Right around the time that Gary Hill held forth on the Artist Trust stage demanding donations for local artists earlier this month, a gold bar was stolen from an installation of his at the Fondation Cartier in Paris.

Or was it a gold bar? Artforum.com reports:

A solid gold bar weighing twelve kilograms (26.5 pounds)—part of an artwork by Gary Hill—was stolen from Paris’s Fondation Cartier last week. As Le Monde’s Nathaniel Herzberg reports, two or three masked thieves entered the foundation during the night, tied up the security guard, and made away with the gold bar, as well as the cashbox. According to the Parisian police, the thieves are “art lovers and well informed.” The going market value for twelve kilos of pure gold is approximately €210,000 ($271,480).

The gold bar is part of the installation work Frustrum, 2006, which has been on display at the foundation since October 25. Hill, hoping to create a critical image of empire, placed the bar in a tank of industrial oil and added a projection of a trapped eagle and the sound of a cracking whip. For reasons of security, the artist had to use nonflammable oil instead of petroleum, but he insisted that the gold bar be real.

Herzberg wonders about the replacement fake gold bar, which can now be seen in Hill’s work. Was the real gold bar stolen directly from the installation or from a security case? Or did the Fondation Cartier, fearing robbery, have a fake gold bar made without telling the artist? The original, if it has not been melted down, still bears a suggestive mark, the engraving “FOR EVERYTHING THAT IS VISIBLE IS A COPY OF THAT WHICH IS HIDDEN.”

New York had this to say about Frustrum:

By accident or design, the digitally animated eagle at the center of Gary Hill’s new installation is a wimpier version of the squawking bird that opens The Colbert Report. Here, the veteran sound-and-image artist’s political symbols of the most obvious kind (gold bullion, a broadcast tower) upstage an unsettling soundtrack of cracking whips. Guilt, an installation of gold coins printed with torture scenes and viewed through telescopes, combines a bad pun with a weary metaphor. Turning the abuses of Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo into genuinely affecting work is more difficult than it looks; Thomas Hirschhorn and Fernando Botero are among the few who have pulled it off. And in art, unlike TV satire, the blowhard act wears thin fast. — Karen Rosenberg