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Untitled (Missing Piece)
2005
Intervention on a checklist
Variable measures, edition 1/3
It allows the holder to reproduce the above label in any catalogue, exhibition, or collection checklist as a work of art by Mario Garcia Torres
Purchased in: 2005
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Text missing.*
- This accompanying text was to have presented the work of the young Mexican artist Mario Garcia Torres, and more particularly the piece mentioned. It would very certainly have noted its obvious reference to the practices of American Conceptual art of the 1960s. It might relevantly have drawn a distinction between homage and reactivation. It would have discussed the ideal of dematerialization of the artwork and its substitution by language and gesture, favoured by Conceptualists. The name Lucy Lippard would then undoubtedly have been quoted. It would also have appraised the meaningful modifications to these gestures according to the context in which they appeared because history never really repeats itself. The terms ‘updating’, ‘reinterpretation’ and ‘deictic’ could have been used, along with the word ‘reappropriation’. This text in particular might have commented on the way the challenge to the museum institution and the exhibition medium has been recovered by the very thing that was supposedly maybe being brought into crisis. In a more general way, and with a determination to problematize the notions in play, the subject possibly would have flipped over to the essential ambivalences of the notion of ‘absence’ which may designate the ontological incommensurability of that which is not immediate. Or more simply, how the missing part of something possibly includes all the rest, which is a lot. It might have concluded in a positivist manner by observing that a cartel with no piece thus possibly determines the whole world as being an artwork. The author then might have been unable to resist the temptation to use a famous, hackneyed quote from Robert Filliou. But we shall never know, because, in his concern to testify as justly as possible to the spirit of this work by Mario Garcia Torres, he has chosen not to publish this text.
Guillaume Désanges
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