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 often wonder about the double-life of art. Indeed, to the extent to which the experience
of art is a solitary, intimate, and personal encounter, it is simultaneously identifies
collective affinities and common intellectual appetites. It is rare to capture these
instances of correspondence, these diachronic intersections exhibiting potential
and actual reformulations of universality. For instance, the other day I encountered
a visitor from Minneapolis, an art historian who came to New York just to visit the
monument. She introduced herself by asking me if I had seen the Hannah Arendt movie
directed by German filmmaker Margarethe von Trotta. The precision of her question
confused me and I didn’t hide my surprise. As a matter of fact I watched the movie
prior to the opening of monument and I had been thinking a great amount about the
way the director focused on the fragility of friendships. She immediately explained
the reason she asked the question in the first place and as it turned out she had
attended at a lecture that I gave a couple years ago where I showed an image of Hannah
Arendt’s grave. The image is a longtime favorite as it connects ideas of memorializing
and concepts such as "public" and "common" space which were profoundly important
to this outstanding intellectual.
