REVIEWS.
Unable to Stand the One Who Stands Alone: Notes on Hirschhorn at Chantal Crousel
This show is an event, a repetition of an event that happened last year in the 'middle of nowhere', as a friend put it, namely at the Creux de l’Enfer in Thiers, France. It has been a while since Thomas Hirscchorn had a show in Paris, and knowing the white, unassuming and almost polite space of Chantal Crousel I was curious to see what he would do with it. Hirschhorn is the grand Philosopher-Installationist afterall, the one that shock my ideas of art around until they opened up to all sorts of kinetic notions when I first saw his work in his seismic Swiss-Swiss Democracy show two years previously around the corner in the Centre Culturel Swiss. And while there is as ever lots of energy with Concretion Re, a rush of visual tactility as well as philosophical exclamation, some of it seems ready to burst out of the little confines of the upmarket setting, as well bending to explain itself as a repetition of a previous event. So prima facie it feels the repetition of an (Hirschhorn) event for the proud and polite denizens of the Marais and, I imagine, the international art market.
The vernissage was a quiet affair, nothing of the buzz of the Swiss-Swiss show: this is I feel, a show for the buyers and not for Hirscchorn to explore new territory within the machinations of him putting on a show. He had already laid that out last year in the Creux de l’Enfer. In the press release Hirschhorn is as embattled as ever:
I am Non-resigned and Non-reconciled. Today, those two conditions are essential to me in order to do my work as an artist. As such, my work consists in giving Form, in asserting that Form and in defending that Form against all and against everything.
There was no champagne at the vernissage as the show is unreconciled, it is unforgiving and the display is at once gruesome and unflinching, pedantic in its insistence in portraying the apparent hypocrisy of contemporary life: porn stars are found alongside the horribly mutilated, the fashion mannequin covered in an armour of screws drilled into their plastic body. The Good, the Beautiful, the Commercial are all recast here and instead of finding some sort of Platonic Formal insistence you only get Hirschhorn's relentless disfiguration of 'Form', of Preconceptions, of the Given.
A little digression: as I walked into the cardboard cavern that enwombs the show a little fight broke out. Some visitors had seemed to take umbrage to Hirschhorn himself and an apparent photo he took of them (this couldn't be true, but maybe, first clauses aren't that important when looking to start a fight). 'Don't you' the man shouted in heavily accented English, 'take my fucking photo.' 'You're Thomas Hirschhorn' the girl added, 'you a fucking famous artist.' The pair proceeded to shout these ambiguous accusations at the artist, who in his gruff French repeated stoically 'Ca va, Ca va..." Then he took a defiant photo of them from his phone. Soon though enough was enough and his military training took hold and he decided to get these weirdos out of his vernissage. Thomas Hircshhorn - ex-army officer, man of achievement, Artist-Worker extraordinaire - making shapes would be enough to make anyone scamper and they soon did, the show defended and reasserted.
And what does defending the Form mean? Defending the Form means: believing in the Form, believing in what has crystallized as a Form, believing in what has become a Form, and that as such can be challenged, criticized, rejected. Defending the shape means believing more than anything in the force that makes something a Form! Defending the Form also implies agreeing with everything that relates to that Form. The defense of the Form is the deeply warlike act that makes one an artist. It is the very condition to establishing oneself as an Actor, as an Artist. Even if one is not victorious in that fight, the defense of the Form never is a defeat. The fight for defending the Form is never a lost fight, never.
And I can imagine this training not only giving him an awed mistrust and compulsion to represent war and violence but also the ability to do it so forcefully. The construction of his shows are always large and sprawling, the packaging tape everywhere, on everything, holding everything up; the cardboard covering the walls and distorting them, making them run down to the floor so that there are no right angles: this is a cave filled with the musings of some sort of Warholian Zarathustra of the times. Large granite stones (“ Pendulums With Outgrowths ”) are hung with the tape from the ceilings - they made for nice works which I hadn't seen before; as did the video and photo work incorporating a dancing barechested Hirschhorn and a mannequin. The mannequin pieces (“ Mannequins avec Nails and Screws ”) with the screws seem to be carried over from his shows in the States, his large canon I'd seen at FIAC in October and the blue marker collages in Arandt und Partner in Berlin…but his work always coheres more potently when he has presented it in the ‘Form’ that he sees best, his art is an event or at least works best when worked into the Event of an art exhibition.
