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This gesture - laying a thing next another thing to break its singular frame - is a meme of art, and we should wish to detour funding, get Grad Students to surrender their Broodthaers dissertations and instead advance proposition of, a definitive history, of this gesture. Start with his potted plants if necessary, the gesture plays a theatricality. Maybe follow a lineage Strau and Blinky Palermo and of all the capital F Fetishists, Tom Burr - who extracted a fey contingency from it- through Lieske, working into the whole Mathew thing, and dispersed into the ether of Europe, formalized. Not sure why I'm including only men in this lineage, arguably neither Harrison or Genzken quite fit, but you can include that in your theses too.
see too: David Lieske at MUMOK , Tom Burr at Franco Noero Drunk