APARTAMENT DESCHIS / FLAT SPACE
18 iunie 2011, ora 21:30
str. Bucuresti 68/1, Chisinau

“The Deleuze Monument”

Thomas HIRSCHHORN

2000, 25 min.

audio: French

FR
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Depuis plus de vingt ans, Thomas Hirschhorn, artiste suisse résidant en France, réalise des sculptures à l’aide de techniques et de moyens précaires. Celles-ci sont conçues à partir de matériaux issus de la vie quotidienne : vieux papiers, bois, feuilles de plastique et d’aluminium, cartons, scotch. Cette esthétique du bricolage est mise au service de hautes ambitions culturelles. En effet, quelques-uns de ses travaux rendent hommage à certains des représentants de la culture la plus haute, qu’il s’agisse de philosophes comme Baruch Spinoza (Spinoza Monument, Exposition “Midnight Walkers and City Sleepers”, Amsterdam, 1999), Gilles Deleuze (Deleuze Monument, exposition “La Beauté”, Avignon, 2000), ou encore Georges Bataille (Documenta 11, Kassel, 2002). Si ce travail s’inscrit dans le cadre d’expositions collectives, le choix de ces libres-penseurs de l’occident revient essentiellement à l’artiste. En effet, ses sculptures sont souvent des “monuments” à des personnes que l’artiste admire. Véritables monuments de papier ou même l’excès de scotch utilisé dans son travail a du sens (pour l’artiste, une façon de dire avec insistance qu’il “faut que ça tienne »), la surenchère d’images, de textes, de documentations tient en haleine le visiteur. Nous nuancerons donc ici l’importance de la commande : on sollicite une œuvre de l’artiste, on ne lui commande pas un monument à un personnage célèbre.

http://arts-plastiques.ac-rouen.fr/grp/sculpture_commemorative/thomas_hirschhorn.htm

EN
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The “Deleuze Monument”

During the Avignon Festival, summer 2000, in the context of the exhibit on La Beauté [Beauty], the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn elected to install a “Deleuze Monument” outside the ramparts, in a likely quarter of the Avignon suburbs. This project was part of the artist’s approach to a work made of multiple gatherings and recuperation [of objects], a kind of visual gleaning to which he invites everyone to participate. So at the end of May 2000, the Deleuze Monument was constructed, a precarious edifice built piecemeal, of parts that inhabitants of the quartier brought to enrich it with poems, drawings and various graffiti (“Come back, Gilles!” “G.D.: we love you”). Hirschhorn himself provided a sculpture of the philosopher on which he inscribed this offering: “Gilles, we miss you, but we are managing” [Gilles, tu nous manques, mais on se débrouille]. This interactive installation also sheltered a library in which the philosopher’s books were collected and in which his video interviews from the Abécédaire were broadcast. Open 24 hours a day, supervised by people from the quartier, the purpose of the Deleuze Monument was to juxtapose a certain idea of Beauty at the very base of the iron and steel HLM buildings [Note: HLM = habitation à loyer modéré, i.e. low-to-mid income housing]. Sadly, the Museum was demolished after two months, victimized by repeated thefts and acts of vandalism. Thomas Hirschhorn, who also developed a Spinoza Monument, outlined this Deleuzian experience in a voluminous dossier, juxtaposed to handwritten commentaries, some elements of which we have excerpted here.

[One handwritten comment: “Deleuze: Why I chose Gilles Deleuze: Because he is an important contemporary French philosopher, because he intervened on behalf of a philosophy at once offered to everyone, hence to people who have never had contact with philosophy, and at the same time to amateurs, from philosophers to “professionals” of philosophy. I chose Deleuze because his writings give me the courage, the strength and the pleasure to reflect.”]

CJ Stivale

Magazine littéraire 406, February 2002 – Dossier: “L’effet Deleuze” [The Deleuze effect]