: Vittoria Martini, Claire Bishop, Thomas Hirschhorn, Lisa Lee, Mignon Nixon, Marcus Steinweg
: Vittoria Martini Thomas Hirschhorn: The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival. The Ambassador's Diary
: Hatje Cantz Verlag
: 9783775752640
: Hatje Cantz Text
: 1
: CHF 21.70
:
: Allgemeines, Lexika
: English
: 188
: Wasserzeichen
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB
The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival is an artwork, a sculpture, created by Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn in a peripheral borough of Amsterdam's south-east known as the Bijlmer in 2009. This book recounts the event through the eyes of its 'Ambassador', art historian Vittoria Martini, who was invited by the artist to be an eyewitness to the existence of this 'precarious' work. A term Hirschhorn sees as positive and creative: a means of asserting the importance of the moment and of the place, of asserting the Here and Now to touch eternity and universality. Appreciating the art historian's presence as a central element of his sculpture, Hirschhorn consciously challenged the certainties of the profession by empowering and activating the role, thus leading Martini to find a new working methodology that she calls 'precarious art history'. Accompanying the readers through her experience of the physical existence of The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival, Martini's commentary leads to the profound understanding of how a work that no longer exists physically, can live on in the mind-elsewhere, at some other time-because in the meantime it has become universal. Paris-based artist THOMAS HIRSCHHORN (*1957, Bern) is best known for his sculptures in public space-monuments, kiosks, and altars. Questioning the autonomy, the authorship, and resistance of a work of art, he asserts the power of art to touch and transform the other. He represented Switzerland at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011 and received numerous awards, including the Prix Marcel Duchamp and the Joseph Beuys Stiftung Prize. VITTORIA MARTINI (*1975, Kinshasa) is an independent art historian living in Italy. She has a doctorate from Università Ca' Foscari/Università Iuav di Venezia. Since 2013 she teaches History of exhibitions and curatorial practices and holds the Art Writing workshop at CAMPO - Program of curatorial studies and practices established by the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo (Turin, Italy). Her research focuses mainly on the institutional structures that produce exhibitions.

Introduction

“The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival will not be ‘just another project’ amongst others. Because of its complexity, its irreducibility, its location, its exaggeration, its becoming possible and the extreme situation of solitude.The Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival is a hyper-complex and extra-ordinary incomparable project.”1

T. Hirschhorn

“I have tried not to lose hold of the first movement of things as it appears in the notebooks, the tripping from day to day.... I could hardly believe that each morning there were new things to see in the pictures, new things to think about, words for them ready to hand.”2

T. J. Clark

If I find myself writing the introduction of this book ten years after the dismantling ofThe Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival, it is because this work has never ceased speaking to me all this time. It’s kind of like when you are in the midst of research and the object of your study seems to fit with every stimulus you receive, with everything you see or hear, even when it doesn’t seem to logically, automatically, or directly fit.

During this time, I experienced a first phase of physical recovery, which was followed by a longer period of psychological recovery: living for two months, every single day, for ten hours a day, deeply immersed intoThe Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival, sleeping a step stone away from it, with its presence carved even into my evenings. It was an experience that would push anyone to their limit. The last week there I clearly felt the first physiological symptoms due to a heterotopic feeling—as precisely described by Michel Foucault. This condition was amplified by the excessive production and the repetitive automatism of pursuing the same actions, the same routine, every single day. There was the constant pression of time, a time that, although defined tightly by the daily program, had led me to live in a state of exception, of alienation, of extreme solitude. A prolonged exposure in an elsewhere without a specific place, although very defined, where it had become impossible to locate myself, not knowing where I ended and where the others began. A suspended but concentrated time where every gesture and every relationship became significant. Living in the “here and now” is like being constantly present to yourself, in the instant of the lived moment that does not contain a memory of the past, but only an awareness of that precise moment, with its amplified and memorable being endlessly forming intricate layers of memory.

Distance was needed, a gaze from afar, in order to be able to distill and analyze the experience. Distance was needed from the “here and now.” Distance was needed in space, and distance was needed in time.

This time has passed, and the work has started to resonate. It has become what Thomas Hirschhorn wrote in his initial statement, well before it came to life in its material form: a sculpture that can be transplanted “first of all in the mind.”3 The lapse in time has allowed the disappearance of aphasia andThe Bijlmer Spinoza-Festival has exploded in my head, with all its strength and beauty—a beauty as tough as the reality of a life lived consciously in the here and now, like an incredibly vivid memory that has reemerged of the presence of my body in that space.

Gilles Deleuze explains it with a great deal of clarity: through Spinoza, the human being can come to understand that the happiness of each of us is triggered by what happens accidentally in our lives, but only if we learn to distinguish what it is good for us (and makes us better) from what hurts us (and makes us weaker); then, we could all reach a state of bliss and joy in this life. The effort of living lies exactly in this constant choice.

It is precisely theconatus that resounded every day as the only understandable word to me from the Dutch text of theSpinoza Theater. It was staged every evening: “CONATUS, which holds everything together. / In the here and now of the only world.”5Conatus: the power of being true to one’s nature and, in the case of human beings, to one’s own body.Conatus as effort, attempt, impulse that can also lead to failure, but which allows you to continue being yourself, to nourish what Spinoza defines asAppetitus, which in the