 2023 in three weeks for the Manar Abu Dhabi1, exhibition in the United Arab Emirates, stretched on Fahid Island for almost one square kilometre and a height of twenty-seven metres: from a circle drawn with a stick in the sand, it formed 19 concentric rings of 448 pyramids and mounds in a mandala pattern. Until last January, it was possible to visit it by entering from an Iron Bridge aligned with the position of the sun at sunrise and sunset: from the two mounds for 360-degree observation or from the centre, the self-similarity of the whole design, in which a part is always similar to the whole, was clear. But all of Denevan’s works are topographical, interacting with places by inscribing temporary signs.
Jim Denevan (1961) is an American artist who creates temporary land artworks all over the world. His installations are ephemeral sculptures in sand, earth and ice, often monumental. His works have been exhibited at the Vancouver Sculpture Biennial, the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts and MoMA/PS1, among others. In 1999, he founded Outstanding in the Field, a sustainable outdoor dining travelling format. His life and art are the focus of the film Man in the Field (2021). He lives in Santa Cruz, California.
Discover his siteWhat is topography for you2?
My mother was a mathematician, so in my mind surfaces are changeable, always in a state of change. In whatever environment I find myself, I think of it in a transitory state. Also, my brother is an organic farmer, used to interacting with different and ever-changing weather conditions. It also applies to cities: if you go back to the same hotel after ten years, different people will work there. Culture is constantly changing people: there are fascinations that in ten years will no longer be particularly interesting. In my particular type of land art3 I emphasise the transient through large ephemeral sculptures. Transient is not generally associated with big things, because monuments imply durability. But of course, apart from the pyramids in Egypt and a few other things, many of the works that we consider monumental, and which were central to cultural life in past eras, are either covered by trees or are no longer in the context of their original location. If we consider natural formations, for example mountains, as monuments, we see how through geological eras they have been transformed into something else: millions of years ago, the Appalachians were the Himalayas.
So I think it is poetic to create compositions on what could be called the skin of the earth, the skin of a body that is not static.
Take seasonal lakes: in Australia, they call them “lake versions” because water is only present 5-10% of the year and yet this marks their identity. If we think about it, if we look at the Earth from an aeroplane, the most ubiquitous sign of culture is agriculture: centre, pivot, leaves and irrigation canals, circles or rectangles. We no longer see them because of how ubiquitous they are.
For the realisation of your works, you rely on the participation of the local population. In what way?
It is a fascinating question. If you think about it, there are figurative, geometric artworks and even traditions of ephemeral signs in different cultures around the world. This potential cultural exchange makes me think of dinner or sharing a meal or gestures like: “here is the food bowl, there is this and we will eat it together”. I think the contribution of different people in the creation of an ephemeral artwork is like such a cultural exchange. It is similar to a dance performance that results in an ephemeral sculpture. There are several stages: first I walk to find a suitable place to start, then I mark the ground with a stick, then I carry the tools, lay them on the ground and if someone is there and wants to help, they can do so. On a beach in Uruguay, six people who walked around speaking different languages started to help according to their physical strength, interest and time available. What is the utopian motivation that drives them? Someone might choose to work for half an hour, someone else for one hour, or two. It happened to me that one person would choose to work for five days.
How many people can participate? Because your works are huge.
Ten to 150 people. Very large piles of sand can only hold four or five people around the perimeter so that they do not hit each other but work together. In smaller heaps, on the other hand, the ratio is 1:1 and everyone feels they can contribute, it is easy and fun, for people of all ages. It is when the work gets big that it is challenging and can be, in terms of physical strength and duration, daunting. In these cases, support is not free. I worked very hard in the desert, both in Abu Dhabi, in the United Arab Emirates, and in Saudi Arabia, even with 70 people a day. I was thinking of doing something like this on the border between France and the Netherlands, on the two banks of a very big river: I had a dream about going to a beach full of people with all the tools and maybe bringing lunch and suddenly there are like 2000 people helping. I haven’t done it with those numbers yet, but we’ll see.
How do you choose the exact spot where to build the work?
I walk for a while and feel the views. Those who, like me, do land art ask themselves: “Does it fit the context? Is this the most natural place to start?” Of course, it takes some time but I am in no hurry, I proceed slowly. For example, for the type of composition made in Abu Dhabi, you start with a circle, which is divided equally. I have been doing this long enough to be able to do it with good precision. The compositions are imperfect but seem to be mathematically perfect. Paradoxically, when the dimensions become very large, the error tolerance visually is much larger.
What are the differences between Angle of Repose from 2022 and Self-Similar from 2023?
