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’ve been getting a lot of questions from visitors about surprises: surprises that
I’ve had while making and having this experience at the Gramsci Monument. The funny
thing about this question is that it trades on an expectation of what my expectations
of working at the monument would be; I get the sense that people are sometimes fishing
for an answer, an answer in fact unsurprising like, “I have been really surprised
that the kids understand _____________,” or “I have been so surprised by the fact
that they don’t know anything about _____________.” The question of surprises is
really a question of expectations. A lot of people are coming to the monument with
expectations disguised as questions, and I wanted to make a note of that, because
the Children’s Class isn’t a neutral space that is somehow excused from the politics
of the project just because it is mostly inhabited by kids.
As for what the surprises have been, there have been too many to count. One thing
that has been really surprising is finding out which projects the kids love and go
crazy over. It’s surprising because it reveals things that I have forgotten: the
surprise is also an act of remembering. For example, remembering how obsessed you
are with your own name between the ages of 6 and 14. Completely obsessed. It shouldn’t
be a revelation that the kids loved making these three-dimensional cardboard initials
because they’re all in an age range where they are beginning the process of self-identification.
But without having prior experience in education and childhood development, this
was a humbling jolt back to childhood.
Also humbling with this letter project – which the kids initiated not as a group,
but day-by-day on their own volition – was the reminder of the indistinguishability
between Art and Arts & Crafts at the early stages of being a person who makes things.
We have been doing a lot more crafty projects alongside the arty ones. The Art and
Craft discussion is an important one to remember as it reveals stratifications in
the art world that have to do with technique, academia, audience, form, and relevance.
Without using this space to write a personal essay on the subject, I think it is
important as a contemporary artist to be beyond the idea of crafts. Which simply
means that for artists, the language of crafts can be very powerful formal tools
to speak about those stratifications, and perhaps also to speak about childhood,
a state of being whose complexity is often lost in society at large.
TEXTS