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Gut Feeling Thomas Hirschhorn’S Superficial Engagement James Westcott

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Gut Feeling Thomas Hirschhorn’S Superficial Engagement James Westcott CriticalActs Gut Feeling Thomas Hirschhorn’s Superficial Engagement James Westcott Theatre plays no role in my work. I don’t like the the 1987 movie Hellraiser. Taped to the walls spectacular in an art work, nor the shocking. are seemingly endless Xeroxed and blown- —Thomas Hirschhorn (in Bonami 2001:93) up banal newspaper and magazine headlines rationalizing and pondering war—like lines This statement, by the Swiss artist Thomas in a sinister, senseless poem: “It Is Real,” Hirschhorn, seems rather disingenuous, even “Evil Chem Plan,” “How The World Sees It,” for such a master of reflexive counterintuitive- ness (a confident and prolific interviewee, Hirschhorn has said that he likes the “hum- bleness” of Japanese tourists, hates fussy Figure 1. Thomas Hirschhorn, Superficial Engagement, 2006. Installation View. Gladstone atmospheric lighting, and believes art can’t Gallery, New York, NY. (Photo by David Regen; answer anything (in Jouannais 1994, Gingeras © Thomas Hirschhorn 2006; courtesy of 1998, and Bonami 2001)—while presenting a Gladstone Gallery, New York) thousand possible answers in his deliberately overdetermined works). Hirschhorn’s latest “display”—he prefers this term to “instal- lation,” since it implies the directness and honesty of a shop-window—features horrific photographs he found online and in “specialty magazines” (Saltz 2006) of mangled corpses in Iraq and beyond, apparently victims of Bush’s War on Terror, replicated dozens or even hun- dreds of times, and juxtaposed with the kooky but calming geometric drawings of the Swiss visionary healer Emma Kunz. It’s a test to see if art can outdo destruction. Destruction wins hands down. The images and drawings are crowded onto three ramshackle platforms that resemble carnival floats. Made of Hirschhorn’s typical ostentatiously cheap materials like packing tape, cardboard, paper, timber, tinfoil, and wire, the floats dominate the gallery. Also on display on these structures are a number of naked, androgynous mannequins standing and gazing blankly, punctured by hundreds Critical Acts of nails and screws, like the boogieman from James Westcott is editor of artreview.com, and he is currently working on a biography of Marina Abramovic for MIT Press. 171 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.176 by guest on 28 September 2021 “A Little Nervous,” “A Bridge to Nowhere,” theorist Georges Bataille. In Cavemanman “Hot Times,” “Global Risk.” (2002), his previous display at the Gladstone The overwhelming stimulation and bully- Gallery, Hirschhorn made tunnels and caves ing bravado of this processional display— out of cardboard, stuck famous philosophy you walk dutifully, dumbstruck around books to the walls next to sticks of tinfoil it—created an immersive, claustrophobic, and dynamite, made strategic piles of garbage, quite traumatic experience for visitors to the and scrawled repeatedly the cryptic slogan of Gladstone Gallery in New York in January solidarity 1 man = 1 man. In London in 2001, 2006. The ride was more painful than any he created another scene—a stage set?—where of Hirschhorn’s pieces since he emerged in potential class solidarity and social isolation the mid-1990s, which all share a similarly combine: a Laundromat. (Laundromats in confrontational and excessive style. Superficial London are uniquely miserable places, like Engagement, the knowingly apt title of this being inside a Smiths song.) Hirschhorn’s spectacular and shocking “display”—yes, Laundromat was made from cardboard and spectacular and shocking—was undeniably tinfoil plastered with newspaper cuttings, theatrical. If Michael Fried could apply the and featured TV screens showing gruesome term “theatrical” to Minimalist sculpture for random news footage. Hirschhorn has made creating a situation that “includes the behold- several rough-and-ready street altars—like the er” (1967:153), then Hirschhorn, though he real ones that spring up after deaths and disas- couldn’t be further from Minimalism, must ters—to Raymond Carver, Gilles Delueze, also qualify. The work is desperate for atten- and Baruch Spinoza; and he’s made “kiosks” tion, and in fact can’t exist without your (walk-in cardboard boxes) displaying informa- (preempted) response, your gut reaction. tion on Fernand Léger and Emil Nolde. Hirschhorn trained in Geneva and Paris Maybe his most outstanding piece is as a graphic designer and originally wanted to World Airport, the project for the 1999 Venice work not for others but as a “graphic designer Biennale, in which Hirschhorn made dozens for myself” (Gingeras et al. 2004:9). When of cartoonish airplanes out of cardboard he found this impossible, or when