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No Heroics Please
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by Douglas Fogle
Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.—Karl Marx Ghosts populate the work of Thomas Hirschhorn. These ghosts should not be confused with the spirit (geist) that haunts the pages of Hegel’s writings and constitutes the motor force of history through its historical world figures. Hirschhorn’s ghosts are not relatives of Napoleon or figures of mythic proportions, like Odysseus, heroically cutting their way through the fabric of history; they are much more marginal in their stature and manner of thought. But, in each case, these ghosts are caught in a nexus of history, tragedy, and farce that circulates throughout Hirschhorn’s sculptures. Tragedy, farce, and history. To encounter a sculpture by Thomas Hirschhorn is to be caught within an electric field generated by these forces. It is a bit like being electrocuted-not in the sense of capital punishment or electroshock therapy but, rather, in suddenly finding oneself to be an electrical conductor within a network of cultural circuits not of one’s own making. Circulating within the ether of these circuits are a cohort of specters, composed of antiheroes and marginal thinkers who, together, comprise Hirschhorn’s aesthetic and political pantheon. These are figures whose works have provoked disruptions and electrical shorts within the normal flow of economic and cultural capital that shapes our everyday lives in the modern world. I met the first of these ghosts as Hirschhorn was installing his work Spin-off (1998), at the Walker Art Center, in the fall of 1998. Traveling from the kitsch incandescence of a small pink candle, in the shape of a peace symbol, through sculptured tendrils of aluminum foil, the energy in Spin-off was conducted along a path of cultural and sculptural resistance that included collaged images of models in fashion magazines, theoretical texts by such authors as Georges Bataille, a video of a Swiss military air show, and sculptured bars of Nazi gold, only to ground itself, finally, in the work’s formal and conceptual compass, a giant cardboard and aluminum foil recreation of a Swiss Army knife hanging in the middle of the display. An intentionally crudely rendered spectral presence hovering in the center of the gallery, the knife radiated equal parts tragedy and farce, as tendrils of aluminum foil connected the myth of Swiss neutrality and efficiency to its historically tragic results in the form of recently uncovered records of gold plundered from Jewish families by the Third Reich. Tied together with yards of cheap, brown packing tape, the work was completed by a seemingly random improvisational act that occurred as the result of a serendipitous visit to a bookstore. While in Minneapolis, Hirschhorn came across a book by the noted Swiss author Robert Walser. As the author was one of Hirschhorn’s heroes, the book was immediately incorporated into the sculpture. Walser, thereby, spontaneously became the critical ghost in Hirschhorn’s machine, providing a contrapuntal antidote to the confluence of tragedy and history embedded in the form of the Swiss Army knife. If we follow these ghosts and flows of energy through the tendrils of his work, where do we end up? Here lies the crux of Hirschhorn’s work. How are these images connected? Where do the connections begin and where do they end? Where are the viewers to position themselves within the nexus of cultural, sculptural, and political energies that constitute Hirschhorn’s work? Is Spin-off an indictment of the myth of Swiss efficiency and neutrality? Does it implicate us all in a system of militarism and economics regardless of our nationality? When looking at these works, it becomes clear that the energy flowing through them is not that of a zero-sum game, with a specific switch indicating an on or off position or even an affirmation or denial, let alone a specific implication of political guilt or innocence. Hirschhorn’s work is, at once, more complicated and frustrating than such questions would allow. This is what makes it both seductive yet difficult to read at the same time. Upon first view, however, Hirschhorn’s work does not appear to be frustratingly complex. A Swiss artist who lives and works in Paris, Thomas Hirschhorn has spent the last decade creating sculptural displays (he enjoys all the commercial connotations of this word) that combine a rigorously banal set of materials with a wide array of cultural and political references. Resolutely handmade, these objects and environments combine the provisional appearance of a grade-school science fair with the critical impact of an evening watching CNN. It is this provisionality that the artist not only values but specifically cultivates in his work, opting for presentations that are precarious both in their cultural significance and their material manifestations. This provisionality makes itself most clearly visible in the artist’s choice of materials. In Hirschhorn’s case, it is the content of his form. Drawing upon a lexicon of readily available sculptural materials, which include aluminum foil, cardboard, packing tape, plastic sheeting, wood, old magazines, and newspapers, Hirschhorn has given the art world a distinctively contemporary take on the term arte povera, or poor art. For the most part, although not exclusively, the arte povera artists who emerged in the sixties in Italy-Merz, Fabro, Kounellis, et al.