Survey

Survey 42

Benjamin H.D. Buchloh Thomas Hirschhorn: Lay Out Sculpture and Display Diagrams

'I wanted to make a sculpture out of a plan, out of

two dimensions. I didn't want to create volumes -

I wanted a third dimension out of the second

dimension. When one thinks sculpture, one thinks

volume, mass, weight, whereas I wanted to simply

make a plan and transfer it into a third dimension;

thereby sculpture changes its condition. '

- Thomas Hirschhorn

Looking back (in anger, in frustration, in

bemusement, in longing) at decades of unfulfilled

or failed declarations promising paradigm shifts in

artistic production is a mode of artistic thought

that is not generally acknowledged publicly. From

the vantage point of the precarious present, it

would seem that not one of the most radical

artistic propositions of the 1960s now holds up -

or they appear out of reach and reality. The

annihilation in the immediate present of the

optimism of the recent past (e.g. of the

enlightenment radicality of Conceptual art and the

politicized versions of institutional critique),

followed by flawed recyclings of that history in the

work of subsequent generations, has undoubtedly

created an obstacle course, a field of blockages,

against which Thomas Hirschhorn, emerging in the

late 1980s, had to construct a language of dialogic

responses and dialectical rejoinders.

Yet it is not the concept of 'influence' that will

guide our discussion of his work; it is rather the

concepts of re-inscription and reinvestment that

demarcate his distance from the positions of the

previous generation. Recognizing the radical

changes wrought by Hirschhorn on the legacies

of the 1960s and 1970s will not only provide a

measure of the decline of paradigms and promises

with which an artist setting out to work in the late

1980s would have had to contend, but it will also

allow us to see the historical specificity of

Hirschhorn's own interventions in the (art)

historical processes of the present. And it will force

us from the start to discern the almost Herculean

optimism (and intense mourning and rage) that

must have been required to begin his work at all,

rather than complying with the cynical

affirmation, as most of his peers of the late 1980s

elected to do.

Hirschhorn himself, in numerous works, and

more explicitly in several interviews, has

foregrounded the importance of a complex set of

historical references in the constitution of his

project. He has positioned himself more explicitly

than any artist of his generation (or that of his

predecessors), within historical constellations: the

utopian projects of the 1920s on the one hand,

and the radical aspirations of the 1960s on the

other. Thus he frequently cites Joseph Beuys and

Andy Warhol as his reference figures from the

recent past. This peculiar pairing is matched by an

even more unlikely opposition within the more

distant historical avant gardes of the 1920s:

Hirschhorn attempts to embrace both the

quietistic legacies of Kurt Schwitters, and the

communicative actionism of Aleksandr

Rodchenko's advertising and design work.

While it might appear difficult at first to

construct a plausible set of relations between the

figures in each pair, and even more so between the

two pairs as a historical framework from within

which an artist could work in the present, it

jiiiiP

probably constitutes as good a model as any in

order to initiate a critical and historical reading

of Hirschhorn's expanded conquest of visibility

within contemporary practices.

To consider the role of design in the work

of these artists might be the first register within

which such a historical comparison could be

productive. Secondly, one could contemplate

the explicit and implicit negotiations with the

increasing encroachment of the commodity form

on artistic autonomy. Thirdly, one might examine

the respective relationship ofthese artists to a

notion of 'publicness' and the 'public sphere',

evident in their continuously shifting modes of

operation and role behaviour (e.g. the artist as

producer, the artist as consumer, the artist as

shaman, the artist as terroristic clown).

A plausible sketch ofthe opposition between

Beuys and Warhol would recognize first of all that

Beuys insisted on the possibility of a practice

outside of traditional artistic institutions. He had

a disregard for the museum, pretended to dismiss

the gallery, and displayed an alternately

aristocratic and proletarian ignorance of the

exchange value of art. Furthermore, what

distinguished Beuys was his claim to operate

outside the discursive frameworks of artistic

production and reception, in acts of expressive

immediacy and in demands for socially transparent

communication. This was particularly evident in his

contempt for Marcel Duchamp, or in the justified

threats that he perceived in his Dusseldorf

counterfigures Marcel Broodthaers and Robert

Filliou in the early to mid-1970s.

For Warhol, of course, the exact opposite

would apply, being more lucid than anybody about

the inextricable intertwining of claims for

autonomy and immediate commercial

recuperation. Warhol's works operated as acts of

detournement not of spectacle by art but of art by

spectacle. Mapping formal inventions on to design

strategies (and vice versa), his work enforced the

insight that in the present, form is brand and logo,

and that the striving for identity - if, and when

successful at all- could only be crowned by the

achievement of a corporate (artistic) identity.

The dialectics of a historical opposition

between Schwitters and Rodchenko are of course

far more difficult to construct with hindsight. Both

of their positions originated in a profoundly anti­

aesthetic impulse, and both removed traditional

artistic subjectivity from the status and the spaces

of privileged forms of experience. Schwitters

invokes the lost subject in the obsolescence of

abandoned and rejected materiality, while

Rodchenko's radical design (a fusion of abstraction

and photomontage) articulated the beginning of a

collective social production of the self ofthe

future. Advertisement and product design in the

hands of Rodchenko embodied the successful

transition from cultural representations in the

bourgeois public sphere to those of a newly

emerging proletarian public sphere, in which

design and production carried not only the utopian

promise of a fundamental equality in the living

conditions of everyday life, but more importantly,

of the future equality of the constitution ofthe

subject within the collective. Rodchenko's work,

and Productivism in general, would reconcile the

dialectical conflict of design and Utopia, an aspect

43

Andy WarhoL

SeLf-portrait

1967

Acrylic and silkscreen ink on

canvas

56 x 56 em

Joseph Beuys

I Love America and America Loves

Me

1974

Rene Block Gallery, New York

Survey

Survey

Untitled

1993

Wood, cardboard, paper, prints,

pLastic foil, adhesive tape, carpet

'Hom mage a Edouard Manet:

Thomas Hirschhorn, Adrian

Schiess', Fondation Art et Societe,

Dijon, France

44

undoubtedly appealing to Hirschhorn's

artistic intelligence.

Hirschhorn's attraction to these legacies

recalls that particular historical moment when

Rodchenko's advertisement work demarcated the

successful transition from utopian promise to its

factual delivery by design, the moment when the

informative and instructional capacities of the

avant-garde advertisement facilitated the

universal and egalitarian distribution of

literacy, communication and consumption to

those who had only recently transcended the

universally governing conditions of illiteracy and

abject poverty.

By contrast, advertisement and design in their

highly advanced forms in the Western capitalist

world, would henceforth make it their primary

project to intensify collective illiteracy. If not quite

yet on the level of an actual inability to read the

names of the products, then this was true certainly

on the level of a psychic and cognitive illiteracy of

subjects that can only constitute themselves in the

readings ofthe names ofthe products, as Warhol's

paintings had amply testified. This historical

opposition ofthe design legacies, the extreme

ambiguity of their attractions, fused with the

vestiges of contemporary experience, make up

one element of Hirschhorn's montage aesthetics.

In total opposition to the utopianism of

Rodchenko, who designed a future plenitude from

the social reality of poverty and lack, Kurt

Schwitters would start from a present of futile

abundance, and he would contemplate its excess

and its remnants. If Rodchenko's forward-looking

design tried to bring about the social production of

the proletarian self, Schwitters' retrospective

melancholia mourns the disappearance ofthe

bourgeois self under the onslaught of mass­

cultural debris.

Schwitters (most evidently in the Merzbau

[1923]' of course) was also the first to recognize

that any attempt to articulate the violence of an

ever-expanding overproduction, its quasi­

totalitarian invasion of all registers and spaces of

the self, would eventually require architectural

dimensions, disabling the containment and

intimacy that the fetishistic structure of collage

had barely upheld. And it is in this architectural

dimension of Schwitters' work that Hirschhorn

would have discovered the necessity for his own

shift from smaLL-scaLe coLLage/montage objects

to ever-increasing dispLays of accumuLations of

objects, images and information, and most

importantLy, of the simuLtaneousLy existing, yet

radicaLLy incompatibLe modes of the experiences

of the everyday.

Shifting VaLues

Ever since Vincent van Gogh described the subLime

detritus outside The Hague in a famous Letter to

his brother Theo, the attraction and depLoyment of

refuse have remained tropes of modernity, and at

ti mes, as with the work of Schwitters, even

ascended to a centraL avant-garde strategy. Since

then, this strategy has expanded its poLymorph

spectrum, and in Hirschhorn's work it ranges from

the hope that obsoLescence couLd contain memory

traces and residues of resistance against

acceLerated production and totaL

instrumentaLization, to a manifest poLiticaL

opposition to Late capitaList overproduction and its

systematic destruction of resources and regionaL

and gLobaL ecoLogies.

Hirschhorn's depLoyment of the cheapest

suppLementaL materiaLs such as cardboard,

masking tape, nyLon and aLuminium foiL, for

exampLe, stands in manifest opposition to the

industriaL (over) production of MinimaList and

Post-MinimaList scuLpture. Either his objects and

materiaLs have Lost aLL vaLue, or they never had any

45

Williams-Renault

1993

Wood, cardboard, paper, priots,

adhesive tape

'Rencontres dans un couloir,!',

Paris

Kurt Schwitters

Merzbau (detail olinterior)

Begun 1923, destroyed 1943

Mixed media installation

Hanover

Survey

Survey

11 vernagelte Fenster

1993

Wood, cardboard, paper, prints,

adhesive tape

Raum fur Aktuelle Kunst, Lucerne

46

to begin with. Thus, even on the basic level of

materials, his work reflects first of all upon the

theoretical problem of the various forms of value

that a work of art can or cannot inhabit, on its

continuous shifts between cult value and use

value, between exchange value and surplus value,

between exhibition value and sign-exchange

value, essentially contesting the very concept of

artistic value itself. Secondly, Hirschhorn's work

reveals that value in artistic production is

circumstantial, contingent and contextual, i.e.

that it is merely the result of institutional

assignments and spatial conventions: works of art

gain value first of all by separation, seclusion and

confinement in the specialized places of collection

and display. Thirdly, Hirschhorn challenges these

territorial and institutional conventions by

constructing situations where the work's material

value is ostentatiously withdrawn. When he

foregrounds the work's perishable or transitory

nature, or when he invites vandalism as one of the

many possible responses to his public pavilions, as

in the planned physical destruction of his work in

Jemand kummert sich um meine Arbeit ('someone

takes care of my work', 1992) or in his Skulptur-

Sortier-Station (1997), he seems to incite first of

all the elimination of value. In this and many

similar works, Hirschhorn withdraws the work's

potential to accrue value with the same radicality

with which artists of the late 1960s had abolished

the seemingly ontological guarantee of visuality by

withholding a work's perceptual information.

