Maria Eichhorn Aktiengesellschaft

For her presentation at the Documenta11 in 2002, Maria Eichhorn founded a German Aktiengesellschaft (AG) named Maria Eichhorn Aktiengesellschaft.

In 2007, the Van Abbemuseum purchased the resulting work, likewise titled Maria Eichhorn Aktiengesellschaft, and subsequently published a book containing all the relevant documents concerning its creation in the same year.

In Eichhorn's own words: 'My contribution to Documenta11 is a public limited company to be formed for an indefinite period. Within the structure of the company, its functions are to be adapted and its attributes rewritten, that is to say, the form and content are to be developed and established in ways that differ from those usually practised in companies. The assets assigned to the company when it is founded are to remain unchanged. The assets are not to become part of the macro-economic circulation of money and accumulation of capital or be used to create added value. All of the shares will be transferred to the company itself. The company will therefore be the owner of its own shares - all of its shares. The money assigned to the company in the form of contributions at the time of its formation continues to belong to the company. However, the company no longer belongs to the shareholders because they have transferred their shares to the company. The company belongs to itself, as it were. That is to say, it ultimately belongs to no one. Therefore, the company's assets, its money - no longer have any relation to the shareholders or to anyone else. The concept of property disappears in this case.'

While some of these premises are correct, most of the deductions derived from them are somewhat misguided.

An Aktiengesellschaft is a legal entity that creates a limited financial liability for the owners of said AG. The founders have to buy shares of the company at its formation and this initial capital is then used as the company's collateral. The formation of an AG requires a minimum contribution of € 50.000. This sum of € 50.000 is presumably chosen to be quite a large amount of money for most individuals, yet a somewhat insubstantial amount for the kind of sizeable business the limited liability is aimed at.

Additionally, any AG is considered a commercial business under the German Handelsgesetzbuch, which states in book one, part one, section one, that 'a commercial business is any commercial enterprise unless, by reason of its nature or size, the enterprise does not require a commercially organised business operation.' 

Here we encounter Eichhorn's first possible misconception. It could very well be argued that the nature of the Maria Eichhorn Aktiongesellschaft doesn't require a commercially organised business operation. In fact, 'the assets assigned to the company when it is founded are to remain unchanged' is somewhat of an antithesis to business operation in general. If this is taken literally, then the Maria Eichhorn Aktiongesellschaft isn't a commercial business at all, and therefore couldn't become an AG either. 

However, the watchful legal eye of Eichhorn's collaborator Tilman Bezzenberger stated that the goal of the company is 'to manage and preserve the company's own assets'. Which is a perfectly valid and oft-used purpose of an AG, which are not uncommonly companies that produce nothing of their own and simply exist to direct the flow of capital. That this flow could remain static as a result of the companies' efforts is an improbable, but perfectly possible, outcome. This formulation thereby provides a legal basis for Maria Eichhorn Aktiengesellschaft's existence.

The next step that Eichhorn stipulates is that 'all of the shares will be transferred to the company itself.' According to her, the result of this is that the company will be the owner of itself. 

Ownership is a principal part of law, but one that is not always well understood. Ownership under German law is defined in section 903 of the civil code as: 'The owner of a thing may, to the extent that a statute or third-party rights do not conflict with this, deal with the thing at his discretion and exclude others from every influence.'

In this sense ownership of an AG's shares is not to be taken as a direct ownership of the company as a whole in the same sense that one can own a piece of furniture. While only the shareholders have a right to vote during the general assembly and are ultimately the recipients of the companies' financial gains and losses, the lack of ability 'to deal with the thing at his discretion and exclude others from every influence' certainly steers away from a philosophically naive idea of ownership.

Ownership of an AG, in the full sense of the world, is thus at best shared between the shareholders and the managing board, which sole member in this case is Maria Eichhorn herself. As is stated in the AG's entry to the commercial register: 'She [Maria Eichhorn] represents the company solely even if additional members of the managing board are appointed in the future. She may conduct legal transactions on behalf of the company'. Although Maria Eichhorn, as a person, might not 'own' the shares that represent the assets present in the company, she has free reign to direct the company as she wishes, which I would say lies closer to the idea of ownership as it was outlined before. No one but the managing board has agency over the assets present in the company. The shareholders' influence can only ever be indirect, which reflects their limited personal financial liability for the company.

Furthermore, it must be noted that the possibility of a company being owned by no one has obvious and far-reaching consequences for the proper working of a legal system. Therefore most countries, Germany included, have laws that regulate a company owning shares of itself. As Tilman Bezzenger once again points out in the second supplement to the contract between Eichhorn and the Van Abbemuseum: 'Under German law, a company may not continue to hold a substantial portion of its own shares indefinitely. Rather, Paragraph 71c(2) of the Law on Public Limited Companies provides as follows: "Where the shares which a company has lawfully acquired ... and continues to hold account for over ten percent of the company's subscribed capital, the proportion of shares in excess of this percentage must be sold within three years of the shares' acquisition".'

The solution Bezzenger concocted is that every three years Maria Eichhorn Aktiengesellschaft transfers its shares, free of charge, back to Maria Eichhorn, before she in turn transfers these shares back again to the company. This recurring moment where Eichhorn temporarily becomes the only shareholder of the company also provides the opportunity to work around another law that bars a company from voting its own shares in shareholders' meetings. It is only at these shareholders' meetings that the members of the supervisory board can be elected and such elections must be held at least every five years. These brief, but recurring, moments where Eichhorn is the factual shareholder of the company thus provide an opportunity to arrange these necessities.

While legally sound and effective in yielding the maximum amount of time that an AG could possibly be its own shareholder, the fact that this construction requires active and recurrent intervention by people who are legally allowed to make decisions concerning the company is a severe dent in the idea that Maria Eichhorn Aktiengesellschaft 'ultimately belongs to no one'.

