Davis, Douglas; Komar, Vitaly; Melamid, Alexander
«Questions Moscow New York»

During a trip to Russia in the seventies «I also met some of the young Russian dissident artists, and was most impressed by the works of Ilya Kabakov and conceptual artists Vitaly Komar & Alexander Melamid […]. In those times, we didn’t expect to meet each other again. It was like a miracle that I was there at all. So we decided to create a transatlantic art work together, using the only mediums that was allowed to us at that time: the telephone and the camera. […] I had this idea that if I painted a line on my wall and they painted one on their wall, we would take photographs, and hold up questions about the meaning of the line, and exchange them by mail, so in each city the work would exist. I took my first picture at midnight on December 31, 1975, and they took their picture at 8 a.m. on January 1, 1976—at the same instant, that is. […] We had four pictures in mind at first: One at New Years Eve, one on May 1, one on the 4th of July, and one on November 25th, the anniversary of the October Revolution. In the last picture they are wearing overcoats, like they are getting ready to leave, and the next thing I know, they successfully emigrate to Israel! So the fifth picture was taken in Tel-Aviv and New York, and for the last picture, or what we thought was the last picture, they finally got to New York, and we did a picture in my gallery, Ronald Feldman. It is called ‹The End of the Line›, and you can see that we’re tearing the line down off the wall.»

(source: Douglas Davis, in: Tilman Baumgärtel, [net.art] New Materials towards Net art, Nürnberg 2001, pp. 58-60.)