In advanced capitalist economies of control

and calculation, only artistic production retains an

atavistic semblance of magic, reminiscent of the

power of desire, that had once generated

transformations in myth and fairytales: e.g. the

transmogrification from small into large, of bad

wine into good, of straw into gold, or, in more

recent modernity, the conversion of outdated

refuse into a sublime aesthetic object.

Yet neither the placement nor the audiences

that Hirschhorn's work addresses will allow it to

accrue value. Thus the work measures first of all

the chasm that separates the promises of cultural

production from the actually existing conditions of

everyday life, demarcating the extreme

contradictions within which cultural practice must

situate itself. This could begin to explain why the

Spinoza Monument (1999) had to be situated in the

red light district of Amsterdam, or why the Bataille

Monument (2002) had to be located in a housing

project for Turkish workers in Kassel, Germany,

during Documenta 11 (while Hirschhorn is of

course fully aware that all agit-prop aesthetics are

defunct in the present).

Hirschhorn's foregrounding of a poverty of

materials, then, reads first of all as an act of

solidarity with those audiences who are socially

and culturally barred from access to traditional

forms of the 'values' of cultural representation. Yet

neither a reconquered naivety (in spite of

Hirschhorn's veneration of Robert Walser), nor an

expansion of various concepts of art brut, nor a

missionary misconception of the powers of the

artist (as in Beuys) are the defining parameters

of his work. Rather, Hirschhorn forces the utopian

dimension of cultural sublimation and the utter

desublimation of experience in the present into an

extreme dialectic.

And while Hirschhorn's work is certainly not

the first to refuse a realization of the artistic self

as the production of value, it is certainly the first

work to diagnose material excess and the

plenitude of surplus as the very conditions that

have eliminated the selffrom production and from

experience. Hirschhorn's displays, with their

perpetual emphasis on mad proliferation, become

a record of those advanced historical conditions of

material accum ulation where the subject that had

once been conceived as the result of production

has now been eliminated by it.

Evacuating Abstraction In his contribution to the exhibition 'Invitation',

curated by Catherine David in 1994 at the Jeu de

Paume, Hirschhorn's work became known for the

first time to a larger Parisian public and to the

47

Jemand klimmert sich urn meine

Arbeit

1992

Wood, cardboard, paper, prints,

adhesive tape, sponge

Paris

Survey

Wall Display, Rosa Tambala,

Saisie, Lay-Out

1994

Tables, fabric, wood, cardboard,

paper, prints, marker pen,

ballpoint pen, transparent plastic

foil, plastic, adhesive tape,

sponge

'Invitations', Galerie Nationale du

Jeu de Paume, Paris

Wall-Display, collection

Kunstmuseum St. Gallen,

Switzerland

Survey 48

peculiar professional milieu that is called 'the art

world'. The exhibition demarcated both a debut

and a finale, since it in fact summed up the first

five years of Hirschhorn's art. One strategy,

immediately striking in all of the work on display,

was what we could call the final evacuation of

abstraction. The second, equally striking, and

in many ways the opposite of the first, was

Hirschhorn's rematerialization of Conceptual art.

The catalogue published on this occasion,

designed by Hirschhorn, actually mimics the very

style of the cheaply produced text-based

publications ofthat movement's most radical

moment (with the introductory catalogue text by

the curator typically placed on the outside cover in

the guise of a Kosuthian proposition). Inside, a

sequence of cheaply photographed and cheaply

printed images of works and exhibitions were

accompanied by two lists (the classic format of the

affectless and ascetic presentation of information

in Conceptualism). One appeared atthe beginning,

the other atthe end of the catalogue, both

registering the works and exhibitions produced by

Hirschhorn from 1988 to 1994, showing

sculptural/painterly objects that the artist had

disseminated on floors or shelves in often

nondescript locations. ' Hirschhorn's evacuation of the meaning

potential of modernist painting operated on a

number of levels simultaneously. The history of

abstraction had clearly occupied Hirschhorn, given

the frequency of explicit and implicit references to

the work of the great abstract artists of the first

half of the twentieth century from Vladimir Tatlin

Survey 50

far left, top to bottom,

Vladimir TatLin

Model for a Projected Monument

for the III International

1919-20

Wood, wire

h. approx. 670 em

ALeksandr Rodchenko

Untitled

1919

Watercolour and oil on board

49.5 x 25.5 em

Piet Mondrian

Broadway Boogie-Woogie

1942-43

Oil on canvas

127 x 127 em

left, top to bottom,

Otto FreundLich

Composition

1930

Oil on wood panel

147 x 113 em

Barnett Newman

OnementI

1948

Oil on canvas

69 x 41 em

Sigmar PoLke

Opium Smoker

1982-83

Lacquer, paper and acrylic on

linen

259 x 200 em

and Aleksandr Rodchenko to Piet Mondrian and

Otto Freundlich, or those of the second, from

Barnett Newman to Blinky Palermo. The first level

was thus in terms of the classical parameters of

avant-garde abstraction: its heroic reduction to

horizontal or vertical linearity, its assaults on

figure-ground relationships, its daring purification

of chromatic relations in favour of pure

monochromy, and lastly, its programmatic

instability, shifting from painting to relief, from

relief to free-standing or freely suspended

sculpture, or from the conceptually rigorous

gridding of surfaces and their serially iterative

structure to a more-or-less accidental

accumulation of structures and materials of an

uneasily identifiable condition of objecthood.

Always hovering on the brink of debris, these

works manifestly lacked the confidence that

American Minimalism had invested in production

and its patentfusing offormalism and the

scientistic-industria complex.2 The abstract designs

on Hirschhorn's 'paintings' by that time had

already become mere spatial demarcations, almost

cartographic or diagrammatic outlines that divided

different spheres or parcelled out segments of

space. Evacuated abstraction, reduced to its most

programmatic form as signal or territorial

delineation, here had finally come to live the

nightmare that had haunted it from the beginning:

once it was cut from its spiritual and utopian

promises, once it had to see its musical chords

voided, to lose its sinuous or architectural

correspondences, it would inevitably end up as

vacuous (in the way that Harold Rosenberg had

recognized the potential of Pollock's painting to

become mere apocalyptic wallpaper, or in the way

that Michael Fried once referred to Barnett

Newman's stripe paintings as bordering on mere

demarcations of a handball court).

Often marked merely with a single painterly

sign (such as a line or a rectangular patch, or an

irregularly designed linear diagram made with

masking tape), Hirschhorn's objects suggested an

extremely ambiguous status: neither painting nor

relief (signalled by the fact that they were placed

on the floorin a horizontal position), neither

sculpture (emphasized by the fact that they were

flat chromatic surfaces), nor ready-made objects,

or minimalist techno-scientific geometric

constructions, these hybrids reminded the

spectators first of all of abstraction's precarious

status.

In the mid- to late 1960s, Andre Cadere,

Blinky Palermo and Sigmar Polke had been among

the first to formulate an allegorical approach that

underlined the depletion of abstraction's past

heroicism. Their paintings, objects and reliefs had

been the first to articulate the dialectics of an

evacuation of abstraction's utopian promises and

the elimination of use-value from the experience

of objects. 3 And that depletion had taken hold, as

it would in Hirschhorn's work, on all levels

simultaneously: that of geometric or biomorphic

form, that of chromatic purity, that of the material

support, and that of the presentational placement.

In the same way that Hirschhorn's cardboard

objects and reliefs mutate through the iconic and

morphological conventions of abstraction, they

also invoke its most heroic battles, all of them lost,

at least when contemplated from the position of

Hirschhorn's mournful travesties. If one of

abstraction's initial battles had been the

insinuation of its self-referential purity, then its

final battle had been the revelation that only the

pacifying principles of exhibition value could shore

up painting's anodyne autonomy against the

compelling topologies of chance, equivalence

and contingency.

If Polke's work at times feigned mere travesty,

and if Palermo succeeded in redeeming abstraction

precisely through its evacuation, Hirschhorn's

abstractions, it seems, were always already

condemned to loss and disappearance. This is not

through an internal logic, let alone through the

51

lay-Out

1993

Fabric, wood, cardboard, prints,

adhesive tape

Galerie Susanna Kulli, St. Gallen,

Switzerland

Survey

Andy Warhol

Brillo Boxes (Soap Pads) and

Campbell's Boxes (Tomato Juice)

1964

Silkscreen ink and paint on

painted wood

Brillo Boxes, 44 x 43 x 35.5 cm

each

Campbell's Boxes, 25.5 x 48.5 x

24 cm each

Survey 52

artist's own decision, but as a result of

abstraction's inescapable subjection to the very

mechanisms of instrumentalization that devalorize

the codes of pure plasticity, dominant now even

within what might once have been autonomous

gestures and graphics. Hirschhorn extrapolates

the signs of a formerly heroic abstract plasticity

and juxtaposes them directly with the

advertisement sign, thus constructing a collision

between the space of plasticity and the space of

design (a conflict that had of course already been

ignited by Warhol's Brillo Box, where the pure form

of sculptural plasticity had been brought out from

under, or had been manifestly submerged by the

reign of design).

