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
This week was seriously serious! Thomas’ word for the week was “acceleration” and
that we definitely did. Among our activities: tessellations that became stencils
for spray painting, origami balloons and flowers, color wheels and color mixing experiments,
tape stripe paintings, exquisite corpses, forced perspective photos, an illustrated
poem, and a movie about Christmas in July. We always have visitors from other places,
but this week there was an increased number of visitors who were making art in the
class. The workshop was an especially nice place to be on Saturday, when several
people who live and teach in other parts of the Bronx came to the workshop; we had
a great conversation not just about the monument, but about sustainable social change.
I think everyone (including myself) is starting to understand what it means to engage
in the new process of actually making something every day. Sometimes it’s making
art, sometimes it’s just something. Either way there is an agreement that we enter
into and the agreement is to fulfill the desire to make something. The agreement
is to not know what it is and then find out. For the last few weeks I have been telling
the kids, “You know, when you say you don’t know what to do, I also don’t know what
you should either!” Being a good artist, or just being really creative, isn’t about
knowing what to do, but knowing how to look at what you have and then go from there.
This is a new lesson for me, too. So it is great to get the sense that the kids are
starting to pick up on the same thing. In the beginning, the workshop was a complete
novelty – chaotic, arrhythmic, and simply new. Then there was a kind of provisionary
order or structure. THEN there was a period of time when hardly any kids could stay
put for more than two minutes. And then with this week came a different kind of energy
with the understanding that we aren’t going anywhere. The workshop is here. We are
all – all of us – here. So let’s go somewhere in our work.
TEXTS