A WORK IN PUBLIC SPACE BY THOMAS HIRSCHHORN, PRODUCED BY DIA ART FOUNDATION NEW YORK
LOCATED AT FOREST HOUSES, THE BRONX - NEW YORK CITY, SUMMER 2013
I was asked "Why are artists Marxists?" The question is pivotal in at least two respects:
it suggests that Marx remains an influential figure and that his work and that of
recent thinkers who have expanded on his ideas (i.e. Gramsci, Lucaks, Arendt, Marcuse,
Althusser, Derrida, among others) continue to be relevant to artists as an "instrument"
in their studio. At the same time, the question implies that this commonality is
hardly a coincidence but an ideological affinity that carries a political dimension.
To provide a reply to the question is important to acknowledge that artistic production,
the making of art, is a material activity even when it is not material (i.e. music
or dance) or when the work of art is ephemeral. Marx, having expounded and examined
systematically the nature and organization of human labor with its historical and
social conditions and developed a theory that went beyond economics but into the
realm of class relationships within society, continues to serve as a reference to
many artists. Marx's writings offer instructive lessons pointers on how to analyze
reality as a totality, to understand the identity of subject and object, and more
specific to artists, on "how to give ideas a material force" as Marx said.
