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
Anybody who has visited the monument knows that there are at least three types of
visitors to the Gramsci Library: those who like books, those who like apples, and
those who like both, books and apples. The average visitor spends one or two minutes
browsing through the shelves, and occasionally sits down to read a preface or a full
chapter. The children, and this is no secret, they come in for one purpose only,
to get a free apple, sometimes even two and run back to the Internet Corner or the
Workshop. In some ways, the empty box at the end of the day, reassures us that a
new association between books and apples is in the making. Furthermore, it strikes
me that the apples help create an atmosphere of ease and hospitality inside the library,
that visitors are more likely to start a conversation or ask me a question more easily
there than elsewhere in the monument. We tend to think of libraries as silent spaces,
we relate reading with silence, and we do so because, evidently, because the aim
of reading and talking are quite different. However, the number of conversations
and interactions happening in the Gramsci Library reminds me of something Marcus
Steinweg mentions regularly in the Daily Lectures, how even though writing is a solitary
act, you are never alone, that one is always in the company of other authors. In
this sense, the library is a perfect example of this conviviality, a generator of
spontaneous dialogues among books and mouths full of apples.
