The Piper Comanche shot down by dozens of arrows, fired by North Dakota Indians in protest at the building of an oil pipeline, turns out on an internet search to be the very same single-engine aircraft in which Obama flew over a reservation in Oklahoma…

The Piper Comanche shot down by dozens of arrows, fired by North Dakota Indians in protest at the building of an oil pipeline, turns out on an internet search to be the very same single-engine aircraft in which Obama flew over a reservation in Oklahoma and came under fire from the local tribe. It is a fine example of how an object of contemporary art goes on living apart from the artist's statement, loses the meaning its author put into it, and becomes an artefact of an alternative reality. In fact the aeroplane with arrows stuck in its fuselage is an installation called Avião, created by the Argentine art collective Los Carpinteros and shown at the Faena Arts Center in Buenos Aires in May 2012. Since then photographs from the exhibition have been circulated online as confirmation of various invented news stories about rebellious tribes, built on real or fantastical news pegs. But I would prefer to think that the aircraft was flying over the Battle of Agincourt, where the English archers utterly routed the French