-favored the organic over the industrial. There was something at once alchemical and oppositional in their choice of such “poor” materials as beeswax, flour, stone, animal skin, etc., reflecting their resistance to the cultural juggernaut of industrialization and commercialism that was the legacy of the Italian Miracle. Hirschhorn’s choice of materials is similarly calculated in the political and aesthetic significance of its “low” connotations as well as its confrontational qualities. But, unlike the arte povera artists, Hirschhorn has deliberately chosen poor materials that are part and parcel of the industrial consumerist milieu. They are by no means raw materials, having been industrially refined and produced, whether we are speaking of the aluminum in his tinfoil or the heavily produced fashion images from the glossy magazines that crop up in his work. Third-generation relics of the Italian Miracle, the American century, and the postwar recovery, they are indeed industrial materials, but, unlike the industrial materials employed by the minimalists in their “specific objects,” these are consumer products readily available in the corner hardware store. Most important, however, these materials are not heroic in a monumental sense, but are, rather, materials appropriated from the flow of energy and capital that circulate in the economic channels of production and consumption in the contemporary industrial world. They have been processed, reworked, and, at times, recycled, carrying with them the residual traces of the energy inherent in their circulation within a cultural economy. Understanding the character of these materials is crucial to understanding Hirschhorn’s work. But why these materials specifically? The artist has suggested that he employs them “because they are economical. Economical is not cheap; economical is political. I work with these materials because everyone knows and uses them. These materials are disposable. They exist, although not for the purpose of making art. Economy interests me. Economy has nothing to do with rich or poor; economy needs connections, it connects. Economy is boundless, economy is active, offensive.” Hirschhorn’s understanding of economics includes neither IPOs, the machinations of Alan Greenspan, nor the writings of Adam Smith. Rather than a Wealth of Nations, Hirschhorn employs a much broader understanding of economics, which he conceives as a flow of energy through a network of social, political, and cultural relations. Aluminum foil is the electrical conductor that formally enervates this economy and connects the disparate elements in his work in a nonhierarchical web of correspondence. In his sculptures, tendrils of aluminum foil spread like crude circuit boards across the field of his displays, physically connecting disparate groups of images, issues, and forms in a network of sculptural energy that attempts to intervene in the larger flow of cultural capital and symbolic exchange value in Western consumer culture. As Hirschhorn has said, “I want to make connections between things that have nothing to do with each other. . . . There are always links of energy that have something to do with each other.” It is difficult to separate Hirschhorn’s choice of materials from the larger economics of his sculptural methodology; both are bound together by his adherence to an antihierarchical organizing principle. One example is Hirschhorn’s Precarious Construction (1997), a work that synthesizes a number of the artist’s recurring motifs and concerns. Commissioned by the Münster Sculpture Project, in 1997, the artist constructed what he called a “sculpture sorting station,” an outdoor display case composed of a number of his signature materials, including cardboard, Plexiglas, plastic sheeting, plywood, and packing tape. Resembling a crude facsimile of an office trailer on a construction site, this rectangular structure was subdivided into ten separate display cases, illuminated with neon light fixtures. On view in these windows were a range of handcrafted sculptures and videos produced by the artist, including aluminum foil-covered representations of symbols and commercial icons, giant tears, trophies, stalagmites, and stalactites, as well as three-dimensional reproductions and videos of sculptures by artists he admires. When encountering this work on the streets of Münster, its taxonomic qualities became readily apparent. But Hirschhorn’s taxonomy is not that of Lavater. It is less of an hierarchical, logical ordering than that of the random proximity of objects in a cabinet of curiosities. But, while the ordering might not appear to be logical, it is the artist’s willful attempt to draw an equivalence of value among an eclectic and diverse body of subject matter and materials that lies at the heart of Hirschhorn’s work. All of these objects were tied together in a system of equivalence established by the fluorescent glow of his display cases. Presenting itself as an autonomous space free of hierarchy, where this eclectic menagerie of objects could safely coexist, the fluorescent lights in this work were, conversely, dependent upon electricity from the city’s power grid, establishing a literal network of dependency upon the culture at large. Like all of the elements that make up Hirschhorn’s work, the sculptures themselves are inextricably bound to the culture at large. Although Hirschhorn is suspicious of the politics of site-specific projects, citing the artist’s inherent inability to understand fully a specific cultural location during the short span of a project, location is nonetheless quite important in his work. By no means does Hirschhorn eschews the space of the gallery, but he has chosen to site a number of his works within the economic networks of particular cultural spaces. Precarious Construction was installed outdoors, in Münster, near a recycling collection station, a generic site of economic exchange, invoking the connotations of recycling in relation not only to his choice of cheap, expendable materials but to his recycling of artworks by his artistic heroes. VDP-Very Derivated Products (1998) shared this connection to the economic by cutting through and across the window of the bookshop of the Guggenheim Museum in New York’s Soho, occupying the