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.
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2 comments:
In some ways I agree that the key to his success is keeping up with his strategy in art practice for a period of time. However I also think that his art has another special aspect to it - it doesn’t have a certain commercial value like many other forms of public art, which in turn invites even more people for it’s viewing and creates a different kind of value on its own.
I think cardboard and tape art sucks
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