Tomorrow is the anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, and political artist Ottmar Hörl has chosen to mark it by encouraging people to have a think about the meaning of Marx’s work.
In honor of Karl Marx’s 195th birthday, Hörl has spread out 500 plastic figurines of the famous thinker in Trier, the western German city near the border with Luxembourg where Marx was born. Each miniature sculpture, which stands less than a meter (3.3 feet) tall, portrays Marx in the exact same pose, but in different shades of red.
A nifty idea, sure. But what could it possibly mean? “I want to inspire pedestrians to think about Karl Marx in a different way,” Hörl explains while his installation is being set up next to Trier’s historic Roman city gate, Porta Nigra, adding that the German philosopher has often been misinterpreted.
The journalist reporting this isn’t impressed; he sees it as trivializing Marx ‘to the maximum’. I don’t know. One thing worth noting is that if you try to think about Marx in 500 ways, one for each of Ottmar Hörl’s Marx-gnomes, you wouldn’t run out of possibilities before getting to the total. People are still arguing about him.