interior of the shop as well as space on the exterior sidewalk. In a larger, citywide project, Lascaux III (1997), in Bordeaux, Hirschhorn used multiple sites, including the checkout line at a Burger King, a private home, a public square, and a shopping mall. In each of these cases, Hirschhorn’s choice of location is significant, as he situates these works in the nodal points of cultural and economic networks of exchange. It is as if his works become sculptural energy collectors placed along the junctions of a cultural power grid, while breaking the rules of engagement of both so-called public art and gallery-bound practice. This emphasis on a nonhierarchical sense of location would seem to connect Hirschhorn’s project to the antigallery stance of the proponents of conceptualism and land art in the sixties and seventies. Robert Smithson, in his 1972 catalog contribution to documenta 5, made perhaps the most direct indictment of the institutional space of the art gallery since Filippo Tommaso Marinetti compared museums to ossuaries, in the Futurist Manifesto of 1911. Calling into question the entire institutional and commercial infrastructure of the art world, Smithson suggested that “museums, like asylums and jails, have wards and cells-in other words, neutral rooms called ‘galleries.’ A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world.” But this is a false dichotomy. Where Hirschhorn differs significantly from Smithson is that he chooses not to place a higher value on either the inside or the outside to the exclusion of the middle. In terms of Hirschhorn’s work, Smithson’s mistake is in thinking that the museum or art center is not itself a public space, a site of symbolic and economic exchange, a nexus of intersecting cultural and social forces, although one with its own specificity. This is why the artist refuses to draw a categorical distinction between the gallery and the world. All of these spaces are not only equally valid but are crucial sites for engaging with the larger sense of cultural economics that Hirschhorn’s work invokes in its materials, subject matter, and location. In both the gallery and public spaces, Hirschhorn brings us the world that, tragically, often presents itself as a veil of tears. In Hirschhorn’s sculptures, these tears find a concrete form: giant aluminum foil tears drip from his structures, while the artist draws tears in red and blue ink on the eyes of models cut out from fashion magazines. Is this trail of tears shed in an attempt at redemption for our sins? This is, perhaps, far too catholic for Hirschhorn, although he has been accused of being both didactic and moralistic. As many critics have pointed out, however, Hirschhorn does place politics at the center of his work. This seems self-evident when one first looks at his work, but upon closer inspection it becomes more difficult to tell exactly what kind of politics is at work here. Is Hirschhorn a leftist? An anarchist? A reactionary? One of the paradoxes of Hirschhorn’s work is the question of how, exactly, it is political. On a superficial level, the politics of his practice can be linked to the strategies of detournement practiced by the situationists in the sixties. Beginning from the proposition that we live in a “society of the spectacle,” in which capital replicates its power structures by a domination of the realm of cultural images, sich situationists as Guy Debord proposed a strategy of resistance called “detournement,” a negative critique in which images were appropriated from the mass media and reworked in order to subvert their intended meanings. When looking at Hirschhorn’s sculptures, we are confronted with images derived from mass media. Newspaper articles, magazines, and videos bombard the viewer with stories and images of atrocities in Bosnia, international arms dealing, and the troubles in Northern Ireland. But, while Hirschhorn’s practice may take on some of the structural features of detournement, his is not a politics of negation and sublimation. “My choice was to refuse to make political art; I make art politically.” His work may ask a question, but it does not necessarily answer the question yet leaving the issue unresolved, but hanging in the air. Although Swiss, Hirschhorn is part of a generation of artists and intellectuals that has come of age in the wake of the events of May 1968 in France. One of the most significant intellectual shifts that resulted from the student uprisings in Paris was a newfound skepticism of hierarchical structures of power embodied not only in the state and the university but within the very heart of left-wing politics, in the guise of the Communist Party. Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari were foremost among French intellectuals who theorized an alternative notion of the political that was at once antihierarchical and inclusive. In opposition to top down, or what Foucault calls “sovereign” models of power, Deleuze and Guattari have suggested the alternative metaphor of the rhizome. Radically antihierarchical, the notion of the rhizome provided an image of a map with no center, a series of connections with no visible starting point. As the authors suggest, “A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo.” This may be an apt description of Hirschhorn’s work. With its aluminum foil networks growing out of control and connecting everything in their paths, the works themselves look rather rhizomic. But beyond the superficiality of surface appearance, Hirschhorn’s entire methodology adheres to a rhizomic program in both materials and subject matter. This could be seen clearly in World Airport, his project for the 1999 Venice Biennale, which wove an epic web of correspondences in its indictment of globalization as embodied in a sculptural evocation of the aseptic environment of an international airport. Creating a veritable overload of visual and