A New BAMPFA Show ‘Exalts’ the Museum’s Most Impermanent Things

The show has a straightforward but interestingly complicated premise: artworks are living, breathing, decaying, broken things. All artworks, like all things, are transitory. Organized by the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive’s chief curator, Margot Norton, To Exalt the Ephemeral: The (Im)permanent Collection might be a conservator’s nightmare, but it’s also an audience’s dream.

This is Norton’s first curatorial project since joining the museum last year, and it’s based on an idea she dreamed up while interviewing for the job. Pulled from the museum’s collections, the show focuses on ephemeral, conceptual and performance art — genres with a rich history in the Bay Area. Yet today, we see less of the ephemeral and more that is easily transacted upon.

Should art function like Dorian Gray, remaining perfectly young as time passes? It’s definitely easier to assign value to such work, and then let it sit, unblemished, accruing monetary worth on the art market.

To Exalt the Ephemeral honors an alternate route. Included in the exhibition are examples of artists who rebelled against the idea of permanence, either because they refused to participate in the status quo of the art market or because their artistic concerns took them into novel territory. The tension here is that the majority of the works in this show reference the idea of ephemerality as a subject rather than evidencing it physically. For example, a suite of Andy Warhol Polaroids refers to the fleeting nature of time as captured in a snapshot — but there is little in the medium that challenges traditional modes of photography.

The show opens with works that are the most materially relevant to the theme of ephemerality: objects that embody a sense of transience, because they were constructed with organic materials or because they are traces of past actions and fleeting moments.

Eva Hesse’s Aught (1968), a set of latex-covered canvases, connects to the crux of the show most directly. During her life, Hesse specified that no efforts towards conservation should be made, and thus, the works have acquired temporality as their co-author. These objects have gone beyond yellowing. They are pumpkin-colored, sagging, wrinkled slabs hanging inert in a series of four on the wall.

When they were first shown nearly 60 years ago, they were clear, BAMPFA curatorial associate and exhibition co-curator Tausif Noor told me. Hesse complicated the clean sterility of minimalism with the uncooperative nature of the body. These works, meant to be seen aging, bear the effects of time like flesh, boldly counteracting the idea that artworks should remain halted in their current state, perpetually preserved.

In this first gallery, we also get a framed diagram of directions drawn by strangers for Stanley Brouwn as part of his This Way Brouwn series. A small vitrine holds documentation and text from past performances, like William T. Wiley’s erased letter to Tom Marioni, a West Coast take on Robert Rauschenberg’s Erased De Kooning Drawing. Berkeley artist Lucy Puls’ Seer (1988), a bundle of fiberglass strips and bolts forming a multilayered eye-shaped hole, is especially muscular.

From there, the show expounds on the idea of impermanence more metaphorically. The gallery categorized under “Atmosphere and Environment” contains some of my favorite works in the show and yields some of the most curatorially liberated moments. Here you will find Joan Mitchell’s furiously painted High Water (1970) positioned beside Hans Haake’s Small Wave #5 (1968) — a skinny plexiglass sleeve suspended around eye-level with water trapped in between its translucent legs. When nudged with the tip of a finger, the sculpture swings side to side and the liquid momentarily forms a very thin wave. (Visitors are encouraged to activate it.)

Through the plexi wave, Sarah Charlesworth’s Arc of Total Eclipse, February 26, 1979 (1979) can be seen. Her series chronicles front-page newspaper coverage of the celestial event as it moves across North America. It’s a simple idea, executed with enviable precision. I cannot help but enjoy the relationship between the waves and moon that these artworks underscore through sheer proximity.

This gallery also presents some of the earliest works from the museum’s collections: 19th-century Japanese scrolls by Okamoto Shuki, acquired in 1909. These works illustrate aspects of nature, representations of impermanence in Zen Buddhism, and flank a much newer piece, Martin Wong’s 1982 painting Silence.

Narrow, muted in palette, Wong’s painting features hands arranged in American Sign Language fingerspelling — an iconography he adopted after receiving a “Hello, I’m Deaf” card aboard a New York City subway train, a fingerspelling alphabet on its reverse side. The pairing of the ink paintings with the implied hustle and bustle of an urban transit system yields a surprisingly delightful combination.

Honestly, all of To Exalt the Ephemeral is a delight. By showing works that are difficult to present, BAMPFA gives audiences a rare chance to see the true breadth of the museum’s holdings. The show overflows with the strength of the artworks in it. My personal preference would have been for even more non-object-based pieces, but I will settle for this peculiarity: the works on paper must be switched out every three months due to light levels. And so the show will grow over time because of conservation constraints. Ephemerality is never far behind us, necessitating return visits to see the evolution of the exhibition itself.

‘To Exalt the Ephemeral: The (Im)permanent Collection’ is on view at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive through July 6, 2025.