The Angle of Repose project in Saudi Arabia is named after the 45-degree angle that a dune forms when wet, before returning to its usual angle of 34 degrees. I was fascinated by the idea that it was possible to calculate this sliding in time, position A and position B. In Morocco, a Barchan dune 30 metres high and 400 metres wide has moved more than a kilometre in 30 years, as can be seen on Google Earth. Moreover, dunes move at different speeds depending on their size: the smaller they are, the faster they move. It is then possible to calculate the relationships between the dimensions over decades. There are many interesting directions to go with ephemeral art, I have learnt a lot about sand: beach sand does not have silt like river sand. In Saudi Arabia, it was river sand, which compacts in contact with water. In two and a half years, an Arabian fox moved into one of the sand heaps, plants grew on top of the melons rolled down the sides of the dunes, but still, the dunes did not reach 34 degrees. In Abu Dhabi, on the other hand, the silk component of the sand was less.
Through ephemeral art, he decides to leave his works at the mercy of the elements, symbolising the vulnerability and transformation of the landscape and our bodies. In this sense, can we say that the most sustainable work of art is the one that disappears?
What we wish would last, like the loved ones, the beautiful things that have been, we consider them beautiful because they don’t last, like the sand you hold in your hand but you know it will be blown away. My brother the farmer has this impulse to realise a kind of earthly Eden but still, everything collapses and crumbles. Maybe, in a way, the idealism within the concept of sustainability could be seen as an effort to hold on to the best of our values or what we love but in the end… they are bound to end, you know? We will not live in a utopia any time soon. And many of the utopias, as we have seen, have led to terrible results. With my compositions and with my work together with exceptional people, I bring forward the realisation that the desire for utopia, if taken to extremes, is both unrealistic and harmful, and it is fine to recognise that our greatest efforts come to nothing, that everything falls apart, like the myth of Sisyphus. We continue to push the rock up the hill and work to create beautiful things and bring beauty and culture, be it dance, music or whatever. But, in the end, there is the poetry inherent in the fact that the other side of life is death and we cannot live forever. When it comes to art, there is a great effort to preserve masterpieces or the environment of the… conservation. And we are a team of people working with museums, to preserve something from the past: but we should realise that we see the traces of the past but we are not experiencing the same context. The Egyptians had different gods and different fixations and obsessions and those of people today will seem just as strange.
And what is yours?
A personal obsession, I think, is to see myself as a medium. Even the word medium, as a medium, is a means of expression of something you have inside. The environment is changing: I love dance and music, arts that are expressive but have no physical substance. Land art is in a way thought of as visual art or sculpture: you walk around it, and you can see it. I have combined my passions through ephemeral sculptures, which resemble a dance. For the next project I am doing, which I cannot name, I am discussing with funders the possibility of organising a festival every spring, to revive the sculpture, or letting time take its course. Both choices are interesting: bring perfection back to life or let it go? We try to cultivate, to realise but we also have the freedom not to.
The question of sustainability, in a way, is the sustainability of meaning in a changing environment
What does the desert mean to you? What did you learn from the desert?
I link it to the word “transcendent”. The desert is a tabula rasa for thoughts, the mind is free from the influence of the world that constantly speaks to us through the construction of roads and buildings and people everywhere. In terms of space, the world is very sparsely populated, but people gravitate towards the places where there are others: the desert serves as a way to get away. It amplifies what happens in urban parks, where we go to find some peace but can be perceived as bad and antisocial, even though the world drives us mad, potentially. Our humanity need not be the obsession of this particular moment. Geology and the passage of time help to acquire this dimension. In the desert, you can see the stars, and the mountains eroding and crumbling. All this change brings me much peace. A big part of the attraction of very, very large ephemeral surfaces is the fact that you can go back to the same place another day and try something else, and that too will disappear. And so it’s just like singing or dancing. It is as if there is a lot of freedom in that. The desert is a place that is material, but immaterial at the same time. It is simultaneously presence and absence because it is turning into something else.
Was he one of those children building sandcastles on the shoreline?
More or less. I grew up very close to a river with a lot of rocks and for many hours a day, I would work on moving the rocks to channel the water into the stream. I would focus on: what is the water doing? Where can I put the rocks? It is a game on a large scale. I make a living pushing sand around. It’s a bit difficult but you can try.
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- Manar Abu Dhabi is a public art initiative supported by the Abu Dhabi Department of Culture and Tourism (DCT Abu Dhabi) as part of the ‘Public Art Abu Dhabi’ programme. Starting with the word Manar (‘lighthouse’ in Arabic), the first edition in 2023 resulted in new commissions and site-specific light sculptures, projections and artworks by local and international artists. ↩︎
- Topography (from the Greek topos, place, and graphia, writing) is the science of mapping the earth’s surface through drawing. ↩︎
- Land art (from English, “art of the earth”) is characterised by the intervention of artists directly into the natural landscape. It spread from the American 1968 as a reaction to the institutional system of production and distribution of works of art. ↩︎
