Boxed Fragility

Relationships to the work’s locus and time have become aesthetic ­constituents of its expanded form. Such has been the case since the ­acceptance of installations, site-specific or not, as an artistic genre, since the appearance of land art, earth works and performance, the ­proliferation both of furtive and “process-oriented practices that take place over a period of time and that have to do with exchange,”1 1  - Patrice Loubier, L’indécidable / The Undecidable, trans. Mark Hefferman (Montreal: Les éditions esse, 2008), 195. and of manœuvres and other temporary interventions in public space. The ­artwork you see on display, whether in gallery spaces or outside of art venues, will not last. Or it is already over, experienced only through writing, ­photography, sound recordings, video, and websites. Art as ­stationary, permanent and stable form now seems archaic when ­compared with the complex, multidisciplinary projects that proceed by occurrences and infiltrate different layers of reality. Interest in ­impermanence, in ephemeral art is now ubiquitous. Not surprising, then, that the deterioration of objects becomes the focus of artistic process. The notion of fragility therefore goes ­hand-in-hand with that of durability. Fragile things are brittle, they threaten to break, crumble, lose consistency of form. Of course, the word “fragile” is widely used—for individuals’ lack of psychological and moral resistance, for human ­relationships, for the nature of ­appearances and representations, etc.—, but it is essential that we conceive of it here in its literal sense, not dodge the obvious—fragility is a material ­characteristic.

Patrick Beaulieu’s work offers a grounded point of reference for reflecting on this notion of fragility. Whether taking the form of ­installations of natural elements—branches, feathers, or butterfly wings, set in motion by luminous, mechanical, or electronic devices—, of a road trip down the long migratory path of the Monarchs,² 2 - Vector Monarca, a mobile multimedia project by Patrick Beaulieu, spanned over several months. Driving a small truck that could be transformed first into a video screen, then into an exhibition space, Beaulieu and writer Daniel Canty followed the migration of the Monarch butterflies from Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, Quebec, to Morelia, Mexico, where these mythic butterflies reproduce (www.vectormonarca.com). or of the creation of a package delivery company, his pieces, stemming from the brouhaha and uncertainty of trial and error and imbued with the poetry and subtlety of complex thought, are defined, again and again, by the very fragility of their materials. An artist whose tentacular creative projects branch out, extend and respond to one another through time and space, going from one venue to the next and proceeding by discrete occurrence, Beaulieu is ­particularly interested in the movement of animals, people, and goods, and in ­various tangential themes: borders, economics, politics, ­communications, ­deterioration, integrity, among others.