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

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

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in numerous works, and more explicitly in several interviews, has foregrounded the importance of a complex set of historical references in the constitution of his project.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

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

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jiiiiP

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

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 antiaesthetic 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

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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
Untitled
1993

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

the proletarian self, Schwitters' retrospective melancholia mourns the disappearance ofthe bourgeois self under the onslaught of masscultural 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 quasitotalitarian 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

Wood, cardboard, paper, prints, pLastic foil, adhesive tape, carpet

'Hom mage

a Edouard Manet:

Thomas Hirschhorn, Adrian Schiess', Fondation Art et Societe, Dijon, France

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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

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

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11 vernagelte Fenster
1993

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-

Wood, cardboard, paper, prints, adhesive tape Raum fur Aktuelle Kunst, Lucerne

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

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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

Jemand klimmert sich urn meine

Arbeit

1992
Wood, cardboard, paper, prints, adhesive tape, sponge

Paris

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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

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

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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

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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. And that depletion had taken hold, as it would in Hirschhorn's work, on all levels
3

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,

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

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

lay-Out
1993

Fabric, wood, cardboard, prints, adhesive tape Galerie Susanna Kulli, St. Gallen, Switzerland

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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
Andy Warhol Brillo Boxes (Soap Pads) and Campbell's Boxes (Tomato Juice)
1964

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

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

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

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Les plaintifs, les betes, les politiques (extract of the edition)

1995
Artist's book, published by Centre
Genevois de Gravure Contemporaine, Geneva

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

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hommage aEdouard 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

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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 seLfportrait 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

Les pLaintifs, Les betes, Les poLitiques (extract of the edition)

1995

Artist's book, pubLished by Centre

Genevois de Gravure
Contemporaine, Geneva

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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 avantgarde 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

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Les plaintifs, les betes, les politiques (extract of the edition)

1995

Artist's book, published by Centre

Genevois de Gravure
Contemporaine, Geneva

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

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

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

! ....
,

'v

2
.

\1

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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 threedimensionaLity 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, nonobjects (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

99 sacs plastiques
1995

Plastic bags, newspapers, prints, adhesive tape APP, Brussels

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F
99 sacs plastiques
1995

Plastic bags, newspapers, prints,

adhesive tape Barbes-Rochechouart, Paris

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

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1
FLying Boxes

1993

Cardboard, prints, paper, adhesive

tape, rope

Galerie Francesca Pia, Bern

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

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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
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

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.....
opposite, La Redoute
1991

Wood, cardboard, paper, prints, adhesive tape La Redoute housing estate, 'Salon de l'Ephemere', Fontenay-SousBois, France

below, Colonel Fabien

1992

Paper, prints, adhesive tape Paris

its imminent removal as waste. Yet it is also always promising its resuscitation to a condition of usevalue 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

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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

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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.

concerns with monumentality: 'My third type of

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

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

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

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1
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

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

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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

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

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 anthropologyto 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

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

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

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Rolex etc., Freundlichs 'Aufstieg' und Skulptur-Sortier-StationDokumentation

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

,Qq

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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

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 geopolitical sites and phases of production, their

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below, and apposite, botton left,
Raymond Carver-ALtar 1999

Safety tape, fabric, scarves, cardboard, photocopies, ballpoint pen, marker pen, adhesive tape,

1
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.

aluminium foil, transparent

plastic foil, books, candles, plushs, plastic toys, artificial flowers, clothes pegs, gadgets 'Vivre sa vie', Glasgow, 2000

opposite, top, Raymond CarverALtar 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

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

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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.

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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).

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
Ludwig Mies van der Rohe Barcelona Pavilion 1928-29 InternationaL Exhibition Barcelona, 1929

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

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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 spatiotemporal experience, the devalorization of the use-value of objects, the ever-increasing rapidity

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

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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,

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,

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

works that were hybrids between quasi-functional architectural pavilions and sculpture ... The pavilion

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p
Cavemanman
2002

Wood, cardboard, paper, prints photocopies, spray paint, aluminium foil, transparent

plastic foil, gold foil, adhesive

tape, neon lights, electrical Wi

aluminium cans, watches, baSi

books, dummy, integrated vide York

Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New

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

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.

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1 Man = 1 Man

2002
Paper, prints, marker pen,

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

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

ballpoint pen, plastic foil, adhesive tape

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.

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

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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 masscuLturaL 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

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

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Sas de contamination
2000

Wood, prints, adhesive tape, chain, transparent plastic foil, plastic cover, neon lights,
electrical wire, wire mesh, original

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 selfconstitution and subjectivity.

paintings and sculptures 'Rendez-vous 2', Hotel de (aumont, Avignon, France Collection Fondation Lambert, Avignon, France

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...

Ein Kunstwerk, Ein ProbLem

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

(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

1998 Wood, cardboard, paper, prints, photocopies, aluminium foil, transparent plastic foil, mirrors, plastic cover Portikus, Frankfurt am Main

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 10

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!.) 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

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

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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 12 13 Thomas Hirschhorn, interview with the author, 20 December 2003. Ibid. 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

SCalVS, 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.

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