23/9/2010
Guillermo Faivovich and Nicolas Goldberg
Portikus, Frankfurt
Meteorit - El taco. El Taco, which weighed 1998 kg, is a fragment of an 800-ton iron mass, older than Earth itself, coming from the Asteroid Belt located between Mars and Jupiter. After almost forty-five years, the two main masses of El Taco will be reunited in Germany for the first time, at this Faivovich & Goldberg exhibition.
The artists, Daniel Birnbaum (Director Portikus and Städelschule) and Carolyn
Christov-Bakargiev (Artist Director, dOCUMENTA 13) will be present.
Talk:
10 October 2010, 5 pm
Public conversation between the artists and Simon Starling.
"… then the land was consumed by fire and flames surrounded the
trees, plants, animals and men. Only a few of the Mocoví people saw
the fires coming and dove into rivers and lagoons, where they were
turned into capybaras and crocodiles. Two of them, a man and his wife,
sought refuge in a tall tree, where they looked on as the rivers of
fire flooded the surface of the earth; but unexpectedly, the fire blew
upwards and burned their faces and turned them into monkeys …"
From the Jesuit missionary Guevara, on the Mocoví myth on how the
Sun fell from the sky (1764).
Four thousand years ago, a meteorite shower took place in a region of
Northern Argentina. The original inhabitants of this area named the
region Pinguem Nonraltá, which means Field of the Sky in the
Guaycurú language. El Taco, which weighed 1998 kg, is a fragment of
an 800-ton iron mass, older than Earth itself, coming from the
Asteroid Belt located between Mars and Jupiter. Discovered in 1962 by
a farmer plowing his fields, the meteorite was retrieved by a joint
scientific expedition between the U.S.A. and Argentina. It was then
officially presented to the Smithsonian Institution. Since the
North-American scientists lacked precise technology to section large
specimens, the meteorite was shipped to the Max Planck Institute for
Chemistry in Mainz, Germany. El Taco was divided in two halves through
a critical cutting procedure that took more than a year. Since then,
one part has been located at Washington's Smithsonian Institution, the
other one in Buenos Aires's Planetarium.
After almost forty-five years, the two main masses of El Taco will be
reunited in Germany for the first time, at this Faivovich & Goldberg
exhibition, a step in their journey toward dOCUMENTA (13), where a
future stage of their project A Guide to Campo del Cielo will take
place in 2012.
Guillermo Faivovich (b. 1977) and Nicolás Goldberg (b. 1978) live
and work in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
This exhibition is a collaboration between Portikus, Frankfurt am
Main; Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Productiva,
Argentina; Naturmuseum Senckenberg, Frankfurt; Smithsonian
Institution, National Museum of Natural History, Washington D.C.; and
Gobierno del Pueblo de la Provincia del Chaco, Argentina.
Realized with the generous support of the city of Frankfurt and
Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación Productiva,
Presidencia de la Naciòn, Argentina.
The artist book The Campo del Cielo Meteorites – Vol. 1: El Taco
was produced by dOCUMENTA (13) and published by Hatje Cantz on the
occasion of this exhibition.
Foreword by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev & Daniel Birnbaum, texts by
Hernán Pruden, Tim McCoy, and Jutta Zipfel, conversation between
Simon Starling and the artists. Texts in English, Spanish, and German,
17x24 cm, 184 pages, 84 color illustrations, clothbound.
Foreword from the book The Campo del Cielo Meteorites – Vol. 1: El
Taco
Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev: What is in the world that is older than
the world?
Daniel Birnbaum: So you mean this object is somehow not part of our
world?
CCB: Yes—it has become part of our world, but it comes from far
away and is very, very old. It is transcendent and immanent at once.
And it is in such an impossible condition because it has gone through
a sort of trauma when it got pulled into our orbit and was shattered.
DB: I presume that this will be the oldest object in the exhibition.
Are you sure it is an artwork?
CCB: Are we sure of anything? Are we sure that we are "we" because we
know we shall die, and because we have language? What is an artwork
according to you?
DB: Well, I doubt that I can give you a satisfactory definition of
the notion of "art" right away. But I am quite convinced that this
cosmic readymade will be accepted as a work of art—and a pretty
great one at that. There is a rather recent book titled After Finitude
by the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux that would be worth
mentioning here. He talks about objects that are so ancient that they
precede not only humanity and intelligent life on the planet, but also
any form of life known to us. He asks what these objects might have to
say about our modern philosophical tradition, which takes subjectivity
and language as its starting point. For him, the fact that we have
these objects and can make scientific statements about them forces us
beyond an insistence on finitude that is typical of modern thinking
after Kant. The meteorite could be an example…
CCB: Yes, it could, if one looks at it from the point of view of
time. However, Karl Marx, in "The Meteors," the fifth chapter of his
doctoral dissertation, uses the theory of celestial bodies of Epicurus
to argue almost the opposite. To him, understanding the materiality of
meteorites allows one to avoid any belief in the unknowable and the
infinite: "The heavenly bodies are the supreme realization of weight.
In them all antinomies between form and matter, between concept and
existence, which constituted the development of the atom, are
resolved; in them, all required determinations are realized." One way
or another, the Campo del Cielo meteorite field 1,200 kilometers north
of Buenos Aires in Argentina was known from time immemorial to the
pre-Columbian inhabitants of the region and since the late sixteenth
century to the Spanish, although only in the late 1700s were
scientists convinced that meteorites fell from the sky and were not
rocks coming from the earth's core.
DB: One last question. With this exhibition we are trying to rejoin
what belongs together. But, of course, our rock is still in two parts.
Do you see this as a tragic work?
CCB: I see the reunification of El Taco meteorite, from Campo del
Cielo, as a joyous work that celebrates—at least provisionally—the
possibility of reintegration. The fact that it gets divided again, at
the end of the exhibition, just means that art could be a lot better
than life.
Opening: 24 September 2010, 8 pm
Press reception & Book presentation:
24 September 2010, 11 am
Portikus
Alte Brücke 2 Maininsel, Frankfurt am Main
Hours:
Tuesday - Sunday 11 a.m. - 6 p.m.
Wednesday 11 a.m. - 8 p.m.
Monday closed
Admission free