Name/Title
Memory Monument I: Remembering ThirstDescription
Unknown Artist
b. 1980+ Toronto, Ontario
LaserJet on paper
8.5 x 11
Memory Monument I: Remembering Thirst is a living monument and imprint of the art Thirst----a discarded water bottle readymade.
Slightly out of focus, it does not attempt to recover the original work. Instead, it marks the impossibility of doing so. The print operates less as a representation than as filling a lack. What is encountered is not the object, but the condition of its having-been.
If the initial appearance of the work hovered between accident and intervention, this subsequent form questions why intervene on an intervention.
In this gap, authorship dissolves further....not only because the original maker did not realize they were an “artist,” but because the thief equally becomes an artist themself.
The work becomes a site where intention is irrelevant, replaced by aftereffect. Disappearance. Thirst signals lack, desire, and the persistence of need without fulfillment. As a memory, the work does not quench but sustains this lack...a lack of the original.
In this sense, Memory Monument I: Remembering Thirst is neither document nor substitute. It is memory. It is whimsy.