[child yelling]
- We'd like to thank y'all.
You know, I thank y'all personally, you know,
for coming out.
[applause]
Please.
Thank you, DJ Baby Dee.
[laughter]
- Say it again.
- DJ Baby Dee..
[laughter]
This day is an exceptional day,
because it's the day of the opening.
So what counts now and what is the change
and what is the most important thing
to me as an artist is every day–
to be every day here,
every day here to be present and to produce something.
Why the presence and the production is so important?
Because I believe only with the presence
and the production,
we can create the condition
that the residents are implicated.
So every day we will be here,
and we will be present and produce the Gramsci Monument.
Because this, what you see, is not the Gramsci monument.
It's only the structure of the Gramsci monument.
'Cause what I want to do is a new kind of monument.
So this new kind of monument,
I have to construct it every day in being here,
in being present and in producing
and in addressing it first
to the family who lives in fifth floor there
or the family who lives there in first floor
or the woman who lives up there in the fifth floor.
They are my public.
This is the challenge.
This what's about, the Gramsci monument:
To create memory, a common memory.
- Ace, deuce, and no use.
[laughter]
- The three the hard way.
- Yo!
- These are my buddies here.
I could tease 'em all day long.
But they--I know not to get out of line with 'em neither too,
'cause they'll slap me around
like if I'm one of their children.
- You wouldn't have never figured
it would've been like this when they first started out.
- I believe that every human being has an understanding of art.
What is separating us is smaller than what is unifying us.
But in order to unify,
you have really to take something who goes beyond.
And this is art to me.
What I wanted, actually,
is to establish a new term of monument.
Why it's new?
Its location.
It is not in a park.
It's not in a city center.
It's where people are living.
Why where people are living?
Because I want to address it
to what I call a nonexclusive audience.
It is new because its duration has no ambition of eternity.
It wants to create memory.
Actually, in every artwork, I would like to establish
a new term of form, a new term of art.
This is my big ambition, of course.
- There's a lot of people came walkin' around,
looking while they was building it.
- Right.
- And they wasn't sure at all.
- A lot of people call this place the wood.
- Yeah, the wood.
- What did he call it?
- The little rascals.
- Oh, yeah, the little rascal clubhouse.
- Yeah, that's what I call it.
- That's the best one.
The one that Phil had called it, he said,
"Little House on the Prairie meets the Bronx."
I was like, "That's it.
Michael Landon's nowhere around."
[laughs] Yup.
Because I decided to do it where people are living,
I must find somebody who agree with my project.
I call it the key figure, Erik Farmer.
Erik is the president of forest houses,
the key to the neighborhood.
ERIK FARMER: The first response was, "What is this?"
Like, "What is this about?"
You know, I don't know anything about art.
I don't know who Antonio Gramsci is.
I didn't know who Thomas Hirschhorn was.
My understanding of a monument
was something that– it pretty much doesn't move.
It just– you know, it stays there.
So I'm like, "How can it be a monument
but you're saying you're gonna take it down?"
So he was explaining to me this is, like, a new concept.
And he actually brought me some books,
some past work he did.
You know, I read up on him and all that.
It's a monument, but it's a temporary monument.
Once he told me that,
I got a understanding of what he wanted to do.
And I knew he was into tape before this.
He's, like, a tape freak or something.
I never– he loves tape.
I never seen nobody like that before.
And he tells me, you know, "You can use tape for anything."
How can you use tape for anything?
But he really does it, really.
Thomas is– he's definitely out there.
But he got me out there with him.
Then– then a banner.
- So then we do one banner more.
Can we hang it in your house?
- Of course, I told you.
Whenever you're ready.
Whenever– yes.
- I asked Erik to compose a team of 15 people
to build the structure.
[saw whirring]
What was important, I didn't tell him I need some specificity.
I just needed residents.
And he composed the team.
And I'm very proud, even when it was very difficult,
to go to the end with the team.
I told it in the beginning, but when you are doing an artwork.
And especially in public space, it's never a completely success.
But what is nice, it's never a completely failure.
- Thomas uses me as one of his main carpenters.
