Art as Panic Attack
Ralph Darbyshire
If you’ve ever woken at night perched on the edge of your bed, unable to catch your breath and absolutely convinced of your immanent demise, "Superficial Engagement" will feel strangely familiar. This is art as panic attack.
It is easy to over intellectualise the practice of Hirschhorn, and I will, but this installation is pure visceral spit. It’s politics on politics. It’s super reflected year zero with reality thrown in. It’s Hirschhorn’s mantra, "more is more and less is less."
He’s filled the Gladstone Gallery with photographic images of unimaginable horror. Of what happens to flesh and blood in conflict, of what we look like from the inside or with bits missing or with most missing. He’s also filled it with cardboard, TVs, text, nail fetishes and a homage to a dead Swiss artist/healer, and loads of tape! All this stuff pinnacles on a series of platforms that punctuate the morass of clutter and terror and reinforce his simple "display" idiom. As to whether this work is a hit or miss is rendered almost irrelevant by the saturation of experience that this environment engenders. To be unaffected, perhaps even physically, one must be either dead or thinking about art too much.
Analysis should take a second or even a third step back from the initial introduction. Clever recognition of historical and theoretical lineage should be a dish served cold when an artist such as Hirschhorn seeks to wake us from our Chelsea slumbers. To approach this work through the microscope of critical analysis is to perpetuate an irony that has all of the superficiality of the couch culture against which Hirschhorn rails. "Superficial Engagement" can so easily be "engaged superficially" if deadpan macho conventions are applied. That Hirschhorn himself engages such intrigues should not detract from the fundamental dialectic of his "display."
Thomas Hirschhorn was born in Berne, Switzerland in 1957. He now works out of Paris and in 2000 was the recipient of the prix Marcel Duchamp and in 2004 the Joseph Beuys-Preis. This is the second time the Gladstone Gallery has hosted his work. In 2002 he produced "Cavemanman" when he constructed a series of utopian hermitages.
Hirschhorn started his journey as a graphic designer. But despite joining Grapus, a Parisian collective of communist graphic designers in 1984, his essential political and aesthetic inclinations led him toward a broader theatre. This allowed him to translate his leftist ideals with a theoretical support mechanism, that whilst unnecessary, does hold out a level of continuity and intellectual rigor which stuff made out of crap benefits from having. He is one of the few remaining "good old boys" who still believes in the responsibility of the artists. He thinks that art can change the world and if you look at his oft quoted historical references, Beuys, Warhol, Schwitters and Rodchenko, he’s probably right. If you add to this mix some magic, quite a bit of anger and a sprinkling of central European pragmatism and bolshiness, you get the mimetically liquidised soup that is "Superficial Engagement."
"Superficial Engagement" represents the sublimation and politicalisation of familiar local vernacular materials with the voodoo aesthetic of alchemy and faith. Brown parcel tape becomes marble or bronze and his jittery formalist lurches make for idealised beautiful forms. Incomprehensible terrain makes for purist, modernist, fundamentalist meaning, His inclusion of a homage to Emma Kunz is no stocking filler. Kunz produced hundreds of complex drawings that she believed were energy fields from which she would formulate diagnoses for her patients. Likewise the inclusion of nail fetishes is an atavistic nod. The usual, but not exclusive theory of these African fetishes being that they were meant to inflict disease, bad luck or even death to an enemy, a practise imported from the European habit of piercing the portraits of enemies to the same effect.
The shamanism of Beuys’ re-conquering of the object is nexus to the already spiritually reanimated confusion of photographic nightmares that Hirschhorn goads us with. But if you dismiss all this theoretical, historical and anthropological prurience as contextually implausible, perhaps even as hocus pocus, it is as nothing compared to the activities perpetrated in our names that have produced the resultant images which Hirschhorn uses against us; for us. The utility of a nail fetish or structure drawing is considerably more tangible than the orthodoxy of bombing a peasant nation from 23,000 feet in order to "liberate" them. Hirschhorn shows us graphically what really does happen to "hearts and minds" and in so doing emphasises the politics of value. Here lies the crux of "Superficial Engagement;" it’s about value and our values.
Hirschhorn crosses all of his T’s and dots all his I’s which I think is a kind of a shame as it would be interesting to see him less theoretically, or even conceptually fastidious. But this is the particular province of the art world that he has chosen to inhabit. A world that can misinterpret his installation as "puerile" and "scatological" with no reference to his place in the intellectual wake of the 1968 Paris Student uprisings.
Hirschhorn has been involved in over 40 public space, non-art site projects. They have all been done in collaboration with both the elements and the local vandals/critics. He doesn’t save his passion for rubbish construction materials for fancy Chelsea galleries. His decision-making processes are based on a purely egalitarian notion. Just as he dismisses the idea that the context or siting of a work intrinsically changes it, his requirement for his audiences to be "non-selected," allows him the scope to "display" just a few doors away from the Mary Boone Gallery where Jeff Koons’ bronze inflatable dingy is "valued" at an anodyne $2,500,000!
The Gladstone gallery should be commended for its embrace of Hirschhorn. "Superficial Engagement" is a beacon of finger wagging lucidity in a sea of triviality, decoration and nonsense. Nevertheless, the accompanying gallery blurb describing the installation as "exploring the intersection of the destruction of war and the creation of art" is just plain wrong, because it doesn’t. It actually explores moral and visual numbness, culpability and lack of empathy. It’s pepper in the eye, chilli on your pecker. It’s Giacometti’s objectional object. It’s a question of what kind of license we give to those that represent us and the kinds of checks and balances we require. It’s about how footage of a father carrying his teenage daughter with her leg hanging by a sinew can become part of the evening’s televisual wallpaper. It’s not really to do with art, it’s more important than that.
That the "intersection" with the creation of art bit doesn’t work, doesn’t matter. In fact Hirschhorn’s wider political, conceptual and historical lineage shouldn’t matter. But this installation does matter, and it does work, but it’s better viewed without art goggles.
