The Gramsci Monument looked as though Sun Ra had landed a plywood space station in the middle of the Forest Houses grounds. The sprawling structure was replete with people. Children were occupied in the art workroom while others were working or playing in the computer lounge. In one room deejays were on mics at the radio station as folks next door were getting the daily newspaper together. There was a restaurant kitchenette where you could smell turkey burgers grilling. I arrived early because I wanted to look around before Fred Moten took the stage in the outdoor theatre. I ran into Fred at the Gramsci memorial library. He was sitting on a comfortable chair in the corner writing a poem. We greeted each other and talked about how the structure, the scene of the monument, felt good. It was not as though either of us had approached this monument without some hesitation. We had both read the various critiques of this project by the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn, a community-centered participatory art project staged in the grounds of a South Bronx public housing project. This installation was the final monument in a series of four, dedicated to Hirschhorn’s favorite philosophers, constructed in poor and working-class neighborhoods. The other monuments were in honor of Baruch Spinoza in Amsterdam (1999); Gilles Deleuze in Avignon, France (2000); and Georges Bataille in Kassel, Germany (2002). I had done some preparatory research before visiting the scene and learned that the monument had generated a lot of praise and denunciation. The negative criticism I read ranged from thoughtful concerns about the politics of staging such a project in the Bronx and another line of commentary that questioned the artist’s sincerity or condemned the endeavor as naïve. Moten continued to work on the poem, which I soon learned was to be titled after Hirschhorn’s piece. I had the sense he was narrating another kind of encounter with the Gramsci Monument that swerved away from the polarized streams of praise and denunciation that the piece had received thus far.
The reading started a few minutes late. The crowd included people who lived at Forest Houses, uptown and downtown art-world denizens, readers of Moten’s poetry and theory, and a few nonresidents who wanted to see the Gramsci Monument and had stumbled on this particular performance. The poet read from two of his books of poems, B. Jenkins (2010) and Hughson’s Tavern (2008), and a prose piece from his new book, coauthored with Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (2013). He concluded the reading with the then brand-new poem “the gramsci monument.” When he began the reading he asked the audience to interrupt at any time if they had questions or felt like saying something. Though visibly engaged, the audience was far too polite to say anything during the reading, so Moten interrupted himself and elaborated on his poems and the stories behind them. Questions were asked after he had read his last poem. One interested audience member asked Fred how he felt being there, at the Gramsci Monument, in the Bronx. He talked about feeling good in the space and how rare that feeling could be. He explained that he was always happy to be invited somewhere to speak, but it was a special kind of luxury to really feel good at the place one is happy to be invited to. The audience breathed in that idea of feeling good, on this mild summer day, with the sun shining, in this canyon surrounded by red brick towers where this ship, our ship, had landed. Someone asked him what he thought of Hirschhorn’s project, and he responded by saying that there had always been something here and the installation did not unveil anything new. He used the metaphor of food to elaborate this point. He explained that sometimes, even though not always the healthiest thing to do, one must salt one’s food to really taste the flavor. The bright flavor of this space was brought out by the monument, but that taste had always been there, which is to insist that the effervescence of the actually existing relationality of the Forest Houses and the promise of collectivity was and is always present in such spaces.
Moten’s poem and his reading, the event of the poem, brought into clear view that these projects are wellsprings for thought, innovation, and love. The poem commences with the poet calling attention to the general situation of the Gramsci Monument when he remarks on the fact that the projects have become a project from and for the outside, which essentially validates and proves the reality that the projects that have always been something of tremendous value, what the poem describes as a “treasure.” In The Undercommons Moten and Harney declare that the only possible relationship to the university today is a criminal one.1 The poem announces a related situation in that the projects are, by design, something that has stolen us, something that we, in turn, must steal ourselves and each other back from, that we must take back the projects. To do so is simultaneously to “bust up” the projects and to love them. In its last few lines the poem considers the wood that composes the project within the projects. The mention of wood speaks to the historical and vibrant materialism of the art project and the projects it inhabits. It marks how wood, the matter at the heart of the matter, could, from a certain perspective, symbolize only chattel slavery’s auction block but, in this instance, during the event of the poem, signals the material that allows us to imagine a pirate ship in the projects, holding its passengers and participants who feel held by the hold. This pirate ship is also a spaceship. Its destination is the necessity of radical departure from one singular project to a vaster sense of a plurality of projects. The poem is now its own cultural artifact but also its own monument to the project in the projects which is always the project.
1 Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, “The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses,” Social Text 79 (2004): 101–15.