So at the Escultura Social: A New Generation of Art from Mexico City exhibit at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, I got a free phone card.
It wasn’t a traditional phone card, though it was wallet sized. There were actually a bunch of them, next to a sign encouraging you to take one, with this inscription: “A found photograph opened a new lead. The latest details were left on a voice message at 312.397.3856.”
So take one I did. This card, titled An Expiring ending II, is part of Mario Garcia Torres’s (with Murtaza Roashan) multi-part, multi-medium piece — all based on trying to find a mysterious One Hotel depicted in a photo taken by an artist called Alighiero Boetti back in the 70s.
So I called the number, and got this message:
As you might have imagined, or already know, the film was never shot. Today, the One Hotel building has still not been found. Maybe it was indeed destroyed around 1981, but the story does not end here. The disappearance of the hotel building now has become less important, as the actual existence of it now becomes blurry. The image you are now holding became incredibly important. According to the photographer journalist M… (can’t make out), this image, which was recently seen in his deteriorating archive, was taken sometime between 1973 and 1975, when the One Hotel was supposedly in operation. The hotel was located in a depicted building. If you look closely, you can see the Aziz Supermarket, then the space where the hotel was, and next the pharmacy, both places present in Alighiero’s photo of the hotel. I now wonder if Alighiero went to Kabul later than 1971, as it has been written. Or perhaps it was all a construction of the artist, or maybe the sign on the hotel building was installed later. I’m now as confused as I was when I started looking for the building. In any case, if not photographic documentation, I did talk to someone in the neighborhood who remembered there was some twins that managed the One Hotel. Presently, I still refuse to believe that Alighiero’s story in Kabul never happened.
Then I got back to the net and found this artblog post by libby, who uncannily covered the exact pieces I planned to write about. I mean, the exhibit was a decent size, yet we both took pics and notes on the exact same pieces. Odd –
Thus some of my pics are below, but I encourage you to visit libby’s post for commentary –
Front: Ganz Grosse Geister (Big Spirits XL), Thomas Schutte; back: Short Cut, Michael Elmgreen and Ingmar Dragset.
Front: Abraham Cruz-Villegas, Rond Point; Back: Stefan Bruggemann, Explanations
Escultura Social: A New Generation of Art from Mexico City. Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. Until September 2, 2007.