What then could be the historical interest of

the dialectics of an evacuated abstraction and of

a rematerialized conceptuality? In Hirschhorn's

account, first of all, it is the articulation of that

perpetual oscillation between an irretrievably lost

plasticity and the inescapable semiology of visual

production. But the semiology is not - as in

Conceptual art - celebrated as a triumph of

language over the mythical primacy of painterly or

sculptural matter. It registers the invasion of every

bit of matter by the impertinence of the

advertisement sign, and its 'languages': boring

and bullying, seductive and sordid.' One ofthe

more striking examples of Hirschhorn's

diagrammatic reductivism is a rather remarkable

installation, Circuit (1991), known only from a

photograph in his studio and reproduced in the

Jeu de Paume catalogue. Announcing Hirschhorn's

future usage of cheap industrial, discarded

materials, a network of string fragments connects

cardboard discs (presumably paper plates).' Each

of these serially aligned discs bears the name of

a global corporation. As the title Circuit indicates,

Hirschhorn presents a randomly chosen, yet

connected accumulation ofthe corporations of

monopoly capitalism, tracing social relations and

subjective identity as residual effects in the web

of corporate spheres, their products and temporal

and spatial controls.

The diagrammatic appears in Hirschhorn's

work from the very beginning as an inescapable

condition of drawing and spatial delimitation. It

seems that once the tactility of objects and the

phenomenology of spatial experience have

withered away, the drawing has to trace the actual

disembodiment and social abstraction that govern

the subject's relation to subjects and objects. The

diagrammatic drawing, then, corresponds to that

particular historical formation in which the

subject's last aspirations for self-determination

have finally vanished, and have disintegrated into

a mere mythical semblance of subject formation

and social participation.

Hirschhorn's Atlas: Les plaintifs, les betes, les

politiques (1995)

Hirschhorn's book Les plaintifs, les betes, les

politiques (1995) could be considered in many

ways as his Atlas.' Itis not justa collection of

source materials, for which the scrapbooks of

artists in the twentieth century from Hannah Hi:ich

to Gerhard Richter have been mistaken all too

often. Les plaintifs samples the conflicts and

contradictions that govern artistic production in

the present, and identifies the tools to respond to

them. But first of all, Les plaintifs indicates the

artist's departure from his previous painterly and

sculptural production, summed up at his Jeu de

Paume exhibition in 1994. In fact, numerous

colour photographs of the older work reproduced

in Les plaintifs now no longer merely document it

(as the previous catalogue had done), but serve as

evidence to challenge its continuing validity in

the present.

This auto-tribunal is conducted both through

textual queries and through the juxtapositions of

these photographs with images from the present:

scenes of war and extreme brutality on the one

hand, and contemporary advertisements and

objects of consumer culture on the other (cars,

cigarettes and perfume). These stark

juxtapositions render them all the more

insufferable in their fraudulence. In one montage

image we are asked to compare the photograph of

a political conference room that has been

destroyed by an explosion with a photograph of

one of Hirschhorn's distribution sculptures, and

the artist's caption reads as follows: 'J had an

exhibition of my work such as this entitled "Un

53

Les plaintifs, les betes, les

politiques (extract of the

edition)

1995

Artist's book, published by Centre

Genevois de Gravure

Contemporaine, Geneva

Survey

Survey 54

hommage a Edouard Manet" and I have seen this

after an explosion (I don't know where it is).

Am I a formalist? ,

The radical reorientation of Hirschhorn's work

evident in Les plaintijs incorporates ever larger

numbers offound photographic materials. These

are captioned with textual, hand-drawn

enunciations that confront artist and spectator on

equal terms. While occasional textual elements

had already appeared in the earlier work, it is only

now that Hirschhorn's questions, often posed in a

faux naif tone (e.g. 'Can you help me understand

this?' or 'Who is Winner, who is Loser?', or in

shifter statements like'I love this' or'I want

everything' or simply 'Thank You'), suture the

readers/spectators in a confrontational dialogic

relationship, leading them right into the conflicts

between aesthetics and ideology. Furthermore,

Hirschhorn's scraped and scribbled texts,

ostentatiously drawn with ballpoint pen, fuse the

bureaucratic and the brutish. Only the most

desublimated drawings ofTwombly and Warhol had

deployed the industrial 'invention' of the ballpoint

pen that had sacrificed an already defaced

graphoLogicaL subjectivity to the need for

acceLerated writing.? And whiLe Hirschhorn's Bic

performances are thus not quite as shocking as

they might have appeared at first, their despair

nevertheLess exceeds the anonymity of his

predecessors in the medium. ALL the more so, since

their support consists aLmost exclusiveLy of found

and torn pieces of corrugated cardboard that give

the compuLsive execution of the drawings an

additionaL tension of urgency, incompetence and

poverty of means. From the hypertrophic and

oversized exclamation marks (straight out of

Rodchenko's arsenaL of agit graphic design) right

down to the tragicomic battle between the

expressive gesture ofthe graffito and its totaL

containment in the individuaL Letter form itseLf,

these oppressed graffiti deLiver drawing as an

index of totaL subjection to sociaL controL and

containment, a condition from which even a once

aggressive and compuLsive gesturaLity (as in

TwombLy's drawings) quite simpLy couLd no Longer

escape in the present.

Hirschhorn's second major revision is his shift

from an evacuation of abstraction to a new type of

photographic montage. In one ofthese textjimage

montages an awkwardLy cut out photographic seLf­

portrait is combined with a found press

photograph of a head with a fataL buLLet wound.

Hirschhorn captions this montage with a quotation

from the very historicaL figure whose work had

given photomontage not onLy its most compLex

definition, but aLso its most courageous dimension

in committing itto anti-fascist resistance. Thus

the paneL reads: 'John HeartfieLd said: Use the

Photograph as a Weapon'. However, farfrom

mereLy paying tribute, this tripartite constellation

of caption and two totally incompatibLe images

triggers an instant sense of the extreme ambiguity

with which Hirschhorn contempLates the option of

mereLy re-enacting the Legacies of the montage

aesthetic in the present. Not surprisingLy, the very

first page of Les Plaintifs formuLates the conflict

between aesthetic seduction and ideoLogicaL

power, and documents how easiLy avant-garde

practices succumb to, or can be reclaimed for, the

worst poLiticaL agenda. Thus Hirschhorn pLeads in

his ballpoint pen message: 'PLease heLp me. This

poster was designed by the Nazis, but! think it is

beautifuL. Why?'

The object in question, a poster pubLished by

the occupation forces of the Nazi regime in France,

operates on severaL LeveLs simuLtaneousLy. Firstly,

it successfuLLy simuLates a certain type of Soviet

poster design from the 1930s (reminiscent in

particuLar of the work of Rodchenko and Gustav

KLucis), in which photographs of heroes ofthe

party, or of the working class, were inserted into

the dynamically conceived bLack and red geometric

designs of utopian proLetarian cuLture in order to

enhance the credibiLity of the actually occurring

progress in the shift from photomontage to the

dispLay of factographic information. The poster's

second LeveL of operation is to construct a

rhetoricaL threat to the French popuLation to whom

it is addressed: aLmost aLL the fighters for the

Liberation from German Nazi occupation are

depicted here as Soviet Russians with Jewish

names, thus mobiLizing the fascist myth of the

intrinsic connection between BoLshevism and

Jewish anti-capitaLism, and appeaLing atthe same

55

Les pLaintifs, Les betes, Les

poLitiques (extract of the

edition)

1995

Artist's book, pubLished by Centre

Genevois de Gravure

Contemporaine, Geneva

Survey

Survey 56

time to the by then no longer latent anti-Semitism

of large segments of the French population under

the Vichy regime. (It seems hardly coincidental

that on the following page, a photo of an obscene

ad for recreational drinking carries Hirschhorn's

inscription 'Thank you, Vichy'.)

In almost perfect symmetry, the last double

spread of the book again asks almost the same

question as the first page: 'Please Help Me: I think

this poster is beautiful, even though I know what

Stalin has done. What can I do?' This time,

however, rather than being a phoney simulacrum,

the portrait poster of Stalin is in fact a design by

Klucis (produced by Klucis for Stalin's propaganda

ministry in 1932 with the inscription: 'The

Victory of Socialism in our Country is guaranteed:

the Base for a Socialist People's Economy has

been constructed:).

Both initial and final image of Les pLaintifs

thus suspend Hirschhorn's artistic project within

the friction between aesthetic and ideological

interests, in the conflict between radical avant­

garde design and reactionary political interests,

recuperating that radicality between voluntaristic

artistic practice and extreme disciplinary counter

effects in the sphere of everyday politics. What is

more important is perhaps the fact that these

initial and final images of the book situate

Hirschhorn's practice within a very particular

historical moment: precisely, ours, when the

previously separated spheres of avant-garde and

mass-cultural representations have been collapsed

by authoritarian politics into one homogenous

media monolith of ideological containment

and control.

Rather than assuming that such a moment in

the present would require, let alone allow, a mere

return to the heroic photomontage practices of

Heartfield and Klucis, Hirschhorn's insights

permeating Les pLaintifs are profoundly

disenchanting, especially in the perpetual

juxtapositions of images of the political "present

with images of advertisement and consumption.

While the activist radicality of these figures of the

historical avant-garde might be what artists in the

present hope to attain, the governing conditions

require far more complicated ruses and strategies

if oppositional interventions and subversive

resistances of any kind should be accomplished by

work in the present at all.

That is the main reason why one of

Hirschhorn's rhetorical tropes is the construction

ofthe aesthetic and the social conundrum. On the

one hand, the 'naive' question about the 'beauty'

of the Nazi or the Stalinist poster recognizes not

only the total corruptibility but also the lingering

and pointless seduction of modernist avant-garde

culture (even when most abused and debased as in

these particular examples). On the other hand, the

interpellation ofthe reader/spectator to help the

artist in resolving the contradiction between

aesthetics and ideology clearly states that it is the

first task of politicized work to understand these

conflicts from within the inextricable entwining of

the two spheres, rather than from a presumably

transcendental position of political consciousness.

