The art of evanescence

by Amy Waldman

In 1989, the Swiss artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss mounted a cheeky challenge to nature’s iron rule that snow, in tempera­tures above freezing, must melt. At the Römerbrücke thermal power station in Saarbrücken, Germany, they encased a snowman in a glass vitrine that was also a freezer. The energy generated by the plant kept the snowman—actually a copper mold of three balls, eyes and a mouth, around which humidity pumped into the freezer condenses into a semblance of snow—cold.

As Fischli observed, a snowman is a “sculpture that almost anyone can make,” but not one that anyone can sustain. “The power plant serves as the snowman’s lifeline, and in turn the art­work becomes completely dependent on it for survival,” the artists wrote. Dependency was one theme of the work, as was the tension between the natural and the artificial. What Snowman was not intended to be was any kind of statement about climate change, which was just coming onto the public radar then. As Fischli has pointed out, the power required to keep the snowman from melting meant that its very existence added emissions to the atmosphere.

In 2016, Snowman was revived. It toured the US, making stops at modern art museums in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, now hooked up to routine electrical supply rather than a power plant. Much else had changed since its first appearance. Weiss, for one, had passed away. The evidence of climate catastrophe was now incontrovertible. And it was clear that one casualty of warming temperatures would be snow. Across the Northern Hemisphere (and in the Andes), snowfall and snow cover have been declining for fifty years, pre­cipitously so in the last decade. How, then, do we think about—approach—Snowman today? For without snow, a snowman is no longer a sculpture that anyone can make.

There are now at least four editions of Snowman, including one at Fondation Beyeler in Switzerland. (There, its power source is solar, the sun protecting the snowman from the sun.) In reliquaries, holy relics are sometimes kept behind glass. Is Snowman, behind glass, a holy relic? These days it can feel that way. I imagine making a pilgrimage to sit with it, maybe in winter, to see the encased Snowman set in snow. Or is it—is snow—now a commodity, like a precious metal? Does Snowman’s value, in a market sense, increase as snow itself goes away? Does its emotional value increase?

On the terrace at the Art Institute of Chicago, when the thermometer hit 96 degrees, Snowman’s facial features sagged a bit. “Some sensitive viewers expressed compassion,” the artists noted in a monograph. Snowman is mineral, inanimate, yet it elicits compassion. (Darker emotions, too: “When I first brought him out, there was sun on his belly, and I felt sadistic, but that was part of the fun,” Fischli said in a public talk. “The puddles of condensation I especially liked . . . that there was an electrical wire running through the puddles.”) The need for care—the snowman’s dependency on us to stay “alive”—is part of the point, as Fischli himself has said. The nature of that care calls to mind the attachments people form with robot dogs or companions, and also the lack of care we’ve shown the natural world.

When Snowman is displayed, conservators must regularly clear snow from the mouth and restore its expression “to the artists’ specifica­tions,” as one article put it. The snow­man requires care both to stay alive (the distilled water must be refilled, the electrical connection maintained) but also, in the maintenance of its smile, to remain itself. Recognizable. That dutifully maintained expression on Snowman’s face is mysterious, an almost Mona Lisa smile. (Perhaps this was another Fischli/Weiss joke.)

The snow­man requires care both to stay alive (the distilled water must be refilled, the electrical connection maintained) but also, in the maintenance of its smile, to remain itself.

It appears benign, yet snowmen once represented terror and menace, or symbols of authority meant to be destroyed by pelted snowballs. “The white cold shadow of your soul,” was the poet Delmore Schwartz’s phrase. Bob Eckstein, author of The History of the Snowman, describes the Miracle of 1511, in Brussels, where snowmen and snow­women were shaped into politically charged and pornographic scenes. The morphing of snowmen into cuddly caricatures is a recent turn, arguably an American one. In 1969, “Frosty the Snowman,” a song from the 1950s, became a beloved movie, one we watched every December during my California childhood. Eckstein finds Frosty a “bland, anodyne” obscuring of the snowman’s true history of sex and violence, and I can’t argue. But Frosty troubles me, these days, for a different reason, which is his immortality. All kinds of plot convolutions take place to ensure that he doesn’t melt, that children don’t see him melt. Or they do—he turns into a puddle, leaving Karen, his child friend, heartbroken—but then he is resurrected. He hasn’t forsaken us. He won’t.

