Document B (the blog - coming soon...)

A source for information concerning ephemeral art, including reviews of contemporary acts of ephemeral art such as performance, action, and happening.

Definition:

1. A wordplay stemming from Documenta, the international contemporary art exhibition held in Kassel, Germany, every fifth year since 1955.

2. The second collating form of "document" in a list of types of documents of art, with "a" being the original form or act of art of an ephemeral nature with each subsequent letter being a displaced and unique version of the original.

3. A succeeding document that is a token of the original ephemeral art experience.
• It is critical that no confusion should exisit in how to separate the original form itself and the secondary document of which there will be a unique and new experience.
• Special interest should be paid to this secondary document in relation to the possibility of an objective understanding of the original ephemeral form versus a subjective experience of the form of the secondary document itself, from which similar evocations of the original form may be made.

4. Rest easy, because unlike viewing a photo of a painting in a book (which is a good activity like drinking skim milk is,) the nature of ephemeral art is that, while it requires a document, for the subject, to maintain a record of itself, it does not need a document, for it in fact would rather remain so near the verge of evanescing that it actually perpetuates its own existence within an isolated and indeterminite zone where it is shielded from the weathering and conspicuous reality of a normal physical object of High Art.
• Like the power of myth, it is this abstract existence of the idea of the thing that makes its document humble, because the document knows it is not the idea itself. But as it goes for stories, the same goes for documents of ephemeral art, that there are better versions and there are worse versions of the tale. That search, for the unparalleled version of the tale of an ephemeral act of art, is the aim of Documentb.com.

Bruce Nauman - Mapping The Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage)
multi-channel video installation still