Gone Tomorrow highlights the ephemeral and artist-centered nature of modern site-specificity with small-scale temporary interventions across the campus of Carleton College. White tiles are bestowed with the identity of "art objects" through the application of images - either flimsy reproductions of expressionist and Modernist work or hasty collages compiled from pages of Elegant Bride magazine - and then placed around campus.
The nature of the materials ensures the artwork's hasty disintegration. Paper, consumer printer ink, wheatpaste - all are quickly degraded by rain, and if let alone for a while will eventually give way to reveal a humble white tile, free of any artistic signifiers and likely to be discarded. Moreover, it's possible that people will simply take the tiles as mementos of their own, since there's nothing identifying the works' owner(s) or author(s), nor anything physically preventing the removal of the artworks.
In the present day, site-specific interventions are very much artist-focused, detached either from physicality (e.g. performance art, one- or two-day sessions with an artist at a given museum) or from permanence (e.g. ephemeral art, land art, large-scale installations running for a short period of time, perhaps at an art fair). Since these pieces then live on only through documentation, a given artwork exists as a corollary to the biographical information of its artist, and not as a piece that gains meaning through interaction with viewers and passersby.
Gone Tomorrow is ephemeral, anonymous, and in the context of the grand buildings by which it is installed, insignificant. It is a brief intervention, accessible (both physically and visually) only to those who see it in its short lifespan, and moreover it is a fragile one - it briefly impresses itself onto its viewer's consciousness, only to disappear forever.
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