An LED panel from Japanese artist Ei Arakawa’s sculpture Harsh Citation, Harsh Pastoral, Harsh Münster (2017) has been stolen by vandals, Artnews reports. The sculpture, which presents a light and sound play, is made up of seven hand-assembled coarse-rastered LED panels and is currently on display at the decennial festival in a field in front of the converted farmstead Haus Kump, which houses part of the city’s Chamber of Crafts. Paintings by Jutta Koether, Amy Sillman, Nikolas Gambaroff, Gustave Courbet, Joan Mitchell, Atsuko Tanaka and Reena Spaulings make up the images on the panels, which are then arranged as an audio-visual choir to challenging the ‘accepted reception of painting as an object fixed to the wall’.
The New York-based artist is working on a replacement for the panel, though it will be made of black PVC rather than the hand-dyed fabric of the other panels. Arakawa has said ‘This is in part because it will take less time to replace, but also because I want this incident of the public artwork being stolen to be visible to future visitors.’
22 June 2017
