photo from flickr
All buildings are meant to collapse. As we construct them, we know perfectly well that they will crumble, gnawed by the years. Such are societies, arts, revolutions. The men that paid with their life revolutions to establish a new government knew that this system would not be eternal, that one day other men would destroy what they had done to rebuild a new world that would also be ephemeral. The men that fought for new ideas or a new conception of art knew that one day their movement would be considered as old and outdated ; the avant-garde would give place to a new avant-garde. When we invent a fabulous machine, the oldest machines are eclipsed by it. To create is to destroy. Whatever we erect, we knock over the precedent construction. Each movement sweep away the precedent and is inevitably destroyed by the following.So why do we built and give everything to build? Maybe because some buildings cross ages. When it happens, the man who managed to build a durable thing enter in the history, because he defied the time. Everything fades with time. But the greatest reason is that we want to ignore that the time will rub out our existence. And, anyway, the creation is no vain. Indeed, what matters is not the creation itself, what matters is the moment of the creation. It is maybe a thousand times more important than the object, the idea, the government, … we create. It’s the idea that stays and not the object. We build just for building. The ideal work is the one that has never been finished, like sigh ready to fly off. The artist captured the moment of the creation. When we finish a work, then we know that it’s ended, that the spark of the creation extinguish, that we will have to make it reappear, because from then on that the work is completed, it starts its progression to oblivion and collapse.
