2010.27.2 Seamless Tube Production, Tenais Siderca, Campana/Buenos Aires, Argentina

The scene here appears to be of an earlier industrial age, but it is a factory that is fully functioning now, and could in an uncanny way be a set for a play or an opera, with a strong resemblance to the 1920s Fritz Lang film, Metropolis. The factory produces seamless tubing that has made possible innumerable technological advancements, processes, and objects that we take for granted, indeed that we could not live without. Without them, transportation, communication, medicine, entertainment - let alone what we think of as science - could not exist. By showing us where these essential but invisible things are made, Thomas Struth goes behind the surface of the everyday, allowing us to become aware of what we use, and what we depend on, without our conscious knowledge or even control. 

Charles Wylie, DMA unpublished material, 2010.

Until 2010: Thomas Struth (b. 1954)

2010: Dallas Museum of Art and the Rachofsky Collection, Dallas (owned jointly), purchased through Marian Goodman Gallery, New York [1], [2]

[1] See the copy of the Co-Tenancy Agreement in the Collections Records object file (2010.27.2).

[2] See the copy of the invoice dated May 18, 2010, in the Collections Records object file (2010.27.2).

Apply to objects where number equals 2010.27.2