Politicization is not achieved here with the means

of a criticality that would have governed

Conceptual and post-Conceptual works from Hans

Haacke to Martha Rosler, approaches in which an

enlightened subject (the artist) appeals to another

subject (the spectator reader), supposedly doomed

by false consciousness. Hirschhorn refuses to

adopt the artist's presumed transcendental

position of exemption from false consciousness,

and counters it with a full affirmation of the

inevitable imbrication of artistic practice within

the very centre of ideological interests itself.

Finally, Hirschhorn's montages in Les plaintifs

articulate the insight that the monolithic power of

advertisement and consumer culture, and the

apparatus that serve their interests, are by now

comparable to the invasive intensity of the most

fanatically organized propaganda machines of

totalitarian politics. And furthermore, that the

strategies with which the artist could oppose these

forces in the present are as precarious and urgent

as they are difficult to attain. His own statements

about the role of artistic practice in the present

declare as much: 'The motor that drives my work is

the human condition and my concerns about it. I do

not believe that the process of making art can exist

without taking a critical position. An artist does not

make a work of art so that it works or succeeds. To

not agree with the system requires courage. Artists

are disobedient - this is the first step toward Utopia.

An artist can create a Utopia. The Utopia is based on

disagreement with the predominant and pre-existing

consensus. '8In a different interview Hirschhorn

added: 'There is no possibility of getting different

information; we are hostages to the information we

are given. My work is also a struggle against

intimidation and cynicism. These are my motivations

as an artist. I want to work with what surrounds me

and how I experience the world. It's not 'political'

work; I am trying to make art in a political way.

To make everything by hand, to enlarge nothing,

to reduce nothing. To connect all the elements, to

isolate nothing, to leave nothing out. There is

no hierarchy. '9

Spatializing Ready-mades

If it is one of the tasks of sculptural production

to articulate corporeal experience (or rather, its

disappearance), and the socially governing forms

of object relations (the precarious ties that bodies

and objects are allowed, forced, or prohibited from

establishing), then we could say that in

Hirschhorn's work corporeality and objecthood

have vanished altogether. They have been

2 'v

! ...•. , .

\1

57

Les plaintifs, les betes, les

politiques (extract of the

edition)

1995

Artist's book, published by Centre

Genevois de Gravure

Contemporaine, Geneva

Survey

99 sacs plastiques

1995

Plastic bags, newspapers, prints,

adhesive tape

APP, Brussels

Survey 58

dispLaced by a scuLpturaL episteme of extreme

opposites: hovering between the constraints of

diagram and design on the one hand, and those of

iterative excess and proLiferation on the other,

between the spatiaL concepts of Laying out objects

as 'commodity dispLays', or arranging them in the

manner of a textuaL and graphic Layout.1O

In his first properLy scuLpturaL work, 99 sacs

plastiques, 1995 (if we want to maintain for a

moment the traditionaL definition of three­

dimensionaLity and voLume as necessary conditions

of scuLpture), it is evident that both structure and

materiaLity in Hirschhorn's scuLpture wouLd be

generated from now on by formaL principLes that

mimeticaLLy follow the existing conditions of the

excessive proLiferation of the most debased

materiaLs of consumer cuLture. TypicaL of

Hirschhorn's cunning choices of objects and

materiaLs, the work is made of pLastic sacks filled

with newspapers. WhiLe refuse sacks are certainLy

among the most common objects of everyday Life

(and therefore the most invisibLe and disavowed),

they are aLso the most revoLting matter and object

type, hitherto considered as utterLy ineLigibLe for

inclusion into any type of scuLpturaL innovation.

QuintessentiaLLy transitory objects, or rather, non­

objects (since they are made to be thrown away),

these pLastic bags are distinguished by their

aLmost amphibious texture, as a foiL that osciLLates

uncanniLy between Liquidity and rigour,

transparency and opacity, between infra-thin

flatness and infiniteLy inflatabLe voLumes. These

unstabLe bags now dispLace the cardboard and

wood surfaces ofthe artist's previous production,

yet they receive the same demarcations, painterLy

marks (masking-tape stripes), photographs or text

fragments coLLaged on to their exterior.

EventuaLLy, Hirschhorn wouLd identify his

ever-expanding scuLpturaL work as displays, and

refer to them in a somewhat untransLatabLe, yet

exceptionaLLy poignant and precise term as

Skulptur-Erinnerungen ('scuLpture memories', or

'memories of scuLpture'). Soon thereafter, the

meandering buLbs and proLiferating febriLe Linear

forms made out of various siLver and coLoured foiLs

that often traverse an entire exhibition, Linking

diverse images and objects as a Labyrinthine

network of spatiaLized ready-mades, wouLd become

one of his most distinct object types. The 'tears' as

F

Hirschhorn calls the more bulbous among these

meandering structures often grow in size and

shape to form veritable caves of stalagmites and

stalactites, and they make the universal reification

of all spatial experience pertinently palpable.

Manifold conditions generate the

disembodiment of sculpture (and the desperate

attempts by sculptors in the post-war period to

regain aspects of the bodily self within credible

forms and practices). Of course one would not

want to attribute a phenomenon ofthis magnitude

to a singular causal explanation. One speculative

theory, however, would argue that the elimination

of use-value from the object is undoubtedly one of

the primary conditions that induces

disembodiment of object experience (what better

example could one think of than the plastic bag

and the universe of foils). A second speculation

would argue that brands and logo designs have

displaced the object altogether (in fact, an object

is no longer recognizable or tangible outside of

that condition). On those two accounts it would

seem plausible that Hirschhorn had to invent the

pa radox of two-dimensional sculpture. It is a

sculpture that is made according to a plan, a

system of objects from which all remnants of

bodily fullness and spatial situated ness have

been removed.

Of course, once again, one could think of

crucial precedents for Hirschhorn's protuberances

and rhyzomes that are located between painting

and ready-made, between found object and action

prop, between advertisement and monument,

between children's calamities and designer's

nightmares. First of all, it had been Oldenburg's

59

99 sacs plastiques

1995

Plastic bags, newspapers, prints,

adhesive tape

Barbes-Rochechouart, Paris

Survey

=

Survey

FLying Boxes

1993

Cardboard, prints, paper, adhesive

tape, rope

Galerie Francesca Pia, Bern

60

genius - facing the loss ofthe body, the

destruction of the social and spatial erotics that

sculpture had once promised - to have brought all

ofthese categories together, and to have

synthesized them one last time. But Hirschhorn's

sculpture memories owe as much to Eva Hesse's

work, even though what might at first appear as a

rather odd comparison would make it immediately

apparent that Hesse's precarious reduction of

volumetric forms to linearity, or her

transfiguration of the linear into the corporeal,

had indeed articulated a disembodiment (i.e. the

withering away of a sense of corporeal self, of the

seemingly naturally given security of the habeat

corpus) that had originated in a catastrophic

experience rather different from the conditions of

experience of late capitalist media culture.

Hirschhorn's spatialized ready-mades thus begin at

that very point of finality where the plenitude of

the body has vanished from the world under the

emerging regimes of one-dimensionality:

"advertisement, commodity design, photography,

film and video imagery.

Distribution Sculpture

Yet in at least one other way we have to recognize

the intensity of Hirschhorn's dialogues with

Postminimalism. One thinks specifically of his

transformation of the concept of distribution

sculpture that had been so integral to the most

radical sculpture oftfle 1960s, in particular in the

work of Hesse, but also that of Robert Morris and

Bruce Nauman. In explicit opposition to their

concepts of distribution, Hirschhorn now identifies

the precise political and economic carriers in which

the social distribution of commodities (and their

underside, the dissemination of detritus) are

1 i

physically embedded. Second, distribution

sculpture in Hirschhorn's displays now also

resituates sculpture in a variety of (often

unexpected) social spaces from which works

of art are generally absent, by the very nature

of their privileged object status, as much as

by the nature of the extremely limited spectrum

of communicability that contemporary

practices attain.

These spaces of distribution range from the

anonymous staircases of a lower-middle-class

high-rise building (the'cLassic' French HLM), to the

counters of bars and cafes, from the windshields of

cars on to which Hirschhorn has slipped his relief

like an ominous and substantial parking ticket, to

a monstrous-looking sheet of formica-covered

wood (demarcated with the inevitable idiom of

abstraction, the stripe) that is presented as a

'work of art' in an auction at Drouot's, the most

respectable auction house in Paris.

Some of Hirschhorn's 'distribution' sculptures,

reproduced in the catalogue of his 1994

exhibition, could easily have been mistaken for a

pile of debris accumulated during construction or

for refuse deposited at the sites of garbage

coLLection. But these objects recall their lost use-

value potential precisely as garbage, in a manifest

opposition to objects and materials that have been

merely recruited for the production of exhibition

value. ParadoxicaLLy, insisting on their actual state

as waste, Hirschhorn's sculpture negates the

work's inevitable subjection to the production of

exchange value. Yet, from a third perspective these

remnants remind us ofthe implausibility of the

systematic destruction of resources for the mere

production of the smallest increments of exchange

value. In the same way that Hirschhorn's

sculptural work circulates around these three

concepts of value, it also rotates within three

registers of temporality: while it is clearly an

object inhabiting the present moment, it appears

as always already obsolete, and as condemned to

61

above, Zorba

1994

Wood, cardboard, prints, adhesive

tape

Cafe Zorba, Paris

below, Auto-Markt-AussteLlung

1994

Wood, cardboard, prints,

transparent plastic foil, adhesive

tape

Civitella d'Agliano, Italy

Survey

.....

its imminent removal as waste. Yet it is also always

promising its resuscitation to a condition of use­

value and social productivity (e.g. Hirschhorn's

documentation of an unknown passerby

scavenging one of his works and stating 'This will

make a nice television table').