In this magical thinking, this blithe insistence on immortality, I see a clue to our current predicament. The refusal to accept that death is inevitable seems of a piece with the unwillingness to believe that continu­ing to burn fossil fuels would neces­sarily raise temperatures, or that the consequences of that rise would be anything but disastrous. In each case, there is an implicit insistence that the laws of nature don’t apply to us. Does celebrating your own exceptionalism, as Americans have been taught to do, also mean deluding yourself that exceptions will be made for you?

Among the institutions that purchased Snowman, reportedly for a “six-figure sum,” is the Queensland Art Gallery, in Brisbane, Australia, a place where snow almost never falls. The museum’s website describes the snowman, squashed into its case, as being “far from its European ancestry,” and also “perfect for selfies”—which seems, these days, to be art’s highest purpose. According to one essay about the acquisition, the work speaks not to cli­mate change but to climate defiance. Snowman, we are told, is “comically out of place in subtropical Brisbane; many Australians will have never seen a snowman in real life. Yet his presence is no less plausible than the Gallery’s year round air-condition­ing. If we can buy flowers and fruit out of season and remain at a comfortable 23 degrees Celsius all year round, why not have a snowman in summer?”

Why not, indeed? Why not tell ourselves we’re not losing anything, but rather gaining access to snow at anytime, anywhere? These days it snows more reliably in Los Angeles at Christmas than it does in New York, thanks to artificial snow that falls promptly on the hour at an outdoor shopping mall. Never mind that snow has been, for humans, not just a substance but an experience, of anticipation, surprise, delight, terror and awe, all charged by the unpredictable, uncontrollable process of water crys­tallizing out of our sight then falling gently (or frantically) to earth.

Perhaps we celebrate the technical aptitude that will allow us to replace what we’ve lost—in fact to improve what we’ve lost, because now it comes with no limits of season or place—in order to blunt our grief at what we’ve destroyed. In Basel, which is home to Fondation Beyeler, temperatures this February were 15 degrees above the norm. Temperatures everywhere were above the norm: it was the hottest February on record, just as each of the eight months before were the hottest on record and each of the four months since. Under these conditions, which are the conditions of our foreseeable future, making a snowman truly will require the Fischli/Weiss recipe: coolant, electric power, distilled water, a vitrine. The only conception possible will be artificial.

Perhaps we celebrate the technical aptitude that will allow us to replace what we’ve lost—in fact to im­prove what we’ve lost, be­cause now it comes with no limits of season or place—in order to blunt our grief at what we’ve destroyed.

In Doppelganger, her exploration of doubles, including her own, Naomi Klein writes: “For centuries, doppelgangers have been understood as warnings or harbingers. When reality starts doubling… it often means that something important is being ignored or denied. . . .” And elsewhere: “In stories about doubles, twins, and imposters, it is often the case that the doppelganger acts as an unwelcome kind of mirror.”

How can I not see Snowman as a doppelganger of all the snowmen we once made, a mirror showing what we don’t want to see? Perhaps all artificial snow is a double of the real thing, a re­flection insinuating itself into the place of reality. Unable to sleep one night, I end up on the webcam of American Dream, a power-sucking indoor ski area in New Jersey. The place is empty, of course, at 3 a.m., the footage of the ski-hill a flat gray-and-white. It looks like where snow goes to die.

The “contradiction between artificial and nature, because I’m making snow from a machine,” as Fischli put it, was always part of the sculpture’s point. But that contradiction dissolves—melts—when artifice is all that is left. In this light, the Fischli/Weiss Snowman seems part not of the family of jolly snowmen but of the history of horror. Of a future of horror, more precisely, in which this eerie creature lives forever even as snow vanishes from the earth. Whether or not the artists intended, the work now joins a long lineage of “specimens”—anatomical; zoological; ethnographic; samples dead or extinct—in vitrines. Like many such samples, Snowman reflects contradictory impulses toward annihilation and preservation: the peculiar instinct to honor through display that which has, in its natural context, been made to disappear.

Image: Peter Fischli / David Weiss, Snowman (1987/2019) (detail). Copper, aluminum, glass, water, and coolant system. AP 1/1 + Ed. of 2. 218×128×165 cm; object approx. 130×∅70 cm. Collection Fondation Beyeler, Riehen. Courtesy the artists; Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich/Vienna; Matthew Marks Gallery, Los Angeles/New York; and Sprüth Magers, Berlin/London/New York/Los Angeles © the artists

This article appears in the 2024-25 issue of the Berlin Journal.