Ping Pong — onLife⁸

Joke for a youth art critic

Three Ping Pong tables in the bookshop of the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Foundation.

An installation of Duchampian memory? What usually is in the parquets enters the privileged spaces, becoming art.

Perhaps a reference to the sweat ready-mades of Félix Gonzáles Torres. As the candies were collected during the days, the rackets will also sometimes be gone. It has happened to anyone.

Actually it is something that is placed chronologically in between the two aforementioned. “J.K. Ping-Pong Club” by Julius Koller, a revival of 1970, the first time in which he transforms the exhibition space into a relational environment, the sports center.

Johannes Cladders in 1999 said, “All institutional conventions governing art’s veneration should given up, and it should feel as if you could play ping-pong in the museum right next to the walls with the painting on them”¹. To conclude by arguing that the only valid reason to remove the works is that they would be a distraction.

¹ Hans Ulrich Obrist, A Brief History of Curating, JRP Editions, Geneva