File under: obscure, meta-conceptual, art heist
Posted August 3, 2007 by John Menick
As some of you who follow these things might know, the conceptual artist Michael Asher has been doing an ongoing project for the public art exhibition Skulptur Projekte Münster, in which he parks a trailer at various sites in the city. Asher started the project in 1977 for the first Projekte Münster, and he has repeated it for every iteration of the shown since. It’s been 30 years now, so the city has changed, but not the trailer. Here it is today, looking a little out of era:
Anyway, I don’t know what the carjacking rates are for Münster, but according to a blurb in ArtForum, the said trailer was stolen. Or, as ArtForum writes, the trailer “disappeared without a trace.” A short while later:
Police reported that the trailer had turned up in the town of Telgte, Germany, approximately six miles from Münster. An initial inspection found no damage to the work, which is an original. The trailer will undergo another inspection before being reinstalled in the exhibition.
A statistical fluke? Münster’s yearly carjacking strikes a conceptual artwork? Or something more ingenious, a meta-conceptual art heist pulled off by some disaffected German art students? Stay tuned…