To what extent Hirschhorn's reflections on the

contextual constitution of artistic meaning and

cultural value differ from that of the contextualist

reflections of the preceding generation of artists

whose work had defined the projects of

institutional critique is obvious from the very first

work documented in his 33 Expositions dans

/'espace public (33 Exhibitions in Public Space), a

book published by the artist and Schweizerische

Graphische Gesellschaft, Zurich, in 1998

documenting his activities in public space since

1989. His first exposition that year is entitled To

Dylan Thomas (1989). It consists of a

photosouvenir of a derelict rural shed in front of

which Hirschhorn has planted a placard whose

linear webbed surface inevitably calls forth a

63

opposite, La Redoute

1991

Wood, cardboard, paper, prints,

adhesive tape

La Redoute housing estate, 'Salon

de l'Ephemere', Fontenay-Sous­

Bois, France

below, Colonel Fabien

1992

Paper, prints, adhesive tape

Paris

Survey

Survey 64

fragment of a painting by Jackson Pollock, or

rather, somebody's attempt to articulate rage with

painterLy means on a found piece of cardboard.

ALmost in the manner of a manifesto,

Hirschhorn's first 'pubLic' exhibition, declares the

new parameters of his work to be programmatically

different from the Limited engagements of

institutionaL critique. It does so first of all by

reclaiming the European Literary tradition as a

space of radicaL a Lterity and dissent, and as one of

the bases for his artistic production. SecondLy, it

expands the narrowLy defined parameters with

which the previous generation of artists had been

engaged into a seemingLy boundLess range of

sociaL, geo-poLiticaL and historicaL spaces. In

manifest opposition to the omniscient

enLightenment claims of poLiticaLLy radicaL art of

the 1960s and 1970s (e.g. DanieL Buren and Hans

Haacke) that operated from a transcendentaL

perspective of rationaLity dismantLing the Latent

ideoLogicaL agenda of institutions, Hirschhorn's

work inhabits the spaces and the subject positions

of those that have been excluded from the

victories of modernity. It pronounces its soLidarity

with those to whom the promises and the progress

of modernity have brought Little or nothing (and in

this regard Hirschhorn's attraction to WaLser is

utterLy pLausibLe).

Yet, when he aboLishes the traditionaL

institutionaL boundaries and discursive Limitations

aLtogether, a fundamentaL theoreticaL probLem

emerges that he has in fact inherited from Beuys'

anarchistic voLuntarism. In this regard,

Hirschhorn's piLgrimage to IreLand is perhaps not

accidental at all: it is the assumption that a

gesture of anarchistic reclamation of free

circulation, discarding or disregarding discursive

and institutional spaces, could collapse socially

and politically constructed boundaries in acts of a

spontaneous communication with a supposedly

classless audience.

Monumentality (Iconic and Industrial) Even when encountering Hirschhorn's work for the

first time, the spectator is immediately confronted

with the fundamental problems of sculptural

monumentality, whether concerning sculpture as

an object or site of commemoration, or concerning

ambitions to expand sculptural projects towards

public spatiality and collective simultaneous

access. Hirschhorn comments explicitly on his own

concerns with monumentality: 'My third type of

work (after the Kiosks and the Altars) is the

Monument The Spinoza Monument (1999) was the

first, the Deleuze Monument (2000) was the

second, Bataille Monument (2002) was the third

and Gramsci will be the last. Monuments require the

participation of the population at the very site

where they have been constructed. My monuments

are temporary, but they can be reconstructed at any

time with the help of the same people who

constructed them originally. My monuments produce

something, they are notjustfor looking, people can

use them as meeting grounds, and only if you use

them will you understand it. For me, sculpture is an

event, an experience, not a spectacle. The dimension

of spectacle enters only when one presumes that

there are two groups, those who produce and those

65

opposite, Grande Guirlande de

larmes

1996

Wood, rope, paper, prints,

ballpoint pen, transparent plastic

foil, adhesive tape

Belle Fontaine beach, XIIe

Ateliers du FRAC des Pays de la

Loire, Saint-Nazaire, France

above, To Dylan Thomas

1989

Wood, cardboard, marker pen

County Donegal, Ireland

Survey

Richard Serra

St. John's Rotary Arc

1980

Corten steel

366 x 6096 x 6.5 em

(laes Oldenburg

Building in the Form of an English

Extension Plug

1967

Pencil on paper

56 x 76 em

(laes Oldenburg

Proposed Colossal Monument: Fan

in Place of the Statue of Liberty

1967

Pencil on paper

66 x 101.5 em

Survey 66

who are only passive recipients. '11

In the recent past we can distinguish two

elementary types of monumental sculpture.

One resuscitates an iconic monumentality,

emerging in Oldenburg's work of the mid-1960s

(and from then on down to its later travesties in

the work of Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami).

The other constructs sculptural monumentality

from the legacies of non-representational

painting and sculpture in the heroic moment

of the Constructivist and de Stijl avant-gardes

ofthe 1920s.

This type of monumentality is evident for

example in public sculptural installations from

Richard Serra to Dan Graham's pavilion pieces. In

exact analogue to this opposition between iconic

monumentality and a monumentality of abstraction,

we encounter the dialectic between the desire to

employ glamorous and gaudy materials in the

realization of popular iconography (e.g. intensely

coloured resins), or to insist on a return to the

purism of the austere materials of the industrial

revolution that had coded avant-garde sculpture

in the inter- and post-war period (i.e. steel, stone,

glass and chrome).

But beyond the dialectics of size and scale,

of materials and iconographies, we also have to

recognize that each work of public sculpture cites

discursive and spatial conventions, and mobilizes

different modes of spectatorial response. The

primary strategy to conceive iconic monuments

had been Oldenburg's extreme enlargement of the

size and scale ofthe readymade, literally dwarfing

the spectatorial subject in a spatial situation

where the hypertrophic object of consumer culture

either acquired the infantilizing grandeur of a fairy

tale's wish fulfilment, or if not that, then at least a

dimension of humorous distanciation from the

objects of desire.

Yet, the quantitative or qualitative inflation of

the everyday object (nowadays especially evident

in the 'public' sculpture of Jeff Koons or Takashi

Murakami) does not lead at all to an imaginary

liberation from the object's fetters. In its naive or

cynical travesty, it ultimately affirms the rule of

the commodity all the more, since it is now firmly

planted even in the very spaces of an imaginary

reprieve from the totalizing effects of commodity

culture. Iconic monumentality in the present

enacts what Oldenburg's extraordinary series of

Proposals for Monuments in 1966 had critically

anticipated and denounced in advance: in their

programmatic refusal to be built (or to be

buildable), Oldenburg's 'iconic monuments' had

diagnosed the inherent fallacy of the

aggrandizement of the Pop image to become

merely a monumental affirmation of

commodity's reign.

Hirschhorn's variations on the theme of the

hypertrophically sized popular object and on the

conditions of iconic monumentality are among the

most striking aspects of his sculptural displays.

Their seriality originates in the laws of commodity

production, rather than in the models of sculptural

repetition that had been first defined in Warhol's

Brillo Boxes (1962), and that had become one of

the structuring principle of Minimalism. In his

display Pilatus Transformator (1997), Hirschhorn

modelled a series of giant rectangular volumes

from gold foil. If, at first glance, they merely

1

seemed to articulate a child's vision of the largesse

of the chocolate holdings of Switzerland, on

second thoughts it appeared more pertinent to

recognize in them the the gold bullion held by the

Swiss banks, institutions who at that very moment

had just reached the apex of infamy when the

degree of their collaboration with Facist economic

interests had become known. Other hypertrophic

objects such as the giant watches in the same

installation (or, more recently, the giant memorial

spoons in his display Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake at

the Art Institute of Chicago, 2000) were equally

modelled from a variety of tinsel such as crumpled

aluminium and coloured foil, cardboard and other

packaging stuff. This juvenile bricolage, objects

that could have been fabricated by the bewildered

members of a distant cargo cult, trigger a number

of insights.

First of all, their 'primitivism' is neither mere

Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake

2000

Tables, wood, cardboard, paper,

prints, photocopies, photographs,

adhesive tape, spray paint,

aluminium foil, transparent

plastic foil, books, chain, basins,

plastic buckets, tools, plastic

cover, neon lights, integrated

video

Art Institute of Chicago 67 Survey

child's play nor a romantic regression into

alternative models of pre-industrial production,

seemingly freed from the rules of the production of

surplus value. Rather, these hypertrophic objects

attempt - in some kind of reverse anthropology­

to fathom the advanced forms of capitalist

fetishism in the present, and they magnify the

intense rituals of desire and possession that

govern all object relations in the era of a totalized

commodity culture.

In the serial installations of Hirschhorn's

menacing watch props (high-end models only,

such as IWC and Rolex) in the display entitled Time

To Go (Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in

1997), or again, in Pilatus Transfarmator, the

spectator recognizes the threatening violence of

the fetish's universal presence. Yet at the same

time, the grotesque power that is operative in this

particular object cult becomes manifest: after all,

what could be more comical than the delusion that

a luxuriously crafted chronometer would assist a

subject in differentiating himself from the

universal law ofthe digital quantification of time?

Considering Hirschhorn's watch props from

the more limited perspectives of sculptural history,

they do in fact teach us another lesson: that

fetishism as an overpowering condition of

experience was not yet central to the object

relationships articulated in Oldenburg's

macroscopic ready-mades of everyday life. More

importantly perhaps, it also appears that certain

objects (a watch for example) would have been

unthinkable in Oldenburg's iconic sculpture of the

ea rly 1960s, even though it was not the

technological per se that was absent from his

iconography of the domestic and the vernacular.

Rather, it was the object of sign-exchange value,

increasingly becoming integral to the construction

of subjective identity, that had remained largely

outside of Oldenburg's aesthetic purview.

