Fleeting: Viewing as a Happening

After experiencing the critique for Fleeting this past week, I have thinking of how the work on the day it was viewed and by who viewed it plays a dual role as a sort of happening in addition to its role as a site-specific installation. Through the dreary weather, the coldness and despair in the work became amplified. With their umbrellas and hunched bodies, the audience for the critique became active and further stressed this coolness and despair found in Fleeting. The visual of the hundreds of browned formerly white roses, especially the ones that fell off the brick structure, referenced this notion of being left with bone, the flesh all having been decayed and separated from the body. The wetness of the rain offered a physical coldness to match this cool read of Fleeting. The ways in which the weather effected the audience of the critique and the brevity of the critique are the two factors that lead me to view Fleeting as a potential happening.