The conclusion that Eichhorn finally arrives at, that 'the company's assets no longer have any relation to the shareholders or to anyone else' is thus plainly false. Nor can it be said that 'the concept of property disappears in this case'. 

The company's assets comprise of nothing but € 50.000. And as is stated multiple times in various documents regarding the registration of the company: 'This paid amount of Euro 50,000.00 is definitively at the free disposal of the managing board.' As the only member of the managing board, the full amount of € 50.000 has thus always been available to Maria Eichhorn. It doesn't matter who is or isn't a stakeholder in the company for this to remain the truth.

In all of practical reality, the € 50.000 has thus always been the property of Maria Eichhorn and despite what many people think, law follows reality, not the other way around. It doesn't matter what you call something, it matters how one acts. Simply saying that something 'doesn't belong to anyone' doesn't make it so and despite her best efforts, Eichhorn hasn't overcome such a legal impossibility. 

 

Out of all the 40-odd legal documents that are reproduced in the book Maria Eichhorn Aktiengesellschaft, I found that the most telling document was the only one that was considered an 'illustration'. This document was the original loan agreement between the organiser of the Documenta11, documenta und Museum Fridericianum Veranstaltungs-GmbH, and Maria Eichhorn.

The legal team working on behalf of the documenta understood the ramifications of Eichhorn's project quite well and took a very level-headed approach to it. The organisers of the documenta agreed to provide Eichhorn with the sum of € 50.000 required for the foundation of the AG, but only as a loan with a limited duration. The loan, issued on March 12, 2002, had to be repaid in full by December 31, 2007, or whenever one of two things would occur. The first is if the work would be sold and the second is if the AG would be liquidated and dissolved. 

The people who drafted these conditions understood full well that despite Eichhorn's assertions to the contrary, at no point would there be a situation where she doesn't have full control over that € 50.000. Legally speaking there is nothing to stop her from simply taking the money and running, except in a situation where the money was provided as a loan that had to be repaid.

More interestingly, in the document that details the agreement between Eichhorn and the Van Abbemuseum there is only an implicit assumption that the Maria Eichhorn Aktiengesellschaft will continue to operate in a similar manner in the indefinite future. A stipulation does exists that says 'the Artist will work towards ensuring the continued operation of the public limited company until the end of 2012', but please note that this does not entail any real obligation on Eichhorn's part.

Further it is stated that: 'In the ninth year of the public limited company's existence, that is to say in March 2021, new rules on the organisational and legal maintenance of Maria Eichhorn Aktiengesellschaft shall be agreed between the Van Abbemuseum and the Artist'. Presumably this means that every few years the agreement is extended, without significant changes, for another few years. That is, until it isn't and the € 50.000 somehow has to be placed back into the 'macro-economic circulation of money' it was supposedly removed from.

While such stipulations are completely understandable from a practical point of view, they hardly adhere to the idealism that seems to be the raison d'être of the work. 

 

Far from finding a 'form and content [...] that differ from those usually practised in companies', Maria Eichhorn's project fits snugly in the current existing framework of legal and financial practices. Ultimately, her construction doesn't factually do what it's supposed to do and it is only the concepts that her work relies upon which disappear in that case.

Baker 4

A professional skateboarder can call himself a professional because he has sponsorship deals with some skateboarding related companies.

To become a professional skateboarder, one naturally has to posses some above-average abilities, but just as important is having something that sets you apart from the many others who posses similar abilities. It are these characteristics, such as a recognisable trick selection, a distinct fashion sense, some outspoken personality traits or even a noticeable name, that give a professional skater a marketability that leads consumers to identify with them and subsequently purchase the products they represent.

While most sports rely on the metrics of competition to display the notable characteristics of their athletes, skateboarding has found its own marketing medium for its more intangible traits. This medium is the skatevideo. 

Skateboarding brands commonly have about ten to twenty skaters on their 'team', much like the stable of an art gallery. Up until the 2010's and the advent of social media, the primary way a company would showcase this team was through videos of roughly 30 minutes to two hours in length. They were sold in stores on VHS or DVD and released every two to three years. 

In these videos each skateboarder on the team had a section for themselves. Such a section is also known as a 'video part' and they are the considered the primary achievement in a skateboarders' career. A video part is typically 3 to 5 minutes long and is a sort of highlight reel of what tricks the person has performed in the last few years. These parts are usually set to a piece of (popular) music and the song that accompanies a video part tend to become heavily associated with the skateboarder in question, as well as how their audience perceives them.

One of the professional skateboarders who posses a very recognisable image is Dustin Dollin.

Dollin came to prominence in the early 2000's, with video parts in the videos Baker Bootleg, Baker 2g and Baker 3. All these video were unsurprisingly produced by his board sponsor Baker. 

Dollin also had major parts in Chicagof from clothing brand Volcom and Sight Unseen, a video published by the now-defunt magazine Transworld Skateboarding.

With these parts Dollin became known for being somewhat of a powerhouse who knew no fear and could jump down the biggest gaps without flinching. At the same time, he cultivated somewhat of a rock'n'roll image, with alcohol use featuring prominently in this. 

 

This kind of behaviour isn't an uncommon sight in the skateboarding industry. There are numerous examples of famous skateboarders who are 'washed up' by the time they hit their thirties because of injuries or alcohol and drug abuse. 

The skateboarders in their forties who still work in the industry have almost always transitioned into other aspects of the business. There is of course the example of Tony Hawk and the famous video games named after him, but there are also people like Ed Templeton, who now entertains a successful art career with the same kind of photos he used to shoot for his skateboard company Toy Machine.

By the time Dustin Dollin hit his thirties, he was still 'just' a skateboarder, albeit a much less prolific one than he had been in the early 2000's. Occasionally he featured in videos published by his sponsors, but his contributions rarely consisted of anything more than a few unremarkable tricks.

