توماس هیرشهورن: یادمان دلوز

Thomas Hirschhorn’s Deleuze Monument was conceived for ‘La Beauté’ in Avignon in 2000. It comprised four elements: a rock inscribed with a quotation, an altar, a monumental sculpture and a library including books by and about Deleuze. Located in the Cité Champfleury, outside Avignon’s historical walls, Deleuze Monument embodied Hirschhorn’s desire to put his work ‘in a difficult situation’ between reality, politics and aesthetics, and marks a significant turning point in his approach to producing and maintaining public works. In this generously illustrated book, Anna Dezeuze examines Deleuze Monument, the second in Hirschhorn’s series of four Monuments, and its relation to ‘scatter’ and participatory art in the 1990s. Drawing on Deleuze’s ideas as well as Hannah Arendt’s definition of work, labour and action, Dezeuze demonstrates how Deleuze Monument brought art and philosophy together in a ‘concrete’ way. An illustrated examination of one of Hirschhorn's “precarious” monuments, now dismantled. Part-text, part-sculpture, part-architecture, part-junk heap, Thomas Hirschhorn's often monumental but precarious works offer a commentary on the spectacle of late-capitalist consumerism and the global proliferation of commodities. Made from ephemeral materials—cardboard, foil, plastic bags, and packing tape—that the artist describes as “universal, economic, inclusive, and [without] any plus-value,” these works also engage issues of justice, power, and moral responsibility. Hirschhorn (born in Switzerland in 1957) often chooses to place his work in non-art settings, saying that he wants it to “fight for its own existence.” In this book, Anna Dezeuze offers a generously illustrated examination of Hirschhorn's Deleuze Monument (2000), the second in his series of four Monuments . Deleuze Monument —a sculpture, an altar, and a library dedicated to Gilles Deleuze—was conceived as a work open to visitors twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Part of the exhibition “La Beauté” in Avignon, Deleuze Monument was controversial from the start, and it was dismantled two months before the end of the exhibition after being vandalized. Dezeuze describes the chronology of the project, including negotiations with local residents; the dynamic between affirmation and vulnerability in Hirschhorn's work; failure and ”scatter art” in the 1990s; participatory practices; and problems of presence, maintenance, and appearance, raised by Hirschhorn's acknowledgement of “error” in his discontinuous presence on site following the installation of Deleuze Monument . "Thomas Hirschhorn's Deleuze monument was conceived for 'La beauté' in Avignon in 2000. It comprised four elements: a rock inscribed with a quotation, an altar, a monumental sculpture and a library including books by and about Deleuze. Located in the Cité Champfleury, outside Avignon's historical walls, Deleuze monument embodied Hirschhorn's desire to put his work 'in a difficult situation' between reality, politics and aesthetics, and marks a significant turning point in his approach to producing and maintaining public works"--Page 4 of cover