The reasons for this absence are undoubtedly

very complex, but at least one tentative

explanation could be advanced. All of Oldenburg's

objects may display a residue of the utopian

positivity towards the world of commodity

consumption that had been typical of the 1950s

transformation of everyday life. This attitude

towards the object's beneficial and egalitarian

69

Time To Go

1997

Wood, cardboard, prints, marker

pen, spray paint, photographs,

aluminium foil, transparent

plastic foil, adhesive tape, neon

lights, electric fans, Plexiglas,

plastic cover, integrated video

'Delta', Musee d'Art Moderne de la

Ville de Paris

Survey

,Qq

71

Rolex etc., Freundlichs 'Aufstieg'

und Skulptur-Sortier-Station­

Dokumentation

1998

Wood, tables, fabric, cardboard,

prints, ballpoint pen, marker pen,

aluminium foil. gold foil,

transparent plastic foil, adhesive

tape, plastic cover, neon lights,

integrated video

Museum Ludwig, Cologne

Survey

abundance would reach its zenith - if not already

on the verge of a breakdown - by the early 1960s.

Inevitably, by the beginning of the 1980s, when

Hirschhorn's artistic acuity would inspect the

conditions of object experience in the present, and

the artist would determine the parameters of his

sculptural production, he would have to situate the

object in its full expansion into an almost

demonic totality.

Thus, Hirschhorn's most haunting structures

are instances of material mimesis,juxtaposing

grotesque commodity objects with the travesty of

failed utopian aspirations that now spark only

negative epiphanies, a strategy that culminated in

his display VDP - Very Derivated Products (1998).

Here, for example, one encountered a series of

little red rags wildly fluttering in the propulsion

of a serial line-up of domestic vertical fans,

conjuring up the lethal memories of the not too

distant past when utopian aspirations had

deteriorated to the level of the military parades

of the May Day Celebrations in Red Square. Another

typical object-structure in this display was the

serial line-up of the ubiquitous umbrellas sold and

thrown away by the hundreds in Manhattan on a

rainy day: all the more comical in their most

pristine product state, they anticipate their instant

disappearance as waste, and the squandering of

resources and labour.

In these grotesque juxtapositions Hirschhorn

gives the viewer sudden insights into the

conditions of the present where a totalizing atopia

and anomie flare up with ever greater intensity.

The temporalities of these objects (their geo­

political sites and phases of production, their

73

VDP - Very Denvated Products

1998

Wood, cardboard, prints,

photocopies, marker pen,

aluminium foiL gold foil,

transparent plastic foil, adhesive

tape, stickers, Plexiglas,

umbrellas, toys, gadgets, books,

plastic cover, neon Lights,

electrical fans, integrated video

'Premises', Guggenheim SoHa,

New York

Survey

•

Survey

below, and apposite, botton left,

Raymond Carver-ALtar

1999

Safety tape, fabric, scarves,

cardboard, photocopies, ballpoint

pen, marker pen, adhesive tape,

aluminium foil, transparent

plastic foil, books, candles,

plushs, plastic toys, artificial

flowers, clothes pegs, gadgets

'Vivre sa vie', Glasgow, 2000

opposite, top, Raymond Carver­

ALtar

1999

Safety tape, fabric, scarves,

cardboard, photocopies, ballpoint

pen, marker pen, aluminium foil,

transparent plastic foil, adhesive

tape, books, candles, plushs,

plastic toys, artificial flowers,

clothes pegs, gadgets

Fribourg

opposite, bottom right, Ingeborg

Bachmann-ALtar

1998

Safety tape, cardboard,

photocopies, ballpoint pen,

marker pen, aluminium foil,

transparent plastic foil, adhesive

tape, books, fabric, scarves,

candles, plushs, plastic toys,

artificial flowers, clothes pegs,

gadgets

'Freie Sicht aufs

Mittelmeer', Kunsthaus, Zurich

74

cycles of usage, disposal and of exhibition) are

strangely compressed in Hirschhorn's displays,

as though all the object states now had to be

collapsed into a single, simultaneous stage. To

rush from its production in a distant third-world

country to its distribution in the first, and from

the production of exchange value to a brief

performance of use-value, and its imminent

dismissal as detritus in ever-decreasing temporal

cycles, seems to have become the universal

condition ofthe commodity that Hirschhorn's

sculptural displays mimetically follow.

Hirschhorn confronts these advanced

conditions, fully recognizing the proto-totalitarian

features of consumer culture. His work mimetically

follows the linguistic spasms generated by the

iterative acts of name and brand recognition, as

much as it counteracts the stridency of corporate

product design with a hebephrenic simulation of

destitution and disintegration. Identifying what

one could call the 'Canal Street' model of the

public sphere, the artist conceives of it as a space

that is simultaneously abject and totalitarian, in

which every temporal and spatial experience can

only lead to random acts of acquisition that

generate minute increments of surplus-value,

while accelerating obsolescence and the mounds

of detritus that result from the total elimination

of use-value from any aspect of everyday life.

Commemoration and Cult

To design sculpture as a hypertrophic icon of

commodity culture is only one model in

Hirschhorn's set of strategies. More generally, he

has differentiated his major works into three

distinct types or genres, the first being defined by

the artist as his altars (i.e., seemingly

spontaneously assembled devotional or

commemorative sets). These might initially appear

as if the artist wanted to instigate a new type of

cult value, and often they are positioned in public

space without any evidence of a legitimizing

institutional or discursive frame. Due to their

cumulative organization and their potential for

infinite anonymous additions, his sculptural altars

take on the guise of a spontaneous collective

articulation. Thus Hirschhorn states:

'1 have made four Altars: for Raymond Carver,

1ngeborg Bachmann, Piet Mondn'an and Otto

Freundlich. Of course 1 have looked for figures of

1 1 1 c ,

which I knew that I could love them. In fact I

selected them because I loved them so much, but

not necessarily because of the tragic nature of their

existence. But for example I could not have said: I

love Picasso. Butfor somebody like Otto Freundlich, I

knew that I could and that I would want to build an

altar. But of course, I only selected four anyway,

even though I could have chosen others. But after all

I decided to only make four altars. '11

Hirschhorn's radical reversals ofthe

phenomenological models of participation in

sculpture occur most poignantly in the 'altar'

displays (e.g. Mondrian-Altar, [1997], Ingeborg

Bachmann-Altar [1998], Otto Freundlich-Altar

[1998], Raymond Carver-Altar, [1999]), where the

commemoration of some of modernism's most

heroic and, more often than not, tragic figures - in

a sudden revelation of the dialectics of subjectivity

and cult - is strangely short-circuited with mass

cultural forms of celebrity. In these altars the artist

accumulates the most banal mnemonic objects

(e.g. candles, found photographs, placards,

stuffed animals, etc.) and presents them in the

manner of spontaneously erected street shrines

that pay tribute to victims of accidents and crimes.

75 Survey

CrudeLy inscribed signs pronounce hommages (e.g.

'Go Piet' or 'Thank you, Otto') in the enunciatory

registers of sports fans rooting for their team or

their 'star'.n These are hommages first of aLL to the

tragicaLLy faiLed projects of modernity that had

opposed the myths of an exceptionaL subjectivity,

and which had preciseLy attempted to subvert its

industrially produced substitutes by enacting the

forms of a newLy decentred, collective subject.

They are pronounced here in the guise of a

diaLecticaL aLLegory of contemporary cuLt. Thus

Hirschhorn's altars demonstrate that the artist's

desire to reposition commemoration as centraL to

participatory artistic practices is inextricabLy

intertwined with the forms of mass-cuLturally

engineered aduLation operative at the very centre

of artistic production and reception in the present.

SpectatoriaL participation and scuLpturaL

tactiLity occur in the work in yet another manner:

in the artist's frequentLy depLoyed, apparentLy

random accumuLations ofthe most diverse

stickers, decaLs and other adhesive LabeLs that

have emerged since the 1960s as some kind of

mechanicaL graffiti of preprocessed pa rticipation

and preformuLated speech acts (subversive

or affirmative).

Pavilion Sculpture

The artist defines the third type of his works as

kiosks or pavilions (i.e.,expository 'dispLay spaces')

where the condition of exhibition vaLue itseLf

seems to have become the first subject of

investigation. These paviLions are hybrid

architecturaL containers shifting between vitrines

and shrines, exhibiting enigmatic eLements and

objects. As in the 'aLtars', their participatory

potentiaL is manifest and radicaL: here, however, it

does not aLLow for the vandaLism of random

addition and exchange, rather for one that might

remove cruciaL eLements at any time, or even

annihiLate the work aLtogether.

Two artistic predecessors or architecturaL

prototypes come to mind in terms of an initiaL

schematic comparison. The first one wouLd be the

history of the Kiosk a nd of Reklame-Architektur, as

it emerges from the scuLpture of Russian

Constructivism in the work of KLucis and of ItaLian

Futurists such as Fortunato Depero, where

declamatory signs and Letters had dispLaced

architecture's traditionaL foregrounding of tectonic

structures. The second, more pureLy architecturaL

type wouLd be the modernist exhibition paviLion -

its most outstanding exampLe, of course, being

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion

(1928-29) - its Later embodiments continuing

through to Gerrit RietveLd's paviLion for the

KroLLer-Mi.iLLer Museum in OtterLoo. SLightLy Later

exampLes exist in the work of the Swiss SociaList

architect Hannes Meyer and his COOP architecture,

where seriaL commodity dispLay and the order of

the sociaList distribution system reguLate (if they

do not dispLace), architecturaL tectonics. ALL of

these modeLs partake in what one couLd caLL the

rise of a new semiotic architecture of the 1920s

and 1930s.