Dollin's only genuine video part in the period between 2007 and 2019 was his part in Propeller. This was the first video released by Vans, a shoe company which has sponsored Dollin since 1999. This part however was only a minute long, versus an average length of three to five minutes.

In 2016 Dollin also had a part in Holy Stokes! produced by long-time clothing sponsor Volcom. This part is unique in the history of skateboarding in that it only showed Dollin's slams, with not a single successful trick being performed. While highlighting failure isn't unusual in the skateboarding world, it is uncommon that this isn't offset with a glorious triumph. It seemed as if Dollin was trying to bite off more than he could chew in the tricks he attempted and all he had to show for it were images of him choking on the pieces.

 

After an extended period of silence surrounding Dollin's skateboarding, we arrive in 2019.

It has been about twelve years since Dollin has produced a video part that adheres to the norms of the skateboard industry. At this point it can very well be argued that Dollin's recognisable public image is the only reason he still retains his sponsors. Yet this is an image of a heavy drinker, largely unable to perform the tricks that had made him famous. That his alcoholism hasn't landed him in jail or the morgue is seen as a positive and his only redeeming quality is that he's still featured regularly in promotional videos, even if he's often not skating in those videos. 

In the latter half of the 2010's, Dollin was considered somewhat of a court jester; entertaining to be around, but not to be taken too seriously.

It is in this climate that the long awaited Baker 4 is released. This video is the sequel to Baker 3, which was at that point 14 years old and can be considered the high-water mark of Dollin's skateboarding career.

In a brilliant move, the song chosen for Dollin's part in Baker 4 is 'The Comeback' by Alex Cameron.

The opening lines to that song are 'You been in showbiz long enough, you get a grip on how things work / But that don't mean it ain't a surprise when they come to take your show / I been in showbiz long enough / You need to wait your turn / wait your turn like me.'

The part starts with Dollin attempting a trick and breaking his board on the landing, before walking away unscathed and smiling to the camera. After a few other tricks at the same location, a harder fall is shown, but Dollin is still laughing and lands the trick immediately after. A contented Dollin is then seen petting a dog.

This cuts abruptly to Dollin mid-trick at a completely different location, falling to the ground. Sitting on the floor after his fall, he immediately reaches for his jacket pocket and takes out a cigarette. 'They say the kids don't wanna see / an old dog sing and dance' plays in the background. 

The whole part has a decidedly slower pace then most skateboarder's videoparts, with tricks being shown twice, many images of Dollin hanging out and longer than normal cuts of his run-ups and roll-aways, which are often accompanied by audible cries of celebration in the background. 

During the longest celebration scene, many of Dollin's friends can be seen hugging and cheering, while the song's lyrics go 'They ignored my lawyer / and they ignored my wife / and I just sat there thinking / I hate my god-damned life'. This cuts to the next clip, showing Dollin standing in the rain, amping himself up for yet another trick. 'I used to be the number one entertainer / now I'm bumpkin with a knife / I'll never get my show back' the song continues, as Dollin jumps down a wall and slams so hard he bounces back up from the concrete floor. For a whole 12 seconds, the camera slowly zooms in on Dollin lying stooped in pain while the rain continues to fall upon him. The cameraman asks him: 'Yeah Dustin! You alright?' and in response Dollin raises an index finger, telling us he's going to need a minute. 

After a friend puts his arm around his shoulder in support, Dollin is seen back up on the wall. It's a different day, with the rain no longer falling. He makes his trick, shouting 'Fuck yeah', while the song exclaims 'We're gonna get my show back'. The next clip comes and the song continues; 'Come on we're gonna get my show / I got too much love stored in me / I got a pain you'll never know / You'll never get my show' and it slowly fades out as Dollin lands his final trick, riding away with a somewhat pained expression on his face. 

The part ends with him walking and falling to the ground, seemingly exhausted.

What struck me about this videopart is that it was an honest portrait of Dustin Dollin at that point in his life and his career. He might even be shown as quite vulnerable and fragile, which is highly unusual for a skateboarder. A videopart is a showcase of abilities and challenges overcome. To emphasize the fact that despite his best efforts, Dollin has to take a step back from what he used to be able to accomplish doesn't sit well with the idea of a skatevideo as promotional material for a business.

What is also interesting about this part is that it's a cumulation of a development that lasted almost fifteen years. For this part to have any kind of impact on its audience, they have to be familiar with his achievements of more than a decade earlier, as well as his subsequent failures and shortcomings. Dollin has been successful at maintaining a career in skateboarding for over twenty years, but this rare feat has also come at a price and this videopart somehow manages to acknowledge both sides of that coin.

In the end Dollin's part is an honest celebration of an unusual life trajectory which one is hard-pressed to find anywhere else and for that it deserves to be highlighted far beyond its original context.

Quite a Few Short Sad Thoughts (1990)

In 2018 I created a presentation in an architect's office titled 'The Collector', wherein I recreated a number of works by well-known artists.
One of the works I recreated for this presentation was 'Short Sad Thoughts' by Mark Manders. While researching the works I came across some peculiarities and in Manders' case it was the existence of a number of exhibition copies which are otherwise unmentioned in the available literature, as well as a second copy that was sold at auction in 2014.

In the literature it is unambiguously stated that the work is in the collection of the Van Abbemuseum, which acquired the work in 1994. In their collection entry, the dimensions are given as (2x) 22,1 x 2,5 x 0,3 cm and the material is copper wire.

On the left we have the current documentation photograph of the work available on the website of the Van Abbemuseum. On the right is the work as it is was reproduced in the catalogue of the exhibition held for the 30th anniversary of the Heineken Prize for Art, in which Short Sad Thoughts was featured. This right photograph is the most recent documentation of the work at the Van Abbemuseum.
There are some small differences between these two photographs, but overall it can be said to be the same work. There are two distinct features of the version in the collection of the Van Abbemuseum. The first is that the bends at the top are not perfectly symmetrical. This can be seen in the left photograph, where the right half is clearly hung mirrored to the right half in the right photograph. The tops of both wires are slightly skewed like one would see in a lowercase 'n'.
The second feature is that one of the wires is slightly bent at the bottom of one of its legs. This is pronounced on the right leg of the left wire in the right photograph. It is less visible in the left photograph, but it's nevertheless also present in the earliest published photograph of the work, so we can assume that it's a defining feature of the original.