he realized (each one representing a nation-state), a this might actually be a good definition of tinfoil runway, and waiting areas where view- an artist, he became one. This background ers could read up on Rosa Luxemburg and may explain the emphasis on bold commun- Antonio Gramsci and pay respect at shrines ication—never mind of what—in his work. to Nike and Puma. There’s an exhilarating A revulsion for the slickness of graphic design openness, enthusiasm, and clear-eyed horror may explain Hirschhorn’s violent rejection to the piece that sums up Hirschhorn’s concern of a conventional aesthetics of quality and lux- about a hypercomplex, underglobalized world ury in his work, which he describes as a kind that’s gone to pot. “Airports are a typical space of two-dimensional sculpture, purposefully of today,” Hirschhorn said later, “a world- flimsy and impermanent. (He once filmed reversed mirror of what is going on: citizenship garbage collectors taking away one of his or not, luxury shops next to the expulsion of dismantled displays.) Hirschhorn’s confusing, the ‘sans-papiers,’ high technology mixed with crowded displays are always made out of cheap, folklorist travel groups from some remote trashy materials because, he has said (rather country. An airport is a nonspace, where patronizingly), “people understand them” everything is so close, but so far away, never (in Saltz 2006). mingling [...]” (in Bonami 2001:90). At Documenta 11 in Kassell in 2002, Airports, Laundromats, altars, commu- Hirschhorn snubbed the exhibition center and nity centers...the few remaining public spaces instead set up three rickety shacks in a poor in a world of globalized and exacerbated housing project miles away, populated mostly inequality, and re-created in such aggressive by Turkish immigrants. Bataille Monument was simulations for bewildered visitors to experi- a community center of sorts, consisting of a ence—these displays are positively brimming café, a library, and a video room—all dedicat- with theatricality. It’s not (only) that the piec- ed to researching the down-and-dirty French es call for a physical and mental interaction Critical Acts 172 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/dram.2007.51.2.176 by guest on 28 September 2021 driven postphenomenological effects like this (forget the flatter- ing fun of a Dan Graham), doesn’t seem a violent enough term for what Hirschhorn does to you. “Art doesn’t give satisfaction,” he once said. “Art poses problems. Art gives questions. Art inflicts sadness” (in Bonami 2001:93). Appropriately, Superficial Engagement was brazen and bru- tal, entirely oriented around and in anticipation of the viewer’s inevitable visceral response to pic- Figure 2. Thomas Hirshhorn, Flugplatz Welt/World Airport, tures of exploded skulls, spattered 1999. Installation view. 48th Biennale di Venezia/d’APERTutto, brains, a dislocated eyeball, guts Venice. (Courtesy of the artist and Musée d’Art Moderne spilling: revulsion. The experi- Grand-Duc Jean, Luxembourg) ence became a test of will: Are you going to let what Hirschhorn calls (stopping to pay respect at a shrine, for exam- a kind of narcissistic oversensitiv- ple, or educating yourself in a kiosk—all the ity (in Douglas 2006) take over and insulate while shuffling, stooping, and being careful you from these horrific images and the reality where you tread). What’s more striking than they reflect? Such a macho challenge made this familiar kind of performative interaction for a one-way, abusive kind of theatre, with a is the way your personal, internal response severely limited range of possible responses becomes something of a performance in itself. and a diminished or perhaps nonexistent In an essay for Artforum in November “radical participatory potential.” 2001, Benjamin H.D. Buchloh identified There was one way of directly participat- Hirschhorn’s forebears in theatricalized ing, but it soon felt pathetic. Using the drills sculpture: Joseph Beuys, who “expanded [the] and hammers provided, visitors could add a concept of sculpture” into the social realm screw or nail to one of the tree-stump totems (through lectures and performances), Allan on each of the floats (individually titled Kaprow with his “performative architecture” Chromatic Fire, Spatial Front, and Concrete (like his blocks of ice dumped on the streets Shock, although there didn’t seem to be much of L.A.), and Dan Graham’s pavilions playing difference or development between them). But with the influence of architecture on human after completing this cute little gesture—like behavior in public spaces (2001:109). Buchloh adding a rock to a cairn—you look up at a pic- writes that Hirschhorn’s theatrical sculptures ture of a corpse with a hole in its chest where imply a “radical participatory potential” (110). the heart should be, the skin melted away This
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