literary information, World Airport’s centerpiece installation featured a room-size table full of sculptured airliners, flanked by a series of altars to such philosophers as Rosa Luxemburg, Gilles Deleuze, and Antonio Gramsci. Evoking the altars found in Chinese restaurants, these formed a perimeter of rhizomic critique around the environmentally controlled, fluorescent-lighted bubbles of reified corporate consensus that radiates from these modern-day gateways to the world. It is important to recognize that Hirschhorn’s altars share the same modesty of construction and antihierarchical qualities as the rest of his work. In Precarious Construction, for instance, one display case contained a video documenting an attempt to build a small monument out of Marlboro cigarette boxes. Unable to maintain its structural integrity under the metaphorical weight of the corporate logo, this monument topples and an attempt is made to rebuild it again and again-a Sisyphean cycle of failed architecture and frustrated expectations. The question of monumentality raised by this video weaves its way through all of Hirschhorn’s work. Traditional monuments are sculptured in steel and marble, materials for the ages that freeze their subjects in heroic poses or glorify the power of the state. One thinks of Francisco Franco’s monument to fascism Valley of the Fallen or even Mount Rushmore. Hirschhorn rejects that notion of monumentality. He asks, instead, how it might be possible to make an homage and pay one’s respects to one’s heroes without resorting to the problematic characteristics of traditional monumentality? In opposition to this, Hirschhorn constructs antimonumental altars to his pantheon of cultural heroes. Less traditional monuments than they are architectural follies, Hirschhorn employs his signature materials, which are both precarious and transitory, and, as such, have a fragility and temporariness that contribute to his work’s antiheroic sensibility. For a number of years, Hirschhorn has been constructing these outdoor altars to his personal pantheon of heroes, playing off of the energy and creativity of spontaneous public memorials to such fallen cultural heroes as John Lennon, Kurt Cobain, Princess Diana, or the less well-known victims of the Columbine High School massacre. Like all of his sculptures, his outdoor altars take on the aspect of the ad hoc and the spontaneous. They are ephemeral and heartfelt and not suffused with spectacle or cynicism, although they are, at times, enhanced by humor. Unlike the altar on which Abraham was to sacrifice Isaac, with its implications of a hierarchical prostration to a superior being, Hirschhorn’s altars celebrate the contingent and the subaltern. They constitute a minor literature of memorialization, paying homage to the artist’s heroes without the semantics of monumental heroism. The heroes that the artist has chosen to honor are intellectuals and artists who have impacted deeply on his thinking. Hirschhorn has built memorials for the Swiss writer Robert Walser, the Dutch artist Piet Mondrian, and the Austrian artist Otto Freundlich. But other cultural heroes populate Hirschhorn’s work as well; the list includes, among others, the philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche, Gilles Deleuze, and Georges Bataille, and the filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder. These are not historical world figures in the Hegelian sense of the term. They are not Napoleons and empire builders but, rather, heroes of the margin, marginal thinkers, thinkers of the margin and not the center. Their ghosts move within the circuits of Hirschhorn’s work, invigorating his structures with their critical energy. Like all of these works, Hirschhorn’s Altar to Raymond Carver deploys flowers, plastic buckets, cardboard, stuffed animals, and markers to pay homage to a master of another kind of minor literature. Raymond Carver (1939-88) was a writer of short stories, which, as a genre, differs from the more monolithic edifice presented by the novel. It offers fragmentary glimpses into the lives of its subjects, who existed before and will continue to exist after the tentative and, at times, provisional conclusion of the narrative. At least, this is the short story as Raymond Carver employed the genre. We enter Carver’s worlds in media res, finding ourselves in the midst of the lives of the noble, if flawed, survivors of the American century. Two boys who wage an afternoon battle with a fish, walk home each with one half, sad trophies in the battle of adolescence. A couple house-sit for friends and find themselves exploring the lives embedded in this apartment, not completely satisfied with their own lives. Carver’s stories provide the reader with frozen slices of melancholic time. His characters are not heroes but ghosts, moving through their lives in search of something they cannot quite find. Hirschhorn’s words about his own work could just as well be used to describe Carver’s: “The motor of my creation is not aesthetic questions or art questions. Rather, it is the human condition and questions of life giving me the energy to work.” As such, Carver is a fitting subject for an artist who is a champion of the precarious, the ad hoc, the provisional, and the antihierarchical. A creator of nonmonumental monuments. An antiheroic supporter of heroes. These are the paradoxical positions from which Thomas Hirschhorn launches his sculptural invectives. Raymond Carver’s hypothetical response to Hirschhorn can be found in his poem “No Heroics, Please”: Zhivago with a fine mustache, We do not need another hero. Thomas Hirschhorn’s work, instead, traverses a field of history, tragedy, and farce, offering us glimpses of a different kind of pantheon, while his sculptures drain away our strength to resist.
—Text: Thomas Hirschhorn, June 27, 1998
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