This photograph is from the catalogue 'De afwezigheid van Mark Manders', published on the occasion of the 1994 exhibition 'Mark Manders shows some fragments of his Self-portrait as a building' at the MUHKA, Antwerp. Please also note that the work is not titled 'Short Sad Thoughts', but 'short sad thought (2 times)'.
It can be stated with a fair degree of certainty that this is the same work as in the 2018 photograph. There is similar asymmetry at the top and, more importantly, a similar bending of the leg at the bottom.
These features are also present in the documentation of the work in the catalogue for the 1997 show at De Appel, Amsterdam and Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, as well as the catalogue of the 1998 São Paolo Biennial and the book 'Singing Sailors', published in 2003.

All three books use the same photograph for the works' documentation, a slightly grainy black and white photograph with a large amount of contrast.

The next published photograph of the work is the documentation of the 2006 exhibition 'Short Sad Thoughts' at the BALTIC Centre for Contemporary art, Gateshead. This is some excellent documentation and it was used by Mark Manders for his own personal website.

This photograph is not identical to the documentation of the Van Abbemuseum. The largest difference is that one of the wires is horizontally flipped and that the nails are somewhat large and distinct in appearance. By correcting this and overlapping them it can be seen that they in fact are extremely similar to one another. It can thus be said with a fair degree of certainty that the original work from the collection of the Van Abbemuseum was on show at the BALTIC exhibition.
Two other noteworthy facts about this documentation is that the material is erroneously noted as 'Brass, nails' and that the photograph showing the work in detail is in black and white. Given that the other two photographs are in colour, this might be caused by a graphic designer trying to 'correct' the colours of the copper in the photograph to match the colour of brass before giving up and turning it into black and white.

In 2004 the work was featured in an exhibition at the Museum Beelden aan Zee, Scheveningen and from 2007 to 2009 Mark Manders was the subject of a traveling exhibition titled 'The Absence of Mark Manders', which was held at the Kunstverein Hannover; Kunsthall Bergen; SMAK, Gent and Kunsthaus Zürich.
For this catalogue the same, black and white, photograph from the BALTIC exhibition is used and the work is credited (as in all other cases) as 'Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven'. Interestingly the material of the work is again erroneously stated as 'Brass, nails'. Presumably they used the most recent available documentation when preparing the catalogue.

Up until this point everything seems fine. There is a work made by Mark Manders, sold in 1994 to the Van Abbemuseum and since then has occasionally traveled to other exhibitions, as is common with artworks in museum collections.

Then in 2010 things change.

Mark Manders is once again the subject of a traveling exhibition and this time the exhibition takes place in the United States of America. Starting from the 25th of September 2010 at The Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the exhibition travels to The Aspen Art Museum, The Walker Art Center and the Dallas Museum of Art, where it ends on the 14th of April 2012.
For whatever reason, it was decided to make an exhibition copy of the work.

While this copy was still credited as being in the collection of the Van Abbemuseum, it was without a shred of doubt a different version as it was not made in copper, but in brass. This is not extremely clear in my photograph of the catalogue, but the two photographs of the exhibition on the website of Mark Manders clearly show the work being brass-coloured and not copper-coloured.
What has likely happened is that in remaking the work, they again used the most recent documentation, which was the catalogue to the traveling exhibition of 2007-2009. There the materials were listed as 'Brass, nails', which was tellingly illustrated with a black and white photograph. Using only this information, it stands to reason why the copy was made in the shiny yellow and a lot more rigid brass, rather than the murky brown and malleable copper.
The shape is also markedly different, with the top edges being much more symmetrical and the legs being more straight, as is to be expected given the different characteristics of the materials.

The next exhibition to follow was the 2013 Venice Biennale. 
Once more there was a copy on view and again it was made from brass. As far as I can tell it was a different copy than the one shown between 2010 and 2012. The left wire seems more pinched together, while the legs of the right seem further apart. It is also much less clean looking, even in the photograph of the catalogue. Simultaneously it is the first time where the work is shown hanging directly against the wall, rather than on the end of the nails, suggesting that the work was either hung with some lack of care or some handsy visitors already ravished the work.

In the meantime Mark Manders published his own 'Reference Book' in 2012, which is the most comprehensive overview of his work thus far.

In this book there is a black and white version of the installation view at BALTIC, together with a new colour photograph of Short Sad Thoughts in copper. The origins of the photograph are unknown, but it is likely that the artist took the photograph himself. The photograph shows more than one pronounced shadow, which indicates poor lighting conditions. These are uncommon for a museum, but expected in an artists' studio. I thought it might be a colour version of the earlier contrast rich black and white photograph, but the differences in shape between the two photographs are patent. I am thus uncertain about the origins of the work. It is clearly different from the copper version in the collection of the Van Abbemuseum, with one wire being distinctly shorter than the other, but I don't have a clear match to any other copy reproduced in another catalogue.

Another photograph of note was the one that documents the exhibition 'Curculio Bassos' at the CGAC, Santiago de Compostella.

The shape of the work is extremely similar to the copy shown in the USA. This includes the distinguishing pointy shape left by cutting wire with a pair of pliers, which aren't present on the version shown at the Venice Biennale. However, it can't be said with certainty that these marks are present on all of the ends, which is the case in the Hammer Museum version, and additionally the brass wires are much more tarnished than the pristine version shown in the USA. It is therefore difficult to ascertain whether or not these copies are really one and the same.
Another interesting find is that while all other versions have been credited as belonging to the collection of the Van Abbemuseum, this is the first that stipulates the work as courtesy of Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp.

