Thomas Hirschhorn's Gramsci Monument in the Bronx

In art, the center seems synonymous with money and/or high visibility; it's rarely representative of any individual’s experience of the art. Galleries, museums, academia, and foundations providing grants establish this center, and the personal experience of a single viewer fades into the abstraction of the general.

The center of Philadelphia, with its borders of South Street, Spring Garden Street, and the two rivers, is City Hall. Here, the center is not an abstraction but is clearly marked with an impressive building. Very close to City Hall, on the northwest corner of Broad and Chestnut, is a bank in a beautiful, white marble, Greek revival building. Years ago, when the bank had a different name than the one it now has, I saw an art exhibition there.

I was not surprised to see art at the bank: Its location seemed to provide high visibility with a constant stream of banking customers drawn from Center City’s professional crowd. Although I had not yet studied art formally at Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and had not exhibited anywhere, I submitted my art for a possible exhibition.

Surprisingly, the bank did accept my work for exhibition. The acceptance came with one rather large hitch.

Sent to the periphery

Instead of exhibiting in the beautiful, white marble, Greek revival building at Broad and Chestnut, I would be exhibiting in a bank branch servicing one of the poorest communities in Philadelphia, a neighborhood that included the Richard Allen Housing Project.

The Richard Allen Housing Project — now renovated with new homes and called Richard Allen Homes — was not far, geographically, from Center City; just a couple blocks north of the Spring Garden perimeter. The neighborhood was, however, economically and culturally remote from Center City. The project was bleak, consisting of both low-rise and high-rise barrack-looking structures. Few trees grew out of the concrete yard that surrounded the buildings; crime and drugs were abundant.

Richard Allen Housing Project was not unfamiliar to me. I spent a year as a mental health intern student at Hahnemann in the satellite mental health clinic that serviced the project. I visited many homes in Richard Allen: awful places where the dirt and smell reflected the misery of its occupants and homes where the residents maintained a sense of dignity despite numerous factors attempting to destroy it.

I accepted the art exhibition opportunity at the bank branch with both gratitude and disappointment, installing my work at the nondescript functional building that housed the bank close to the project.

When I packed up the art a month later, a bank teller told me that an elderly black woman from Richard Allen had spent an afternoon drawing my work.

Taken by surprise but feeling both humbled and encouraged, I imagined an elderly woman sitting on a plastic bench spending the afternoon drawing the art. Growing up, my family actively discouraged art I created, and I worked in private, never revealing anything to anyone.

I couldn’t help but wonder whether I would have found the same supportive experience in the lovely Greek revival bank of Center City with its busy customers.

Whose views?

I thought about the woman from Richard Allen when I recently read about Thomas Hirschhorn’s 2013 installation at Forest Houses, a housing project in the Bronx.

Hirschhorn, a Swiss political artist, made a reputation creating what he describes as “monuments” dedicated to progressive philosophers in European housing projects. At the Bronx monument, funded by the Dia Foundation and dedicated to Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), Hirschhorn created a large structure that housed a theater, bar, and library stocked with political books. Residents were paid to build the structure, in which philosophy lectures and art classes were offered. Visitors from the art community came to see the installation.

I did not see the installation but read several descriptions in various mainstream publications. These included both supportive comments — the installation provided entertainment for the residents — and some negative comments — it was a vanity installation of an egomaniac artist.

My question is: Who is the audience of this installation, the residents of Forest Homes or the established art community?

In the installation, Hirschhorn never seems to relinquish his link to the art world, with money provided by the foundation, media coverage in major publications, and visitors from outside the community. Hirschhorn makes his entrance into this foreign housing project with a calling card announcing him as an important artist with power. As such, Hirschhorn takes no risks. He's like the recently minted defense lawyer in the prison visitors’ waiting room, attempting to be hip to the crowd but flashing symbols of power — though he or she occupies the same space, he or she is oblivious to who the denizens of that world are. In his resistance to the Forest Home residents, Hirschhorn appears facing another audience, the established art community.

Losing the freedom to connect

The Forest Homes residents are not Hirschhorn’s audience but elements in the installation, like colors or marks that an artist wishes to use in a composition. Used as participatory elements, the residents become objectified, are stripped of their authority as viewers. Freedom to connect independently to art is lost.

Loss of freedom and objectification is not exclusive to Hisrchhorn’s installation but happens any time an audience is incorporated into an installation asking for their participation. What is lost for the participatory audience is freedom to experience art without the agenda of the artist, who, like a helicopter parent, oppresses the viewer’s independence in connecting with art.

Of course, any art genre has the potential to be oppressive; one might consider the long history of painted white naked women as autocratic or Gauguin as another white man on a trip of exploitation. Then there are the installations whose agenda is confronting the audience. If the work of art is an act of confrontation, could any blatant oppression be justified as an artistic statement?

A bigger work of art may be, conversely, the potential space it offers explicitly to a single viewer; a space that is private and imaginative; a space free from external manipulation. This space can develop a relationship between viewer and art that knows no periphery and no center because it does not have to exist beyond itself — it just is.

Above right: Richard Allen Homes, 1980 (Temple University Urban Archives / Historical Society of Pennsylvania)