They stole art from Documenta and made a horror-porn collage. Canon? Shattered.
For Robarte el Arte [Stealing the Art] (1972), Juan José Gurrola together with Gelsen Gas and Arnaldo Coen supposedly stole an artwork during Documenta 5 in 1972 and represented it with an asterisk of scotch tape on a rock in the Wilhelmshöhe Park. Sequences of this performative action are montaged like in a silent movie with panels of cut-up newspaper text blocks, installation shots from the Documenta exhibition inside and outside Fridericianum, and scenes from a horror porn movie based on the story of the serial killer "Goyo" Cárdenas – his case became a sensation on Mexican media in the 1940s and inspired several copycat murderers imitating his crimes – and underscored with a dramatic soundtrack. With Robarte el Arte, the artists satirically destabilize Documenta’s institutionalized role to chart the current art developments and thus setting the foundation for a so-called canon as Eurocentric.
Editing
Silent-movie montage meets newspaper ransom-note aesthetics
Direction
Gurrola's brazen institutional sabotage as formal strategy
Sound
Dramatic score weaponized against high-art solemnity
Director
Juan José Gurrola
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
Documenta 5 was curated by Harald Szeemann and famously attempted to define 'individual mythologies'—Gurrola, Gas and Coen literally stole from it.
The horror footage comes from a lost 1940s Mexican genre film cycle inspired by real killer Goyo Cárdenas, whose crimes spawned actual copycats—meta-commentary on media contagion before 'copycat' was common parlance.
No ratings yet
Sign in to join the discussion — comments are spoiler-gated to your watch progress.
Discussion starters
US