The last time I've seen the work in person was at the Bonnefanten museum, at the exhibition titled 'The Absence of Mark Manders', which at the time of writing is still open to the public.
There the work on display was once again a copy, one so brazen that I could recognise it as a copy from another room.

To the credit of whoever made it, it is at least a copy in copper instead of brass, even if the material is still listed as brass. It thus stands to reason that its maker must have had some first hand experience of the work in the past. Unfortunately, this is were my compliments end.
The first thing that I noticed, and which is very difficult to show on photographs, is that the copper had the wrong diameter. Because copper bends very easily, it is difficult to buy a solid copper rod thinner than 4mm. So what I believe they have done at the Bonnefanten museum is to simply get the thinnest copper rod they could buy and use that, which is always more thick than the slightly under 3mm diameter of the original. I had already encountered this problem when I made my own copy of the work. My solution was to use some electrical wiring, as this is sold as 6mm², or 2,76mm diameter, but does come on a spool and thus has to be straightened. I also believe Manders' used this kind of electrical wire for the original, given some slight tool marks on the work, the corresponding thickness of the wire, the 'great difficulty' of bending he constantly describes and the simple fact that the original isn't completely straight.
Possibly to keep the proportions right, I also believe this work to be ever so slightly longer than the original at 23 cm instead of 22 cm. Although it must be said that the only evidence I have of this is a blurry photograph I took while holding one of my notebooks as close to the work as possible without freaking out the guards.

In the photograph on the left one can also again clearly see the markings left by pliers, as well as the extreme unevenness at which all the legs have been cut, which is the biggest flaw in my opinion. It truly looked like somebody simply grabbed a piece of copper rod, bent in half, quickly cut the ends up at a length that looks kind of right and hung it up. A legitimately disappointing moment in the exhibition.

So this is a short overview of the many different exhibition copies that I have encountered of Short Sad Thoughts. While I understand the possible advantages of exhibition copies, the extent with which they have been present in this particular case has somewhat confused me.
Part of the reason for this is that Mark Manders is otherwise an artist who is very open about his works not being unique, both in philosophy and factual documentation of the work. The work Short Sad Thoughts can be seen as a copy of itself and Manders has copied many of his works at 88% of their original size. It is likewise quite common for him to openly retake older elements and rework them or remake them into newer sculptures, which creation dates commonly span over a decade, such as in the case of 'Notional Cupboard (1989-2003)'. A lot of his works are also casts and highly reproducible, with many of them produced in an edition of three to five. Again this is done completely openly, so that there is never a question about who owns the 'original'.
Perhaps the secrecy that surrounds these particular copies can be attributed to the fact that the work was made when Manders was only 22 years old and he thus likely didn't even anticipate the work ever traveling the world. Perhaps no adequate solution was therefore stipulated for these kind problems.
At the same time, there is a creation myth propagated by Manders himself surrounding this work. In a short text that often accompanies the work, Manders now says the following: 'This work consists of two hanging copper wires that appear to be at the mercy of an enormous gravitational pull. In reality, it was with great effort that I bent the wires, an act I then repeated in exactly the same manner.' The first instance I found of this text was in Dutch and simply said: 'In werkelijkheid heb ik het koper om moeten buigen' or 'In reality I had to bend the copper'. The first English translation I could find of the text left out the word 'great'. There the wires were simply bent 'with effort'. Not wishing to undermine the perceived difficulty of the work by stating it has been remade multiple times could be a reason to not speak openly about these copies.

As what to actually caused the introduction of these copies I can only speculate, although I suspect it has something to do with the representation of Mark Manders by Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in the United States of America. Their collaboration started in 2007, a few months before the last exhibition where we can be certain that the original was on loan from the Van Abbemuseum.
The next exhibition where Short Sad Thoughts was shown was a touring exhibition in the USA, undoubtedly facilitated in some part by this new American gallery. Since then, every single exhibition outside the one held at the Van Abbemuseum in 2018 has used a copy of the work instead of the original.
At the Bonnefanten exhibition the work was also credited as courtesy Tanya Bonakdar Gallery and Zeno X Gallery, even though in the catalogue it was credited as Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven.

Perhaps this is an absent-minded mistake but it nevertheless seems strange why they would make a (badly executed) copy for an exhibition when the original is not even 100 kilometers away, only to credit it as a joint ownership to the gallery the museum originally bought the work from.

There is one loose end in my investigation and that is a group show at the gallery Kayne Griffin Corhan. Manders himself must have been involved with the exhibition is some way, as his publishing house ROMA publications published a catalogue for the exhibition. In this catalogue the work is credited as 'courtesy Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven' and the photograph of the work is the documentation of exhibition at BALTIC. On the gallery's website they instead used the photograph of the work at the Hammer Museum.

From installation views of the exhibition I do however suspect that it was a different copy altogether and quite a bad one at that. It is difficult to establish any kind of fact from a 20 pixels wide segment, but my experience with the work tells me that it is much more rounded off at the top and more wide. It also appears to be more orange than any other copy I've encountered. These features somewhat negate the appearance of a strong gravitational pull being exerted on a piece of copper, which was the original appeal of the work.
This particular copy thus raises some questions, including its setting in a commercial gallery, but I have nothing I can say about it with any certainty.

As a final note, I wish to point out the fact that the work in the Van Abbemuseum might not be considered the original, depending on how you wish to define original.
Lot 47 of Sale 3046 held on 7 and 8 of April, 2014 at Christie's in Amsterdam was titled 'Short sad thought (2 times) (fragment from Self-portrait as a building)'.

I originally believed that this must have been a fake somehow, inspired by the recent showing of the work at the Venice Biennale. Yet direct comparison between this work and the work pictured in the 1994 MUHKA catalogue would suggest otherwise.

