Hans Ulrich Obrist interview with Thomas Hirschhorn

Reading about Thomas Hirschhorn can make you excited about creating art. The words “Quality No! Energy Yes!” ring through your mind as you contemplate the potential aesthetic quality of cardboard and packaging tape. To reduce Hirschhorn’s practice such formal concerns, is of course a mistake though. It is the way in which mutilated media remnants are imbued with political agency that is one of the exciting aspects of Hirschhorn’s mode of making. In his interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, Hirschhorn speaks a lot of his desire to create non-heirarchical and value-free installations that create open contexts for the creation of knowledge. It seems so simple: cut up some newspapers, photocopy some texts, tape it all together and, presto, open and free art for the people. The key to the validity of the project seems to be in maintaining this strategy over a period of time, with the continued hope that it will result in only small and temporary engagements. There is no utopian dream at stake and therefore nothing to loose at any one particular instalment. It is enough for Hirschhorn that an individual may engage with only one sentence contained within an exhibition.

Hirschhorn also mentions that he wants to give form not create form. By aiming to be free from what is his, he hopes that the viewer may also remain free. Here the role of the artist is to act as the mediator between audience and information. That which is of value are the exchanges that occur around the art, rather than the art itself. I am reminded of Doug Aitken’s book ‘Broken Screen’ in which an attempt is made to capture the spontaneous conversations that spring up during the production of art. Aitken says in the introduction to the book, that these conversations are often the thing that keeps him going. In a hyper-productive post-everything-world of intensely complicated interactions, it seems that all we can hope to hang on to now, are these fleeting fragments of engagement.


References

Doug Aitken, Broken Screen: 26 Conversations, edited by Noel Daniel, New York, 2006

Hans Ulrich Obrist: Interviews Volume 1, edited by Thomas Boutoux, Milan, 2003.

Gregory Sholette, ‘Disciplining the Avant-Garde’

Gregory Sholette does an interesting job detailing aspects of the relationship between art and government. In particular, his focus is on how certain producers or products of art are deemed either acceptable or not acceptable according to the government philosophy at the time. Writing from an American point of view, Sholette certainly has ample examples to illustrate the lengths to which a government will go in order to maintain order in the name of freedom and democracy.
Sholette highlights a fascinating development that occurred in the 1960s, when counter-cultural symbols were co-opted and sold back to the public by corporate America. Consumers were now able to buy not just products but an ‘alternative’ and ‘individual’ lifestyle. In the 1980s, a similar development followed on from this, whereby corporate management strategies adopted “experimental, avant-garde and even critical forms of culture.” (Shollete, p12) Employees, in offices potentially decorated with contemporary art, were encouraged to think ‘creatively’ in their new role as managers of their own self-gratifying activity. Keeping employees ‘happy’ was the key, “at least as long as happy-work leads to a product worthy of profitable exchange.” (Sholette, p11) Obviously this only describes the situation for a certain group of people, but it is nevertheless a disconcerting occurrence. Sholette points to a correlation between open and flexible management ideology and ‘tactical media’, the process by which amateurs or outsiders can exploit advancements in technology (cheap consumer-level electronics and expanded forms of distribution) to express their disenchantment with the wider culture. Both modes of being break the rules of engagement in an attempt to secure their own place in the world.
The underlying theme here is the lack of distinction between work and play, products and culture, and the ability of institutions to absorb any critique levelled against them. That any clear distinction between these poles ever existed is a debatable issue. Foucault would argue, via his account of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, that every subject embodies the means with which they remain under the rule of those with governmental power. However, it seems the concern now is that there exists a great similarity between the activities of those with power and those without, making any subversive activities harder to maintain.

References

Gregory Sholette, ‘Disciplining the Avant-Garde: the United States versus The Critical Art Ensemble’, in CIRCA: Contemporary Visual Culture In Ireland 112, Summer 2005, pp50-59

David Campbell, ‘Horrific Blindness’

In his article, David Campbell outlines how the meaning of images of violence changes according to the context in which they are shown. One example he uses are the photos taken by white supremacists documenting and celebrating the lynchings of African-American’s in the first—half of the 20th century. The photos were published and became powerful articles of propoganda, becoming “integral to the public and social meaning of the murders.” (Campbell, p57) The exhibition ‘Without Sanctuary’ (2000) compiled a selection of these historical documents and re-presented them for a new audience. Stripped of the racist environment that produced them, they now serve as horrific reminders of America’s past and its impact on the present.

The element of Campbell’s article that I find most interesting is his description of the system of distribution that delivers images of violence to an audience. The key here is not only the audience’s role in experiencing the images, but also providing the media with pre-existing criteria for judging the acceptability of any particular image. Essentially, any public response to images of violence is “against pictures that have been anaesthetised in anticipation of this response.” (Campbell, p64) We are only shown what we are expected to enjoy. Our compliance in this system of distribution complicates any accusations of blame thrown at the media for disturbing the peace. Certainly, boundaries of good taste are transgressed in individual occurrences of poor judgement. But it is the determination of what is good taste in the first place, that is more shocking.


References

David Campbell, Horrific Blindness, in Journal For Cultural Research, Vol.8, No.1, Jan 2004

Jean Fisher, ‘Towards A Metaphysics Of Shit’

I am currently writing a narrative for a film that is intended to represent the fragmentary nature of lived experience. The central character will, at the beginning of the film, appear to be suffering from the continuous and repetitive stream of activities that fill her life (driven primarily by an unfulfilling job). The way in which I want to articulate the real source of her discontent, is through the perceived cohesion of her comings and goings. That is to say, it is as if everything makes too much sense; all of the time and space in which play, nonsense and distortion may be allowed to reveal the ‘productive cracks’ in the perceived monotony of her life, has been compressed almost to the point of not existing at all. These ‘productive cracks’ are important on a meta-level because they reveal the inadequacies of the reductive narratives that sustain the power structures within which we all reside. They are also important on an emotional level because they provide an individual with moments of stimulating disruption, moments of engagement in a disconnected system. These moments still arise, but they are not often able to be acknowledged as sites of resistance because the apprarently cohesive steamroller of productivity moves one’s consciousness on to the next chapter in the story.
In Jean Fisher’s article, an archetype with an anthropological history that spans multiple cultures is posited as a potential agent of change amidst a climate of impotence in the face of so much global commercial productivity. Trickster posseses the power to rebell not by negating systems of meaning, but by interogating and disrupting them. As Fisher says, that “which limits the self also provides the key to its liberation from constraining patterns of thought.” (Fisher, p66) By embodying ‘otherness’, trickster is able to manifest that which is unable to be articulated. And without a code of ethics and a productive bottom line to adhere to, trickster is able to jam the system by revealing the cracks the system itself produces.
I see trickster elements at play in the work of John Ward-Knox. Through subtle shifts, sleights of hand, he is able to ‘return shit to productive use’ (Fisher, p69). The objects he uses are not so obviously the waste produced by globalisation in an industrial sense. Nonetheless, they are often pieces of rubbish or just stuff that was lying around, the waste produced by one’s daily routine. The resulting sculptures toy with functionality, releasing a kind of beauty that was lying dormant within the original object. In this way, Ward-Knox reveals the cracks in our predetermined meanings for objects that liberates us (and the objects) from constraining patterns of thought, even if only temporarilly.

References

Jean Fisher, ‘Towards A Metaphysics Of Shit’, Documenta 11, Platform 5, The Catalog, Ostfildern/Ruit, 2002, pp63-70