He'll tell me to do something,
and I'll take my construction experience to try to add something to it.
But if he doesn't want to do it that way, you know,
Thomas is the boss.
We have to do it his way.
A lot of times, Thomas listens to how I do things.
So when they walk on it, everything is balanced.
- Oh.
- He's not a construction guy.
You know, as he say, he's an artist.
You know what I'm saying?
He's not a construction guy at all.
- Well, we had plans made by an architect
but only to get permission.
[laughs]
And, I mean– but also it was helpful,
because, for example, I learned
a staircase have a certain dimension.
So that I try to do– not so good, but we tried.
The same with the ramp.
I mean, it has to have a kind of level, of course, to go up.
- I would go backwards,
and then when it turned up, I would turn around.
So it's fine, Thomas.
- Okay.
To me, it seems the only way to work together.
Which I would like to call in coexistence.
Seems to me much more honest to say "Coexistence"
than "Collaboration."
They will be paid for their work,
because it's like I'm coming in a gallery
And working with the people who are working for the gallery
or for the museum.
They're paid as well.
- When he first got there,
he didn't want people to focus on making money
and people just focused on doing a job.
He wanted people to understand what this gentleman was about, Antonio Gramsci.
- I was very happy that in the neighborhood of forest houses,
people who didn't know Antonio Gramsci
made very immediately the connection
To Nelson Mandela or Malcolm X.
Gramsci is a philosopher of Marxist thinking,
and he comes from italy.
He went to prison for his thinking.
He didn't made a book.
He made his notebooks, who are like layers of thinkings,
always related to very practical things but still with a big ambition.
This is not a cultural project but an art project.
It's very important to understand it as a sculpture,
as something who wants to engage with the surrounding buildings.
Why these materials?
Because they're materials that everybody use and knows.
It's not because it's in forest houses,
in a socially not favorite neighborhood
that it is with cardboard or with tape and with wood.
No, it belongs to my aesthetic vocabulary.
- Shotgun, too hot to trot.
Yo, we're here live, 91.9 fm.
Don't forget to stop by The Gramsci bar and grill,
Where they've got all the beautiful food and everything.
It is so...
- [singing] ♪early in the morning♪
♪drive into the street♪
That's it.
[indistinct conversation]
- No, island.
Do you know how to spell?
- Island?
- On 5:00 sunday, we got Mr. Marcus steinweg
with the daily lecture.
Mondays, we got our Gramsci theater.
[people talking at once]
- I'm going mad!
People: Whoo!
- Capitalism?
Capitalism?
Capitalism.
- You learn.
I met people from all walk of life.
I love that.
That was– that was the best.
- All over the world.
- That's right.
- The second part of my work
is what I call public interventions.
I go out of the museum and gallery world,
And I try to reach an audience that is larger
than the small audience that we know goes to the art world.
And the third part of my practice is teaching.
That's fine, yeah.
This is working?
Okay, okay.
- Sorry.
- It's okay.
- And if it wasn't here, they wouldn't have came.
- Right.
- 'Cause why would they want to come here?
- On fridays, Mr. Thomas Hirschhorn himself
At 11:00 in the morning to 3:00 in the afternoon
with his art school.
His art school is very good.
I've been to the class and everything,
and it's right here on the Gramsci monument stage.
Thomas Hirshhorn's art school class, 11:00 in the morning.
And his art school class, it contains energy, yes; quality, no.
- Never about judging a person, never.
But judging a work with it, yes,
because I believe only the judgment of something
we did ourself or some other else did
can help us to go forward.
- If you can't take criticism...
- Don't come.
- Don't come to the class.
- Energy, yes.
Quality, no.
I'm not interested in the criteria of quality,
because I think the criteria of quality is exclusive.
So that's why I try to invent another criteria
who replace the criteria of quality,
the criteria of energy.
- It was kind of rough.
- And make brown, right?
- Can red and blue and orange?
- Yeah, the last one,
Because they're opposites.
Orange and blue are opposites, because orange...
Thomas came to my school.
I graduated from Princeton University.
And he did a lecture, and I had a studio visit with him.