The shape of both works is markedly different, so it is not simply a question of reusing an older photograph. While the metal is different, indicating the originality of both works, the small sign with the title of the work appears almost identical, from the shape to the typeface to the thickness of the paper. This says that while they are different, they likely do have a similar origin. They are also almost identically spaced, even if there is no particular spacing specified in the works documentation. Most tellingly, the nails in the auctioned work rusted quite severely. I'm thus inclined to believe that this in fact is a second version that was acquired directly from the artist.
What's peculiar though is that it is stated to be edition number 2/2 on the certificate, yet the work was apparently sold in 1991, three years before the Van Abbemuseum acquired their version. At the same time, there is no mention of the work being an edition anywhere in any of the literature.
As none of the other publicly accessible entries of the museum's collection data mention edition sizes, this omission might just be a consequence of the museum's record keeping.
In either case, if the work sold at Christie's was in fact bought in 1991, it could be the first work to enter into public circulation, thereby making this the original from a copyright perspective, rather than the 'copy' from the collection of the Van Abbemuseum.

To end this post I would say that I truly wish I had some concluding remarks about all of this, even a vague opinion. I think I only set out to show how much knowledge one can gather from simply looking at a work and its descriptions.

An Existential Statement of the Form ∃x φ(x) such that φ(t) is True

This post is a bit unusual as I will talk about my experience with The Witness, a video game released in 2016. I'm writing about this game because it is a puzzle game which does not give explicit, verbal, explanations about its own rules and as such I feel its existence is relevant to a view of art in general.

The Witness is a game that has a very large scope. Starting from a simple idea of a puzzle where a single line runs from a beginning to an endpoint, the full game contains an entire three-dimensional island to explore with various themes and settings.
The core gameplay of The Witness, as it's presented to the player, consists of solving line puzzles. The player has to draw a line from a circle to a rounded-off end of a line.

Throughout the game there are multiple symbols added to the puzzles that define ever-more complex rules for the route the line can take between these two points. These rules are never explicitly explained to the player, however, and the main hook of the game consists of the player figuring out what the rules are that govern these puzzles and their symbols.
The clearest example of this is the swamp area. Before you enter the swamp, you have traversed through at least two other areas. Then when you enter the swamp you see this set of puzzle panels:

 

These panels, starting on the right, gradually teach you how to define a shape within the panel with a line. It starts out extremely simple and by the sixth panel you have a decent idea on how to define a shape. When finishing this puzzle, you look to the left and you see the following:

In this view going straight seems like the most logical step. The walkway leads to an open area and the yellow path is brightly marked. This yellow marked path actually contains a puzzle that you haven't been shown the rules to yet. By this point you've nevertheless realised that part of the game is figuring out these rules, so you fumble until you get it to work and bring you further along, only to encounter two other groups of puzzles ten seconds after:

These puzzles require definite knowledge about how you're allowed and able to combine the various shapes within a single line segment, knowledge these first six introductory panels haven't touched upon. So you get frustrated and you move backwards to where you came from. At the earlier junction where you went straight, you now turn right and you find these:

A total of eight panels that very explicitly serve as a reference on how you can combine the shapes by a single line. Panels four to six even share a single solution to make it very clear what matters and what does not matter when defining these shapes. After you have found these, the rest of the puzzles in the area are quite straightforward, increasing the difficulty largely by introducing a higher density of shapes and adding a few smaller rules.

Acquiring this kind of knowledge is how most players will spend a large part of the game. Knowledge is introduced and then tested in a number of puzzles, which tend to be somewhat trivial once you have formulated the rules right. After you solve all the puzzles in each area, you activate a laser that points to the top of a mountain, clearly indicating that this mountain is somehow a point of interest.

Once you have gone through a number of areas like this, you have become acquainted with the game's mechanics and you enter into its last areas: the town and the mountain. In these areas it is no longer about gathering knowledge about the mechanics of the various puzzles, but about applying this knowledge and understanding it more deeply to solve a wide range of complex and creative puzzles, without ever being able to do anything other than moving around and drawing lines.

This latter part of the game, once you have seen most of the island, was for me by far the most enjoyable part and I found it ended rather quickly once I got there.

So far, so good, you might think. Designer Jonathan Blow has made a silent game about solving line puzzles on an island. Fun to explore if you're into that sort of thing and if you don't like drawing mazes then maybe this game isn't for you.
The story doesn't quite end there though and in order to delve more deeper into other aspects I first would like to point out some flaws I find with the part of the game I have just described.
As you can see from the description above, the first part of the game is more or less about learning, while the second part is about applying the knowledge gained in the first part.

If the first part of the game is about learning the ruleset of the island, it is important that this introduction is done clearly and, more importantly, without contradictory information. For the most part, Blow and his team succeed in doing so and have demonstrated well that it is perfectly possible for a game to let players figure out what they need to do without actually telling them. The earlier example of the swamp puzzles show that is very possible to provide a clear introduction to the rules for a puzzle using non-verbal communication.
Even the existence of environmental puzzles, considered one of the game's biggest secrets, is at one point communicated very, very, clearly. One of the areas closest to the beginning also has you use elements from the environment to find its solutions, which should be a huge clue that you should pay attention to your surroundings.

