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 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.
