ABSTRACT
Infrastructure as a genre written through global capitalism is somewhat of a challenge for creative researchers, who usually seek to customise, if not autonomously develop, their infrastructure in each artistic situation. The problematics of artistic personae as infrastructure are well illustrated by the various analyses of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Gramsci Monument, a project commissioned and produced by the Dia Foundation, located in the Forest Houses, a public housing development of the Southeast Bronx in 2013. Boris Groys acknowledges the artistic persona as fundamental, but he does not materialise its production in a way that could see the persona as infrastructural. Groys and the historical avant-garde’s aging defenders have failed to understand the lessons of feminist and anti-racist critique, particularly as made within institutional critique. Gayatri Chakravoty Spivak gave a talk at the monument, and her work on responsibility emphasises that the ability to ‘answer to’ and ‘answer for’ is overdetermined by the institutional constraints that distribute responsibility in advance.