Before I delve further into those, however, I would first like to bring back the focus on what has frustrated me the most while playing The Witness. This is the fact that it at times deliberately obfuscates the kind of information that is necessary to understand the rules to the game. Blow has stated in interviews that this kind of obtuseness is something he has tried to avoid and while I believe he has genuinely tried to do so, I can't say that he has always succeeded, at least in the way I experienced this as a player.
For example, let's take a look at the introduction of a symbol with one of the more complex rulesets. The first panel and a solution look like this:

Which is fairly straightforward, even if you have no idea what's going on. The puzzle only has twelve possible routes and three of those are correct solutions. Even when merely fumbling around at random, I still have a one-in-four chance of finding a valid outcome. Like in the introductory panels of the swamp, this is more than alright, as any grounded deductions about the functioning of a symbol can't reasonably be made from any single panel. Which is exactly why the following panel is so problematic:

This is the next panel you encounter in a set of five introductory puzzles. The other panels are only activated once the previous panels have been solved, so there is no other way to continue except solving this panel. Because we only have the knowledge gained from the previous panel, the player can't reasonably be expected to have a well-formed hypothesis of the function of the symbol yet. At the same time, making a lucky guess isn't realistic either. Where the previous puzzle had twelve possible routes, this one has 184 possible routes. Only six of those routes are valid solutions and all of those solutions are longer than the average route. So while the number of solutions has doubled from the previous puzzle, the number of possibilities has increased fifteen-fold. You are therefore asked to extract an enormous amount of knowledge from a tiny amount of information. While in retrospect it is technically possible to come to the right conclusion given what you already know about the puzzle, I don't believe it is an effective, nor refined, method for teaching a new set of rules. From my own experience I can only think that these particular panels were designed in this way as to provide an artificial difficulty level that is perceived to be necessary when solving any kind of 'puzzle'. In my own playthrough, I got stuck trying to figure out this rule for about thirty minutes, before obtaining a hint for it outside the game. This quickly made me understand what the rule was and I consequently solved all other puzzles in that particular area within the next half hour.
The difficulty therefore doesn't lie in comprehending the system, but in simply knowing its rules. If you know the rules, it is easy, if you don't, it's extremely difficult.

The Witness is described as a game where you solve puzzles and I believe many of its problems stem from this description. In my opinion, the game mostly presents its panels as logic puzzles. In a logic puzzle you are given a set of rules and you have to understand how they interact with each other to see what their possible outcomes are. Figuring out the rules themselves isn't a challenging puzzle, or at least it shouldn't be. Shoots and Ladders, for example, does not automatically become a puzzle game by simply refusing to explain the rules.
Where Blow has gone astray in some parts of the game is that sections that should have been there to non-verbally explain the rules of a certain puzzle and have instead been treated as if they were puzzles themselves.
This has made some parts unnecessarily difficult, while at the same time partly undermining Blow's own vision of creating a game that allows a player to grasp the concepts of said game by simply observing well and 'being treated as an intelligent person'.

There are also other parts of the game where things are made more difficult than they need to be in a more arbitrary matter. After finishing the puzzles in the jungle, for example, the laser you have to activate is located within a small maze. This is already somewhat annoying on its own account, but it is made worse by the fact that the actual entrance inside the maze to the room that contains the laser looks like this:

It's right there in the center and I couldn't see it either. There is a little open area with a distinctive tree next to the entrance to help recognise its significance, but this tree simultaneously blocks the clearest view of the entrance. In the end I just used the knowledge that every maze has a solution by simply following a wall to its inevitable conclusion, which is tedious at the best of times. I can understand the importance of mazes for this game and have no problem with the other instances, but this particular one was a needlessly burdensome implementation for what in every other area is a fairly straightforward path.

Another component of the game that has been somewhat of a double-edged sword for me are the aforementioned puzzles which incorporate the environment, most notably the sunshine. I wholly applaud their inclusion and I think it's one of the main reasons The Witness feels like every part of it is somehow connected to all the other parts. At the same time I can't help but feel that the gameplay implications are occasionally extremely frustrating for the player. The vast majority of these puzzles require the player to stand precisely in a specific spot to either find the solution or see the puzzle at all. Even when you know where to stand, it is still sometimes awkward to get it right, with many tiny button presses required to obtain the correct viewpoint. It is thus once more the case that if you posses a certain kind of knowledge, the puzzle is hardly a puzzle at all, but if you don't have this knowledge the solution is literally out of sight.
At times these puzzles are made even more difficult by introducing a changing element on a timer. In that case moving around haphazardly to find the right viewpoint and at the same time trying to keep an eye on where you are going is cumbersome and adds little to your understanding of the puzzle's mechanics. I believe that as soon as you understand how a puzzle ought to be solved, executing that solution should be trivial. Unfortunately this isn't always the case in The Witness. Blow's previous game, Braid, also had these kind of moments where once you understood the solution to a level, there was still some finicky platforming maneuvers necessary to execute that solution.
It must also be mentioned that I had to play the game on a low graphic quality setting. This admittedly kept the game playable, but it certainly didn't help with of some of these puzzles that are so dependent on the way things appear. Especially in puzzles that had to do with shadows it was at times unclear whether I had the wrong solution or if I had simply mistaken one pixelated line for another.

Then there are also some decisions made during the design process that I can't really understand or account for. In some puzzles, I would estimate about one tenth of them, the puzzle panel turns black after you input a wrong solution. Then you have to go back to the previous panel and redraw the solution for that panel to light up the other panel again. This already tedious endeavor is made worse by the fact that the solution to the previous panel is still highlighted there. You just need to mindlessly trace a line that is clearly visible before you can go back to the panel you want to be working on. 

I have yet to find a good reason for those particular panels shutting off after inputting a wrong solution. As I said before consistency is very important if you want to teach somebody about anything, so having some panels shut off while others do not without any particular reason can't really be justified in my opinion. Perhaps some playtesting would have shown the errors of my ways, but even their necessity at parts of the endgame isn't enough for them to be included earlier in a more forgiving setting.
The wrong turn taken in the swamp described at the beginning is also an example of this kind of problem. It's understandable that having all the panels in a single line is monotonous and therefore unwanted, but simply luring the player away from something that is required to progress further isn't a very elegant design solution either. There surely must have been better and more consistent solutions for these kind of issues.

As a whole, I would argue that one of the more general problems in the Witness are those kind of diminutive lapses in consistency.
The interface of the game is kept very simple, for example. A great effort has been made to make sure that the only interaction the player has with the world is done so by drawing a line from point a to point b. It is one of my favourite features of the game and is wonderfully implemented, both mechanically, visually and conceptually.

