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historical references in the constitution of his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
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