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Thomas Hirschhorn: Altar to Raymond Carver
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  Hirschhorn’s Altar to Raymond Carver in Zürich |
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Born in Berm Switzerland. in 1957, Thomas Hirschhorn studied graphic design at the Schule für Gestaltung in Zürich. After completing his studies in 1984, he moved to France and joined Grapus, a Parisian collective of communist graphic designers. Despite the power of graphic media to galvanize an audience for either commercial or political ends, neither advertising nor propaganda adequately reflected Hirschhorn’s complex social and aesthetic concerns. By 1986, the year of his first solo exhibition at Bar Floréal in Paris, he had abandoned graphic design altogether in favor of the visual arts. Among the influences on his work, Hirschhorn cites the Russian constructivists, Kurt Schwitters and Andy Warhol (an artist whose career followed a similar path). Retaining his political convictions, Hirschhorn translates leftist ideals into sculptural displays combining rigorously banal materials with a wide array of cultural references. As part of a generation of European artists and intellectuals who came of age in the wake of the 1968 Paris student uprisings, Hirschhorn absorbed lessons from a variety of writers whose thinking is anti-hierarchical and who have rejected sovereign models of power. This awareness and stance is reflected in the thrift and “vulnerable eccentricity” of his materials—which include aluminum foil, tape, board, plastic, and paper—and the ephemeral quality of his assembalges. At the 1999 Venice Biennale (and, again, at the Renaissance Society, in Chicago), Hirschhorn constructed an extensive work entitle World Airport. This indictment of globalization contrasts the fluorescent-lit image of an airport—corportate gateway to the world—with altars dedicated to such individual philosophers and political martyrs of fascism as Rosa Luxemburg and Antonio Gramsci. Hirschhorn’s work constitutes a state-of-the-wrold equation whose facts and variables add up to a global portrait. For a number of years, Thomas Hirschhorn has been constructing outdoor altars dedicated to his personal pantheon—Piet Mondrian, Otto Freundlich, Ingeborg Bachmann and Raymond Carver. Deeply suspicious of traditional notions of heroism, he adopts the format of spontaneous public memorials to fallen pop idols as well as the brief shrines that form at roadsides commemorating victims of car accidents or crimes. Hirschhorn appropriates the lack of cynicism and affirmative energy of these shrines, which he views as motivated by the need to “bear witness to one’s love.” The altars constitute a literature of memorialization, paying homage to the artist’s heroes without the semantics of monumental heroism. This sense is aptly reflected in his Altar to Raymond Carver, an homage to the America short-story writer known for his Chekov-inspired, spare sketches that treat themes of loss and disillusionment. Built for the Galleries at Moore, Thomas Hirschhorn’s shrine to the American poet/short story writer Raymond Carver stretched along the sidewalk of 20th Street. “These altars eventually will disappear. The average duration is two weeks. The disappearance of the altar is as important as its presence. The memory of what is important doesn’t need a monument.”Hirschhorn avoids the pristine and permanent setting of the gallery; the altar will be acted upon by time and the elements, slowly disintegrating as it becomes part of the landscape. Born in Bern, Switzerland, Hirschhorn was educated at the Schule für Gestaltung in Zürich. From his studio in a working-class neighborhood of Paris, he is now producing sprawling installations that overflow onto street corners and galleries all over Europe. For the Venice Biennale (1999), Hirschhorn created FlugplatzWelt/World-Airport, an installation now on view at the Renaissance Society, University of Chicago.
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