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 30

I have started to recognize returning visitors and was happy to see the young Japanese historian from last week again. She came alone this time without her friend and sat down at the library with me for a while. She told me that as a historian she often struggles with “the opaqueness and mystery of contemporary art” but that the monument had made her “change her mind.” And then she asked me to sum up what I liked the most about the project. Admittedly, it is precisely this type of encounters with visitors, the conversations and exchanges that occur, what I consider to be one of the most important assertions of this work. But actually, there are a multiplicity of questions that are stake for me beginning with the internal logic of the monument, the constitution of this collective action, and the different levels of commitment. Among other affirmations that I consider to be most important is the confrontation, at the most fundamental level, with the notion of artistic production, how the monument build itself, transforms into an “event” (in the Deleuzian sense) while remaining a work of art. In this sense, and perhaps more specifically, I’m interested in how the monument set out to confront or reformulate, in new and different directions, the definitions of sculpture, architecture, and monumentality. And simultaneously, how such an artistic project generates a clash, how it engages in a debate concerning the relation between art and institutions (galleries, museums, kunsthalle, academia, publishing houses, etc.), how it break out with the structures of display and circulation by addressing the bureaucracy of cultural administration as a body that is worn-down by habits, bound by its own weight, and lost in its own apparatus. In other words, what I think is enormously important is the affirmation of the human power, human interaction, the fact that there is a steady and continuous sound coming out from the monument—voices, laughter, nasty arguments—responding to the invitation to be present.

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