Object Lesson: Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument: Negotiating Monumentality with Instability and Everyday Life

Figure 1.

Thomas Hirschhorn, Gramsci Monument, Forest Houses, Bronx, N.Y., 2013.

Photograph by Luisa Valle.

During the summer of 2013, an unconventional one-story building sat in the courtyard of Forest Houses, a low-income housing project in the South Bronx (Figures 1, 2). Its undefined structural type—two pavilions connected by a makeshift bridge—and utilitarian materials—plywood, blue tarp, and packing tape—gave the building a precarious and explicitly nonmonumental character. Yet it was titled Gramsci Monument, and it was the fourth in a series of works by the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn commemorating major Western writers and thinkers; the others celebrated were Baruch Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, and George Bataille.¹ The south building of the Gramsci Monument contained a newspaper office, a library of volumes by and about Gramsci, a radio station, a computer/Internet room, and a museum of letters, personal objects, and photographs of the Italian philosopher.² A bar serving lunch and dinner, an artificial pond (called the pool/sculpture), a crafts workshop, and a lounge, where talks about philosophical topics were held each day, completed the monument on the north side of the bridge. As instructive as its program may sound, more important at the time was that the artist, Forest Houses residents, and visitors shared the production of its space.³ Building on recent interpretations of Henri Lefebvre’s theorization of space, time, and the urban, which treat Lefebvre’s work as a heterodox and open-ended Marxist proposal suitable for investigating the present, this essay argues that Hirschhorn challenged modern and postmodern expressions of monumentality. The sculptor critically engaged the Gramsci Monument with its context through the experiences shared by a “non-exclusive audience” (the residents of the public housing project and their neighbors) and the anticipation of its obsolescence.⁴ Ephemeral in nature—it lasted only for a summer—and contingent on the daily lives of its resident builders, workers, and visitors, the Gramsci Monument proposed a monumentality that built on the experience and memory of the site without usurping the potency of the everyday in negotiating public history.

Figure 2.

Thomas Hirschhorn, Gramsci Monument, Forest Houses, Bronx, N.Y., 2013.

Courtesy of the artist and Dia Art Foundation, New York, N.Y. Photograph by Romain Lopez.

The Gramsci Monument project began in 2009, when Hirschhorn wrote a letter pitching the idea to Philip Vergne, who had recently been appointed director of the Dia Art Foundation. In “Why Gramsci? Why New York?,” one of the many texts available in the Gramsci Monument’s website archive, Hirschhorn justified his homage to the philosopher by simply declaring himself a “Gramsci-fan.”⁵ Antonio Gramsci was an Italian Marxist philosopher active in the early twentieth century who theorized the concept of hegemony and shifted it from the traditional Marxist context of materialism to the realm of social relationships. During his incarceration by the fascist regime, Gramsci wrote a series of seminal notebooks. In the Prison Notebooks, the philosopher discussed culture, for example, as an unfixed system that could be negotiated in the everyday under a hegemonic structure.⁶ Hirschhorn’s rationale for the Gramsci Monument declared, “My love includes everything coming from him [Gramsci], without exception,” and suggested that the monument would further many of the philosopher’s liberating ideas.⁷

In 2010, with the commission from the Dia Art Foundation secured, the artist began a two-year fieldwork study, visiting forty-six public housing sites and meeting with residents of projects in three New York City boroughs.⁸ By the end of 2012, the possible sites had been narrowed down to seven projects in the Bronx: Castle Hill, Soundview, Monroe, Patterson, Bronx River, Claremont, Butler, and Forest Houses.⁹ A reading of Hirschhorn’s debriefings on his meetings with community organizers of several Bronx housing projects makes it clear that his conversations with Erik Farmer, president of the Forest Houses Resident Association, and members of the Southeast Bronx Neighborhood Center—Diane Herbert, executive director...