GRAMSCI MONUMENT

2012

HOME PROGRAM LOCATION THE PROJECT THE MAP ABOUT GRAMSCI CONSTRUCTION DISMANTLING PRESS-KIT
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
"Every
human being
is an
Intellectual."
Antonio Gramsci


AMBASSADOR’S NOTE 15

I often wonder about the double-life of art. Indeed, to the extent to which the experience of art is a solitary, intimate, and personal encounter, it is simultaneously identifies collective affinities and common intellectual appetites. It is rare to capture these instances of correspondence, these diachronic intersections exhibiting potential and actual reformulations of universality. For instance, the other day I encountered a visitor from Minneapolis, an art historian who came to New York just to visit the monument. She introduced herself by asking me if I had seen the Hannah Arendt movie directed by German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta. The precision of her question confused me and I didn’t hide my surprise. As a matter of fact I watched the movie prior to the opening of monument and I had been thinking a great amount about the way the director focused on the fragility of friendships. She immediately explained the reason she asked the question in the first place and as it turned out she had attended at a lecture that I gave a couple years ago where I showed an image of Hannah Arendt’s grave. The image is a longtime favorite as it connects ideas of memorializing and concepts such as "public" and "common" space which were profoundly important to this outstanding intellectual.

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