And his expression "energy, yes; quality, no"
is something that really resonated with me.
So I emailed him afterwards, asking if I could be involved
in his next project, and he said yes.
In the beginning, it was more like a class.
Like, for the first five or six weeks,
there was very, like, specific activities
that we were doing about different artists,
different ideas in art,
different technical art concepts.
But then in the last few weeks,
it's been more kind of just, like, an open workshop,
'cause now the kids are coming in,
and they have a lot more of their own ideas.
You want to spray the inside?
- No, don't spray the inside.
- All right.
You could spray the inside.
- This is not a collaboration.
This is work in coexistence
That me, I do it 100%, but the other also 100%.
So I cannot interfere.
I don't want to interfere.
And I want to take the responsibility– and I can–
of 100% of what the other does also.
That I call unshared authorship.
So, for example, in the radio station,
what the DJ Gucci Or DJ Baby Dee told
and how they told it, I take 100% responsibility about.
- Offices have a certain amount of collars to get monthly,
I was told.
I was told, when I was writing tickets, that I had a minimum of 27 tickets
I had to write per month minimum.
Look around you.
Notice that when you enter upon a projects,
what is it that you're walking through?
Whereas it– they were not there years ago.
- It's, like, gated.
- Raw iron gates.
- Yeah.
- Once you enter upon those raw iron gates,
you're practically going through a door.
That's the insignia of trespassing.
- The thing is, do we go down?
Do we make a complaint?
- Of course.
- Do we fight the ticket?
Wait a minute.
Let me just finish.
Do we fight the ticket, or do we just let it sit
and get a warrant and then double up our problem?
- I think I have a solution.
- Yeah, yeah, solution.
Let's hear a solution.
- I've been going through it, So...
- Then, at 4:00, we got the daily lecture with Mr. Marcus Steinweg.
His daily lecture for today is "For the Love of Philosophy."
- A kind of ontological void or emptiness.
What does it mean, then, for the change
now transform situation of the human subject?
What does it mean for the definition of what thinking is?
So thinking is first to deal with this lack,
with this void, with this emptiness.
call it the inexistence of God.
Call it simply a kind of– Call it a kind of–
the whole of freedom,
like Jean-Paul Sartre is claiming that.
- He said that yesterday he don't believe in God.
And I said, "What you mean, you don't believe in God?"
That, like, it got to me.
I had to get up and say– I had to get up and say something.
"What you mean, you don't believe in God?"
He said he don't believe in nothing.
I said, "Okay."
- When I'm in front of an artwork,
there are two questions.
Where do you stand?
What do you want?
- Without getting too deep, too heavy–
- Yo, this next song is a joint called I got it.
And this is basically based on anybody
who's ever tried to accomplish something
When the odds was really against you
but you still pushed forward anyway.
- Yeah, yeah.
- With that said, soundman.
[latin guitar music]
♪like flaunting these roses♪
♪so many phony imposers♪
♪so many days on the humble♪
♪now feel my attitude crumble♪
♪and I won't shut it off♪
♪I've paid every cost♪
♪so all that shots I call♪
♪who are you to doubt it?♪
♪many floors in entertainment♪
♪I bear my soul 'fore it's naked♪
♪too many dreams now faded♪
♪they're saying I'll never make it♪
♪and I should fold my cards♪
♪damn, I've come too far♪
♪I shine above them all♪
♪and everything I love, Man, I got it♪
Thanks for the love, Forest Projects.
We out of here.
- I told y'all I was gonna be crazy.
You didn't believe me.
I told you.
MARCELLA PARADISE: Speaking and talking
to other people,
Listening to other people lectures,
saying where they came from and from where you came from,
we're gonna miss it.
- Yeah.
- We ain't feel it yet.
We ain't feel it yet, but it's gonna bring some tears.
It's gonna bring some tears here.
- 'Cause that means the people go.
- Right, and it's just gonna be something loss here.
Just gonna be like someone die.
- Mm-hmm.
- Now I understand what a monument means.
It's something that stays in your heart and in your memory,
because they only have it once.
- Yeah.