This new 'architecture of signs' (rather than

an architecture of sociaL spaces and functions)

deveLops at the very moment when architecture's

traditionaL tasks to contain and enabLe the various

sociaL functions in pubLic space (e.g. Labour and

77

Ludwig Mies van der Rohe

Barcelona Pavilion

1928-29

InternationaL Exhibition

Barcelona, 1929

Survey

•

ALlan Kaprow

Kiosk or Rearrangeable Panels

1957-59

9 panels, 243 x 27 x 76 em each

Oil, leaves, plastic fruit, mirror,

canvas, wood, Light buLbs

CLaes Oldenburg

The Store

1962

Mixed media

Green Gallery, New York

Dan Graham

PaviLion/ScuLpture for Argonne

1981

Two-way mirror, gLass, steel

229 x 457 x 457 em

Survey 78

production, domestic and public leisure) were

displaced by the new tasks to organize space as

'media', in competition with, if not in execution

of, the interests of a rising media and commodity

culture. In its totalizing culminations in the

present, contemporary semiotic architecture

(such as the 'strip', the airport, or the mall)

disseminates politically authoritarian or

consumerist ideologies, and extends commodity

control into the very fabric of quotidian

architectural envelopes.

Not surprisingly, at the moment of the late

1950s and early 1960s when the recognition ofthe

inextricable entanglement between commodity

production and artistic production and the

intertwining between the frames of shop windows

and the frames of museum displays would become

mandatory, not only emerging Pop sculptors such

as Oldenburg resuscitated the architectural type of

the Kiosk or the Store, but Fluxus and performance

artists such as Allan Kaprow and Robert Whitman

developed these proto-architectural performance

devices that displaced assemblage aesthetics

(from Joseph Cornell to Robert Rauschenberg) and

their contemplative containers with an aesthetics

of sculpture as an event.

Kaprow's large-scale structures such as Kiosk

(1957-59) or Apple Shrine (1960),14 Robert

Whitman's untitled participatory frameworks and

'sets' from 1958 made out of cardboard and

discarded materials, wooden lattices and various

translucent and light-reflective foils such as nylon

and aluminium, and, perhaps most notably once

again, Oldenburg's installations The Street (1960)

and The Store (1961), would be the crucial

examples of that moment whose historical

importance reverberates throughout Hirschhorn's

sculptural kiosks and pavilions.

In particular it is Oldenburg's aesthetic of

tatters, fragments and charred pieces of cardboard

collected in the streets that articulated the

sculptural transformations ofthe advanced stages

of consumer culture of the 1950s. These had

brought about the total fragmentation of spatio­

temporal experience, the devalorization of the

use-value of objects, the ever-increasing rapidity

oftheir planned obsolescence, and the perpetual

acceleration of the cycles of object acquisition and

expulsion to which Hirschhorn now responds with

extraordinary precision.

But Hirschhorn not only resuscitates

Oldenburg's iconic approach to mass culture, or

the performative architectures of Kaprow and

Whitman, he also repositions sculpture within the

participatory radicality of that historical context.

Theirs were dialectical constructions embodying at

all times spectatorial experience without reifying

it, dissolving fetishistic objects without denying

the pervasiveness of objecthood, conceiving

sculptural constructs as mass-cultural mimesis in

which the actually governing conditions of

experience in public space were articulated

without being monumentalized.!S Hirschhorn's

rediscovery and re-readings of these' legacies

positions them as the paradigmatic - and largely

unrecognized - instances in the redefinitions of

post-war sculpture. It is a legacy that culminated

in the renewed attempts of post-minimal sculpture

to further incorporate the contemporary

rediscovery of the semiotic dimensions of

architecture. But, more importantly, the pavilions

of Kaprow and Whitman that redefined sculpture as

a cumulation of performative 'events' refuted the

suspicion that all sculpture, once positioned in the

remnants of public space, would be condemned to

the conditions of a fraudulent monumentality.

Coming at the end of that legacy and in many ways

constituting its culmination, Dan Graham traces

his version of a history of the pavilion-structure as

follows: 'I started to devise sculpture pavilions,

works that were hybrids between quasi-functional

architectural pavilions and sculpture ... The pavilion

79

opposite, bottom, Emmanuel

Bove-Kiosk

2000

Wood, cardboard, paper, prints,

photocopies, ballpoint pen,

marker pen, adhesive tape, books,

carpet, mirrors table, chair, desk

lamp, neon lights, integrated

video

Universitat Zlirich-Irchel, Zurich

left, Otto Freundlich-Kiosk

2002

Wood, cardboard, paper, prints,

photocopies, ballpoint pen,

marker pen, adhesive tape, books,

table, chair, desk lamp, neon

lights, integrated video

Universitat Zurich-Irchel, Zu rich

below, Robert Walser-Kiosk

1999

Wood, cardboard, paper, prints,

photocopies, ballpoint pen,

marker pen, adhesive tape, books,

table, chair, desk lamp, neon

lights, integrated video

Universitat ZOrich-Irchel, Zurich

Survey

p

Survey 82

idea had a lot to do with where you can interface art

with the actual world and where you can't. It evokes

history, the park and the city, rather than simply the

art world as context. It might happen that some of

those ideas will later be used by an architect, so that

my piece would be like an earlier visionary example.

That I consider okay ... The architecture with the

greatest influence on me is modernist. Many of my

initialforms come from Mies van der Rohe's

Barcelona Pavilion or late Rietveld. '16

In pointed opposition to Graham's late

modernist pavilions, which suture the spectator

within the surfaces of the mirrored glass of

Cavemanman

2002

Wood, cardboard, paper, prints,

photocopies, spray paint,

aluminium foil, transparent

plastic foil, gold foil, adhesive

tape, neon lights, electrical Wire

aluminium cans, watches, baSin!

books, dummy, integrated video

Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New

York

international-style architecture (in a remnant of

the egalitarian expectations ofthe 1960s),

Hirschhorn's pavilions are made from detritus, the

materials of waste and impoverishment. They

incessantly remind their spectators that at this

point even the slightest allusion towards a

material analogy, or formal alliance between

sculpture and techno-scientistic rationality, only

exacerbates the masochistic identification with

the conditions of experience inside the spaces of

control that the corporate regulation of everyday

life imposes on all of its subjects.

1 Man = 1 Man

2002

Paper, prints, marker pen,

ballpoint pen, plastic foil,

adhesive tape

Survey 84

Publics, Partidpation, Subjects And finally there is of course the most difficult

question of all: what is the role of the

participatory spectator in Hirschhorn's public

altars, monuments and pavilions? Any artist

working in public space at present has to confront

a complex (if not unresolvable) set of problems

and tasks. First of all, one must recognize that if

a work of art really aims to clarify the existing

conditions for the articulation of subjectivity in

the present, and for collective sociality in the

future, it will have to engage with a situation in

which the socio-political support structures for the

formation of subjectivity have been eliminated

with a persistent violence that even the

parameters of liberal democratic societies had

hardly allowed us to imagine.

It is against this historical background of a

systematic sabotage of the subject that Hirschhorn

positions his public installations (the most

astonishing and memorable example probably

being the Bataille Monument that the artist

situated in the midst of an urban housing project

for Turkish workers in Kassel, Germany). After all,

aesthetic objects are fundamentally dialogic

structures and they presume that an enunciating

speaker and a receiver communicate on somewhat

equal terms. But when it comes to establishing

communicative links between the Spinoza

Monument and the Bataille Monument, and their

respective communities, neither the inhabitants

and visitors of the red light district in Amsterdam,

nor the mostly juvenile bystanders ofthe housing

project in Kassel are very likely candidates for such

a dialogue with Hirschhorn's work.

Thus, the second problem that Hirschhorn had

to address is precisely the insight that a socially

enforced absence of subjectivity has to be matched

with an absence of privileged forms of artistic

articulation. After all, the strategies of negation

that Hirschhorn enacts throughout his work (as

much as he invokes them in his frequent

comments) formulate those precarious

interchanges between absent subject and artistic

negation, and they explicitly inquire what process,

what material, what formal definition could

adequately correspond to their mutual effacement:

'I am against work of quality, ready-modes, finished

products. I try to work with total energy. Energy yes!

Quality no! ( ... ) I only believe in energy. '17

The third task, then, is all the more difficult

since the very act of artistic creation is

traditionally perceived as the evidence of the

subject's self-constitution in the instantiation of

labour and production (or more likely, and

depending on the moment of the avant-garde's

self-comprehension, in acts of its dialectical

negation, in ludic activities or chance operations).

Thus work as the practice of self-articulation, or

work as denial or refusal of production, work as

gesture of oppositionality against a universal

regime of instrumentalization, all of these are

fused in Hirschhorn's practice within an equally

complex dialectic of agency and anomie. After all,

what type of anomie does mass cultural production

really solicit, and what type of agency can still

operate credibly in a contemporary work's claim to

serve as the primary evidence of the subject's

access to experience in everyday life?

It is at this point that our initial attempt to

recognize Hirschhorn as being situated exactLy at

the intersection between the Legacies of Beuys and

WarhoL gains a certain precision. If it was Beuys'

messianic aspiration to resuscitate the subject in

whatever form might be conceivabLe after its

putative death (reLigious, mysticaL, pedagogicaL,

poLiticaL), then it was WarhoL's diagnostic acuity

that reduced artistic production to those very

strategies and structures in which subjectivity had

withered aLtogether, so as to cede the pLace of the

work to the very pubLic forces that had initiaLLy

assauLted subjectivity. Hirschhorn's reading of

history, however, is far too compLex to be reduced

to such a simpLe opposition. After aLL, if Beuys and

WarhoL embody two extreme ends of the diaLectics

of the voided subject, Hirschhorn has Long since

understood that other, Lesser known artistic

positions, such as the work of Robert FiLLiou and

of the earLy 1960s Fluxus and Happening artists

in generaL, offered infiniteLy more differentiated

modeLs. If the Pop art and iconographies of WarhoL

and OLdenburg had been aLL too easiLy misread as

conciLiatory gestures towards the regimes of mass­

cuLturaL consumption, by contrast, the asceticism

of FiLLiou and Fluxus had never even been

understood as the poLiticaL radicaLization of a

programmatic and oppositionaL poverty of means.

