Messages last longer than the medium

In some contexts, disappearing paper stacks have been called
art. That’s not necessarily the case with the disappearing
stacks of paper that we produce. After all, most of us who work at
The Bruin are sleep-deprived caffeine junkies working on a deadline
in an office where the air doesn’t move and the only fans are
for the computers.

The paper stacks I refer to are those of Felix Gonzalez-Torres,
a Cuban-born artist who was active in the 1980s and ’90s and
died of AIDS in 1996.

The stack disappeared because those who viewed the work were
invited to take a piece of paper from the stack home with them.

In fact, that was the point. For Gonzalez-Torres, these stacks
of paper were public art in a way that a large cubic sculpture
outside of a corporate building could not be. By taking a piece of
the work home, the public work became private, intimate,
individualized.

A newspaper works in a similar manner.

The Daily Bruin creates a work that is ultimately ephemeral
““ tomorrow these words might be irrelevant or out of date,
and the papers will almost certainly have been replaced by new
ones.

The information is general, but in picking up the paper and
reading it, the stories become personalized.

Maybe you’ll read an article about the Undie Run, but it
will remind you of the night you learned not to wear white
underwear because it doesn’t hold up well during
fountain-wading.

From the beginning, I’ve been fixated on the end. And,
working for the Daily Bruin, I suppose you could say that I was
interested in the end even more so because the end meant I would
get to go outside during the day and stop being nocturnal.

But in a completely predictable and cliche fashion (sorry),
I’m sad to see it end. And in constantly thinking in terms of
the end, I thought that I could escape it.

Gonzalez-Torres said his works have been destroyed from the
beginning because they are meant to disappear and be replenished by
an endless supply of papers.

But this also means that his work cannot be destroyed because,
as he said, “I have destroyed it already, from day
one.”

He likens it to being in a relationship that you know
won’t work out; you don’t have to worry that it
won’t because it’s over from the beginning. I knew that
this would be over from the beginning, but life doesn’t
imitate art.

That said, I guess this is the end.

But you’ve known that since the beginning.

Zehler will probably still be nocturnal.