A paradox embodies contradictions, but is maybe more true than uninformed truth. I will make five statements from my digital sketchbooks about what I think 'traceless art' is.

First, it is about tracing our understanding of the world. People have always looked up at the sky to understand the world, because at ground level it is often difficult to see far: sometimes mountains, sometimes fog, obscure the view. Later, much later, we could look back at the Earth from the moon. This is the Australian Northern Territory, seen from a satellite; the dry soil of this landscape is used in paint, in ceremonies which trace the paths of the ancestors. These are temporary tracings in sand, or using plant materials.



At some stage there was a new development, when someone put a canvas between the artist and the earth. This is what has happened relatively recently in Australia; much earlier in many other places. Although these paintings on canvas may still convey the same stories: the paths of the ancestors, the web of relationships, the same snake-like figures and animals and rivers seen from the sky, like this river here near Bangladesh. And there are other traces of Nature which can be observed from up there in the sky, and which have been understood by people for a long time.

Such art is also an attempt to understand the cosmic system, like in these mandalas, which are also temporary traces: they’re made and then later the sand is dispersed. These images are made daily. They are prayers. And these are images of the Navajo. It is the process of making them, which takes eight to ten hours, which is the most important. The images are used for healing and after that, the sand is disposed of, because it’s too powerful. There are other temporary traces like string figures made with the hands – cats' cradles, Jacob's ladders and so on – originally representing the stars.

Performing is getting out of reach. Once only your voice and your feet were needed, and you moved around according to patterns of how to move – patterns maybe drawn in the sand like the sand drawings still made by tribal peoples. But then other, later cultures fixed things in writings and scores, and built theatres, and reproduced the same things in different variations, often after a lot of study. So music and movement become the embodied knowledge of specialist actors, rather than the community itself.

Yet even now our culture has non-scored musical forms like jazz, and forms of non-choreographed dancing exist all over the world in different forms, whether in the Boy Scouts or in Papua New Guinea. This is a kind of traceless art; like the Dragon Dancing of Singapore.

It is not, of course, just a question of Western versus Eastern culture. For example, the repertoire of gestures in Indian dance are rigidly fixed and exist in very precise variations, so they are similar to the score systems of art that we know. But movement is light in itself, and light and movement together create the shadow theatre, which is a royal artform, for example, in Thailand.

European theatres built for Kings became bigger and bigger in the 17th and 18th centuries, culminating in the Grand Opera in Paris. The buildings for the arts were now even more imposing in themselves, and the layout of cities was based on them. Art demanded a bigger and bigger stage, until Verdi's Aida called for Roman Imperial structures.

Art can be seen as an act of love, an expression of the beauty of the temporal. The act of love is an act mostly of relatively short passions, and then forgetting. It’s about remembering then not remembering, there’s a kind of beauty in that. Something remains, but it’s mainly unspoken, then it’s washed away.

And then there are art-forms like Christo’s works, floating, temporary structures with ropes and nylon. And those action paintings by Pollock. It’s sometimes said that with Pollock it was the same as with the Navajo: the act of making the painting was more important than the end product. The art market, of course, has denied that kind of insight.

These are nice, bad-quality photographs from the 1960s: Oscar Yorn ripping posters from the wall, Ben Voche in 1962, Reflexis saying: "Regardez Moi: c’est-la suffie" – "Look at me, that’s enough". I have a personal relationship with these kinds of temporary things, so this is a drawing system I did, a continuous drawing that I did in 1966 or 1967. It’s a group of students, because I led a school in continuous drawing from London to Amsterdam. So here are some pictures of that – I relate them to the sand drawings we saw before, because they were also temporary.

But there was always a contradiction in the art world. Take Beuys with his blackboard and writing. You can go to this museum in Hamburg, Berlin, and it’s nicely conserved there; but it was just meant to be chalk on the road. And it's the same thing with graffiti artists – as with the Australian Aborigines, a canvas has been place between their hands and the wall, because of the art market.

The perfect art collection is incomplete. So this is an artwork commemorating an archaeological site in a township in South Africa, in the middle of a road. We are always interested in traces from the past. We go to sites and museums to see the traces of Neanderthal people, or Roman Pompeii. We are fond of bones, and our museums are necrophiliac institutions. As is Madame Tussaud's, with its waxworks – an old tradition used by the Catholic Church.

Then you have a category of museum objects that once had another function, a religious function, like this star-map of the Siberian Shamans. These had a religious meaning; but they are put on show in museums, and when we go to look at them they are completely dead and de-sanctified – rather like the French Revolution de-sanctified the churches by putting all the altars in a line and classifying them. We like classifying; and it can be beautiful: take the 'cabinet of curiosities' with its little boxes and drawers. Sometimes the classification becomes an artwork in itself.

The cabinet of curiosities is where the museum began in the 17th century. But what started off as a little cabinet became a huge storeroom: now we have collected much more than we can ever see. The cabinet of curiosities could be carried around; today's museums are far from portable. Similarly, we have so much in our libraries and archives, that we can never read it all.

Perhaps we should focus on the now, not the past. Perhaps we need more space for our own creativity. Perhaps when we make art, we should make temporary art, traceless art. How can we keep it all, remember it all? It’s all too much.

There have always been temples, churches and palaces where precious things were stored. Many of these castles, churches and monasteries have decayed – and everybody loves ruins. It might be preferable not to preserve art, but to just allow it to slowly rot.

Medieval cathedrals, like the temples of other religions, were communal works in the beginning. Later, religious institutions became more and more powerful, and named artists started to paint these things. Further down the line, churches changed in function, and became a kind of tourist attraction.

Next, museums became the new churches, the new cathedrals, where you could see these famous objects of worship: artworks. New museums are more and more designed, they are more and more imposing in themselves. It seems as if the artworks are there for the museum, not the other way around. And it’s strange that the cathedrals of the modern age are museums, like the Musée D'Orsay in Paris, or the former cathedral of electricity and power, the New Tate in London.

These new museums are all so big, and so imposing, and they look like paintings or sculpture in themselves. So how can you show something inside, will it have it’s own life? Or is the museum itself the new art? It's incredibly clever; but is this what we look for in our culture, in our art? Tony Blair said that the Millennium Dome was a mistake, like the Paris Opera in its time.

This is a new centre that will open in Sendai, which is very transparent. But there’s another problem with this. It’s a very expensive building and the budget is small, so there’s no money left for the content, just the building. That’s a general problem now - I know of other places in the same situation.

In conclusion, I think we need to be less involved with posterity and the future, and less involved with the past, and more involved with our own creativity, at this moment, now.