IAB iron meteorite, 1574 kg
PORTIKUS, FRANKFURT 2010
Prompted by the encounter with one of the halves at the Buenos Aires planetarium, some elementary questions began to shape an artwork that would try to answer them elementarily: where is the other half of the meteorite, when was it divided, who did it and why. Although this type of impersonal and reasoned inquiry into detail has its point of origin in what could be defined as an intuitive approach towards the object (which was already reflected in early works such as La Sorpresa y los meteoritos que ya no están Campo del Cielo), as time went by, it was methodologized into a practical and applicable model. During the period of those first approaches to meteorites as an embodiment, as an idea and legacy, until finally encountering El Taco, the artists were refining the conceptual framework without revoking their acute emotional foundations.
Their research revealed the terms under which the legal dominion over El Taco was disputed after its exhumation, in an asymmetrical institutional courtship between Argentina, the United States and Germany. Names and documents were progressively revealed; the changing status under which the meteorite was passed from hand to hand (first "gift", then "donation" and, finally, "loan" to the Smithsonian Institute) was studied, and the discussions about which methodologies would be the most suitable to examine it were also reviewed. It was learned that the rationalization of the object took place in terms of gothic scientism: the desire to exercise on that body actions such as "cut it in half" in order to produce "large specimens", "remove a slice from each half" or "polish it and clean it with nitric acid" was recorded in the notes and letters exchanged between institutions.
From then on, El Taco's trajectory expanded and contracted alternately: it crossed the Atlantic to the German city of Mainz to be sliced by means of an experimental system, it returned in pieces to America and, in 1967, five years after its discovery in the Southern Chaco, one of the halves was repatriated from Washington to Argentina. A large amount of technical information about the meteorite was produced both in Europe and the United States, while in Buenos Aires it was destined to become a public Sunday attraction, without any documentation accounting for its current status or its past journey.
Regarding the artists' work, the theorist Graciela Speranza speculates that "more than denouncing the underhand abuses of colonialism, the negligence of institutions, the inequalities between the First and the Third World, the geopolitical 'dealings', [Meteorit „El Taco”] composed the remains in a work that invited us to pay attention and reconsider its effects". In other words, it is the procedure of arranging the material remains of politics that which validates a genuine political dimension for art: conceptualism thus becomes a condition of possibility for the human-historical and the cosmic-ahistorical to be probed as complex processes rather than reduced to simple slogans. The space that separates the two halves of the meteorite is also the division between aesthetics and the purely material.
Rather than presenting the artist as a plenipotentiary political figure, Meteorit „El Taco” attends to the full dimension of the artist as a materialist rhetorician, a figure capable of exercising a very specific type of persuasion over the structures that rule the world. The artistic language is thus established not only as one of the systems designed by humanity to address extraterrestrial matters, but as the most suitable for overcoming the difficulties generated by all other systems.