Hirschhorn's aLmost fanaticaL insistence on

withhoLding conditions of quaLity from the work of

art are of particuLar importance here. They

resuscitate the brilliant critique of the concept of

aesthetic quaLity that FiLLiou had pronounced in

1968 in his formuLa of a work's trianguLated

modaLities of being: it couLd be, as FiLLiou argued,

well made, badly made or couLd aLso not be made at

aLl. As such, FiLLiou's extraordinary proposition

corresponds to another, far more famous

trianguLation of the functions and states that the

work of art couLd assume, as Lawrence Weiner

formuLated it in exactLy the same year, when he

suggested that the work of art couLd be made by

the artist, or by the receiver, or couLd not be made

at all, according to the wishes of the eventuaL

receiver of the work.

It is, then, as though Hirschhorn's work

confronted what Fluxus and ConceptuaL artists had

achieved, and redeemed what the reception

process had unjustly condemned as mereLy

esoteric. FiLLiou and FLuxus as weLL as Weiner not

onLy gauged the actuaL impact on the subject of

87

Critical Laboratory

1999

Trestle tables, wood, cardboard,

paper, prints, photocopies,

transparent plastic foil, adhesive

tape, books, chairs, artificial and

natural plants, glass, mirrors,

plastic bottles, plastic basins and

bottles, plastic cover, desk lamps,

diorama, neon lights, integrated

video, integrated texts by Manuel

Joseph

'Mirror's Edge', Bildmuseet,

Umea, Sweden

Collection Jumex, Mexico City

Survey

Survey

Sas de contamination

2000

Wood, prints, adhesive tape,

chain, transparent plastic foil,

plastic cover, neon lights,

electrical wire, wire mesh, original

paintings and sculptures

'Rendez-vous 2', Hotel de

(aumont, Avignon, France

Collection Fondation Lambert,

Avignon, France

88

mass-cultural annihilation, but they turned these

governing conditions into the parameters oftheir

artistic production. Their work underlined in each

act that the very existence of these parameters of

destruction offered the singular historical

opportunity from within which the anticipation of

any actual and future experience of a new

subjectivity would have to emerge. It is in their

work that Hirschhorn discovered that the dialectic

of anomie and agency could be properly

articulated and counteracted with the

infinitesimal instantiation of the subject's

constitution in the performative. Thus he actually

forged a credible link not only with the aesthetic of

Fluxus, and with Filliou's promises of agency, but

also with those that the earlier avant-gardes of the

twentieth century had held out.

With its endless uncontrollable proliferation

of information, its vast range of international

historical topics, its sheer endless accumulation of

simulacral objects and materials Hirschhorn's work

has made a stunning reversal of the artistic

attitudes of the last fifty years. This was at a time

when it had, we should remind ourselves, become

the totally incontestable doxa that a work of art

should not address anything outside itself,

certainly not a socio-political phenomenon and

least of all attempt to analyse and represent a

larger historical context. Thus by making the

parameters of the mass public sphere the measure

of his work as much as by negating the mass

cultural destruction to be final and totalizing, the

work situates itself in the centre of the dialectical

potential of anomie and agency. To the utopian

avant-garde in the context of the Soviet

Productivists, the emergence of a new proletarian

public sphere was formulated at every level as a

historically possible and necessary shift that

artistic practices could assist in initiating. In an

exact and inescapably necessary reversal of this,

Hirschhorn's mass-cultural public sphere offers no

such aspirations to its producers or its consumers,

since every material element figures control, not

emancipation, signifies consumption, not

production. Yet Hirschhorn situates the spectator

beyond that anomic condition in a diffraction of

the desire for the self, in a process that

continuously and collectively enables and enacts a

multiplicity of micrological steps towards self­

constitution and subjectivity.

,...

Survey

Ein Kunstwerk, Ein ProbLem

1998

Wood, cardboard, paper, prints,

photocopies, aluminium foil,

transparent plastic foil, mirrors,

plastic cover

Portikus, Frankfurt am Main

92

See Catherine David (ed.) Untitled Catalogue for 'Invitations'.

Galeries Nationales du Jeu de Paume, Paris, 1994.

In displays such as Saint-Trapez (1992), for example, the artist

offered a multitude of variously shaped found pieces of wood or

cardboard, differentiated from mere driftwood by seemingly

haphazard or mechanically applied monochrome painterly marks, or

demarcated with linear masking-tape diagrams.

In Souvenirs du XXeme Siecle (1997) he offered as souvenirs

reproductions of works by some of the heroes of modernist painting

(Mondrian, Freundlich among others) wrapped in chintzy frames of

silver and gold foil, as well as numerous other banal objects.

The late Andre Cadere's work is particularly called forth by

Hirschhorn's investigation into the dialectics of objects and

placement. It had been Cad ere's artistic intelligence to situate

'abstract' painterly objects, disguised as 'merely' ludic (and, in the

eyes of some of his mistaken peers, ludicrous) structures, and to

position them (often to the chagrin of his peers and their curators),

unofficially and at times illegitimately within the reserved spaces of

the advanced exhibition culture of the late 1960s and 1970s.

This sudden and perplexing juxtaposition of advertisement

fragments with codes of abstraction is typical of most of

Hirschhorn's work during 1988-94, beginning with his 3 Pieces au

mur (1988), where three more or less randomly sized wooden

panels carry three different demarcations. The lowest one is a

group of classical modernist squares and smaller rectangles, while

the middle one is horizontal linear partitions on biomorphic wood

grain. The third and uppermost one is divided by a vertical line into

two fields whose respective inscriptions 'Normal' and 'Super' not

only identify the stack of panels as a potential petrol pump, but

more importantly act as a travesty ofthe linguistic aspirations of

Conceptualism to transcend the limitations of abstraction and of

the metaphysical aspirations of modernism at large.

The work's materials, as well as its organization, remind us of

Polke's use of string and cardboard in works su.ch as Liebe zu ... or

Fotokreis, just as his Pappologie (all 1968) and Langeweileschleife

(1969) made use offound fragments of cardboard, and defined

abstract linearity with either string or masking tape.

Thomas Hirschhorn, Les Plaintifs, les betes, les politiques, Centre

Genevois de Gravure Contemporaine, Geneva, 1995. We are

referring of course to Gerhard Richter's famous Atlas project in

which the artist has collected a wide variety of found photographs

from the most diverse sources and mounted them on panels. Begun

in 1964, and exhibited for the first time in Utrecht in 1972, the

project continues up to this date, and has become an image bank,

both olthe artist's preoccupations with photography in society and

in his work, as much as a collection of source materials used in the

preparation of his paintings.

The mythical ballpoint pen, a tool for accelerated industrialized

handwriting, had been discovered by the Hungarian Ladislao Biro in

the late 1930s and was first manufactured by the Frenchman Marcel

Bich in 1950, who named it the Bic. Warhol had deployed this

quintessence ofa deskilled and desubjectivized writing and drawing

tool as the perfect counterpart to the inscriptions and enunciations

that he quoted in his textual drawings. A similar approach to

desublimatory strategies within drawing occurs a few years later in

Sigmar Po Ike's declaration of ballpoint pen vulgarity in opposition

to Joseph Beuys' continuing adherence to the sublimity olthe

pencil. of paint and the writing with chalk on blackboards.

Okwui Enwezor, 'Interview with Thomas Hirschhorn', in James

Rondeau, et al. (ed.), Thomas Hirschhorn: Jumbo Spoons and Big

Cake/World Airport, Art Institute of Chicago/The Renaissance

Society at the University of Chicago, 2000, pp. 26-35.

Pascaline Cuvelier, 'Weak Affinities: The Art olThomas Hirschhorn',

Artforum, New York, May 1998, pp. 132-35. (Excerpts from a

conversation with the artis!.)

10 Hirschhorn has stressed that he favours the term 'display' over that

of 'installation' without giving further explanation. The fact is,

however, that many of his early arrangements of sculptural objects

follow the principle of the eta loge (often mimicking the display of

cheap commodities on markets). But in quite a few photographs in

his Les plaintifs for example, it becomes evident that the flat

expansion of dispersed objects on the ground seems also derived

from the contemplation of caches of weapons spread out for sale, or

dead bodies laid out for identification, setting the parameters of

Hirschhorn's preference for the 'display' structure. In that regard,

then, his 'displays' are rather different lrom the serialized,

spatialized and iterative readymade that had emerged as a principle

01 sculptural organization alter Warhol's display olthe Brillo Boxes.

11 Thomas Hirschhorn, interview with the author, 20 December 2003.

12 Ibid.

13 These inscri ptions are similar to the rhetorical figures in

Hirschhorn's installation of Artists' Scorves (Limerick, Ireland 1996),

where the names from his artistic pantheon (from Rodchenko to

Filliou) were inscribed in the crude typography ollabric letters

appliqued on to vertically striped, brightly coloured football

SCalV€S, faintly echoing the fate of Daniel Buren's radical critique

with the means of painterly/mechanical geometrical striations.

14 Or the extraordinary discovery 01 Clarence Schmidt by Allan Kaprow,

featured in his Assemblage, Environments and Happenings, Harry N.

Abrams, New York, 1966.

l5 The explosion of commodity production, the permeation of everyday

spaces with discarded refuse, and the restructuring of sculpture as

an accumulation 01 obsolete objects (and as the spatialization of

the ready-made), were registered at the same time in Europe in

works such as Arman's Le Plein (1960). In the theatre, gesture and

movement were rigidified and restructured as arrested tableaux

vivants, and actors were buried in growing mounds of debris, as in

Samuel Beckett's Happy Days (1961). At that point it seemed that

sculpture could no longer be conceived as a discrete industrially

produced object allowing us to contemplate the conditions 01

letishization. It had become a wasteland 01 reluse, a theatricalized

set oftotal reification.

16 See Daniela Salvioni, 'Interview with Dan Graham', Flash Art

Internatianal, No.152, Milan, May-June 1990, pp. 140-44.

17 Thomas Hirschhorn, interviewed by Okwui Enwezor, op. cit. p.32.

93 Survey