That being said, there is one common item in the game that doesn't require you to draw a line. These are small voice recorders, found at various places all around the island. You have to click on these and then they play a soundbite. Why an exception has been made for these voice recorders is never made clear. There are other ways to play media on the island, including audio, and all of those use a line-drawing interface. The only reason I can think of for housing these soundbites in tiny, clickable, voice recorders is that in that way they are more difficult to find, or perhaps easier to hide. I'm not sure if that alone is worth losing a certain sense of cohesion in a game that otherwise goes through extreme lengths not to use buttons or any other forms of interaction.

Elsewhere in the puzzles there is at times a similar inconsistency. This doesn't hurt the puzzles in isolation but are detrimental to an overall view of the puzzles, and therefore the game, as a cohesive whole. One of the earliest puzzles you will encounter shows that its possible to have two different outcomes from a single line.

Yet in most of the puzzles found in the rest of the game, even those with multiple beginning- and endpoints, there is only one valid beginning and ending for any single line. There are some important puzzles much later in the game where knowledge of this kind of possibility is required to progress at all, but I think that showing these kind of multiple solutions as one of the few distinct possibilities at the beginning of the game is similar to the 'I before E, except after C' rule. Even if it's true on some occasions, the rule has just as many exceptions, so perhaps its better not to teach it at all.
In another instance the rules are more complicated than they need to be. In the game there are two different symbols which indicate two different kind of exclusion of other symbols. Their rules aren't readily compatible if they were to be used in the same panel. As far as I can remember they are never used together in the game, but at the same time that begs the question why there are two different types at all. I can understand why one of them was introduced in a particular area and then barely used in the rest of the game, as it only applies to one other set of symbols. Yet given the view that one part of the game is about learning mechanics and the other is about implementing those mechanics, the inclusion of this symbol in one area seems like an ad-hoc solution to flesh out a section that would otherwise be rather short.

It is easy to confuse these kind of inconsistencies with an expanded ruleset that keeps elaborating on the players knowledge and possibilities. I would therefore say that there is an important distinction between having a player expand their understanding and simply negating or ignoring something that was previously explicitly shown as an (im)possibility.

These criticisms aside, The Witness is definitely an unique game. It is vaguely reminiscent of the nearly uncrackable adventure games of the 1990's and as such it often gets called an adventure game, as well as a puzzle game.
The thing is, I don't think The Witness fits into either of those monikers. In my opinion it's an understanding-what-this-thing-is game. This works on many different levels, but is best exemplified by the fact that the very last part of the game, far beyond the ending as described in the beginning of this text, is something called 'The Challenge'. The Challenge is a tightly timed sequence of puzzles that are randomised each time you attempt it, while also requiring you to memorise the solutions to puzzles early in the sequence to use in a later part of the sequence. To be able to complete this challenge, you have to fully internalise the mechanics of the game, as nothing short of skill and understanding will allow you to complete it.
So while the game seemingly is about solving puzzles, or discovering the so-called secrets of the island, in my experience the very core of the game is concerned with not only exploring, but also communicating, the fullest of consequences of what can be done with a single concept. It's about taking a simple idea, drawing a line between two points, and expanding that idea as far as it can go while still maintaining a cohesive, playable game. Making that game cohesive and enjoyable is trying to let the player venture on this journey as well and let them think about this concept as if they thought of it themselves. In other words, The Witness is an understanding-what-this-thing-is game.

It is precisely in this point that The Witness is different from any other game I've ever played and I think it therefore has gotten a somewhat odd reception. The game has received critical acclaim for the most part, but neither the positive nor the negative reviews manage to make a meaningful distinction about this point. For some the lack of a singular narrative and meaning has been a point of criticism, but this almost becomes irrelevant if the game is seen as a far-reaching exploration of a single mechanic. The little narrative that is available in the game then mostly serves as commentary on the exploration itself, not its outcome. This is very clear at the endgame, where a secretly recorded casual conversation about the inclusion of the voice recorders is re-enacted by voice actors and played from a voice recorder in the game.
Likewise and oddly enough has The Challenge at the end been negatively perceived by some critics as a strong break with the 'calm and contemplative' gameplay of the rest of the game. I don't think this is the case at all, with The Witness cramming in a great deal of implications in a relatively short amount of time, with The Challenge merely being a possible, but logical, outcome of those presented facts.
A very common comment I have encountered are the 'incredibly difficult puzzles', but that really isn't true either. If The Witness came with an exhaustive manual detailing all the rules and mechanics of the different puzzle types, I believe arriving at the first ending in The Witness will be a somewhat trivial matter for most players. Solving those puzzles therefore hasn't been interesting at all in my view.
What however is very interesting and peculiar to me is that at the same time I also believe if a player was somehow in possession of this manual, it will take them much longer to complete The Challenge at the very end. While I at times have my problems with the way The Witness teaches its mechanics, I am in full agreement with the idea that this kind of self-reliant teaching ultimately leads you to a deeper understanding of what the game is.

One of the concerns that Blow had while making The Witness has been investigating what makes video games unique as a medium. The obvious answer is interactivity and it is precisely this kind of deep, elongated, investigation into the workings of an otherwise lifeless object that interactivity allows for. In the physical world it's never sufficient to merely analyse the components of a game in order to figure out how it is played. Chess pieces don't tell you anything about even the basic rules of chess and a football field doesn't tell you anything about the offside rule. Software in general, and video games in particular, are the only medium that essentially consist of nothing other than rules. To explore the full extent of a single rule therefore seems like a good way to investigate the 'true' possibilities of the medium.
The Witness is commendable as possibly the first game that attempts to discover what can be done if a simple rule is truly taken to its furthest consequences, without taking the common real world limitations of finances, time or company structure into account. It has come short at this attempt in some places, but being the first of its kind these shortcomings are expected and can be overlooked when the game is taken as a new beginning, rather than an end.