The show does slowly start to come together as a singular attempt to take on the plenum of modern visual media and information. It confronts the war that fills our lives: it shows it as a sickness, an abnormality, as primitive as cave living say. It’s a declaration of resistance as well as a grand effort to try and understand. The pictures (in the various ‘Vitrines’) displayed of people suffering from gigantism and split open heads and other horrendous afflictions are contiguous with porno breasts not for the sake of gratuitous pastiche I feel, but in an attempt, almost naïve perhaps (and that is what Hirschhorn is always good at: belief and sincerity in bucket loads, filling the artwork until it almost starts to empty itself) to try to understand what it means to be human, to stand next to each other, to be singuraly different whilst remaining at base the same. And that is why the mannequins are employed, they are the embodiment of an Other for Hirschhorn, he can manipulate and violate them at his will alike others do with real living Others everyday.
As an artist, I want to work on giving forms that are made with the Will of being Precise and Excessive. I aim precision in my work; yet I want to work in excess, overwork with intensity and turmoil. For that is the only way for me to achieve working in chaos, in order to clarify it and confront the abysmal miracle of the unspeakable. I want to work in chaos, which means understanding Art as a mean to confront Reality, a way to know the world and a tool to live in my own time. And chaos is everywhere.
Upon entering the show there was a pile of photocopies of an article by Mehdi Belhaj Kacem, Evénement et Répétition, which is in itself worth a mention, not least because it fits snugly with Hirschhorn’s (re)presentation in the space, but also because it is a fine article written by one of the more interesting young writers/thinkers practising in French letters at the moment. One thing you learn as a Philosophy undergraduate is that philosophers answer questions with more questions, the subject in many ways a self assured concatenation of doubt and interrogation. Ad infinitum. Kacem’s text starts off by declaring his mate Alain Badiou’s – possibly one of the more important thinkers alive today – request that he be clear and precise. It’s a 21st century philosophical text that gives 10 axiomatic rubrics on the subject of repetition and the event. Difference, he states, Otherness, was the starting point of 20th century philosophical thinking; the Event, he is arguing with this text, is to take its place. Its all grand continental philosophy but interesting for its definitiveness. Regarding the show, axiom eight seems to point toward Hirschhorn’s practice the most:
‘La phenomenology est ici la discipline noble et pieuse de ce don’t l’expérience menter comme Un, l’usage de soi physique et compulsif, ce qui ne peut étre qu’expérience du Deux, et d’abord en ce sens négativisant.’
[…] qui se trouve étre, comme par un malheureux hazard, l’expérience immanente de tout animal humain, fút-ce pour le pire.
And in this case, probably because I decided to write some words on the show, the text that surrounded it actually helped: I began to feel that this show, and TH’s work in general, are visual, tactile representations of the phenomenology (taken here as meaning the affectation of the body) of the self debasing subject. The cut up body, the mutilated and grotesque, the deformed and hideous, the mannequins, Hirschhorn’s own little dance behind the breast plate of a limbless mannequin, the blue-marker collage series that deconstruct pornography with their repetition of breasts and models, violently shot up: they all show physicality in its crisis moment, the Husserlian epoché or bracketing of elementary phenomenology at work. As Kacem’s text has it: ‘the pornographic experience [within this singular repetitive phenomenology] is fetid immanence.’ And yes, its all very Batallian, but also kinetic, its pointing at what good art should or could do, mainly wake the viewer up a bit by presenting the world they live in a manner that is once communal, alike the grand Aesthetics of Kant, but also a diversifying palimpsest of deconstructed taste and opinion. Kacem’s text, concerned as it is with the philosophical problem of identifying the unifying event, contiguity and repetition, shows that in a way Hirschhorn’s work gives a filogramm of the excesses of man: the commodification of man’s excesses in a persuasive, common and cheap, visual language. And that human immanence, if it is to be found at all, is now more likely to be found in those repetitions our daily life is made up of: the true Event of life is but the cheap, throwaway repetition of culture, money, sex, et cetera.
And the defense of the Form gives us all of this, the sickness and weakness as I see it, of man; TH gives us the realisation of his vision of things and the time spent in his little Marais cavern is illuminating, even with all the squirming and discomfort. Each wound is his wound he declares, each sickness is his sickness; if these occurrences of man’s foibles are never ending repetitions of the same events than Otherness, distinguishing difference, is no longer a concern, Hirschorn can sidestep them to the universal Form he has always seemed to wish to affirm. It is all but the repetition of things that are sadly all too human. ‘L’homme est une repetition suspendue entre deux événements. L’instant d’une grace, il lui est donné d’étre un événement entre deux repetitions. Qu’est-ce donc que vivre? Ca.’ And perhaps either TH, the defender of the Form, or the disgruntled, pushed around viewer, experiences that grace with Concretion Re. An interesting thought as far as contemporary art practice is concerned. What harm if you take my photo, or are a famous artist, or reshow work already shown? It has all been done before, and it will all be done again, in the mean time you have the show, the work, the Hirschhorn Event.
www.crousel.com
www.creuxdelenfer.net
www.lacan.com/kacem
8th February 2007
