Thomas Hirschhorn

Thomas Hirschhorn (born 1957 in Bern, lives in Paris) is an installation artist whose works address socio-political issues. Directed at a non-exclusive audience, his monumental spatial collages are made from everyday materials like tape, cardboard and aluminium foil. With his stagings and performative elements, Hirschhorn has developed his own visual language in which the worlds of politics, society and commerce collide, leading to his current practice of presence and production projects.

In awarding Thomas Hirschhorn the Prix Meret Oppenheim, the CFA salutes the extreme coherence of his artistic process, one that is based on the defence of society’s democratic values. From his early collages to his temporary monuments, from his large-scale installations to the conferences he gives all over the world, Thomas Hirschhorn has developed a unique formal language that reflects the challenges of the modern world as well as the artist’s own experience. The different forms that his process takes demonstrate the deep commitment of an artist who sees his art as a form of combat sport. (Julie Enckell Julliard)

From the Prix Meret Oppenheim 2018 publication: Thomas Hirschhorn in conversation with Yasmil Raymond

My first experience of Thomas Hirschhorn’s work was Swiss Army Knife (1998); in the spring of 1999, it was on view at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. I was about to complete my undergraduate degree in art and immediately understood that everything I had been taught was obsolete. Hirschhorn constructs his work quickly using common materials that have become his signature: packaging cardboard, plywood, brown packing tape, magazine cutouts, cellophane wrap, and gold and silver foil. The earnestness in his work can be destabilizing, the abundance and density of materials overwhelming. And yet, all the excessiveness is never gratuitous or precious. Hirschhorn’s work challenges intellectual snobbery with its furious clarity. “To make art politically,” Hirschhorn said early on, “means to choose materials that do not intimidate, a format that doesn’t dominate, a device that does not seduce. To make art politically is not to submit to an ideology or to denounce the system …. It is to work with the fullest energy against the principle of ‘quality’.” I followed Hirschhorn’s work for two decades, traveling to dozens of cities, including Amsterdam, Berlin, London, Los Angeles, Mexico City, Minneapolis, Montreal, New York, Paris, Pittsburg, São Paulo, and Saint Petersburg. In 2013, I held the title of Ambassador to his outdoor project Gramsci Monument, which was commissioned by Dia Art Foundation and located at Forest Houses in the South Bronx. The following interview took place through an exchange of emails early this year.

Yasmil Raymond
Where are you with your work today? What are some of the problems you are grappling with?
Thomas Hirschhorn
I still have so much to do — I am not complaining because I am very happy to have so many projects to do for exhibitions. I still have much to assert and many ideas to give form to. I do challenging work and doing it is truly a never-ending fight. My problem with each work is: how can I take a position? How can I give form to this position? And how can this form create a truth — a universal truth — beyond aesthetic, political, economic conventions? My problem with my work in public space is how to provide an answer to the question “why non-permanency persists?” How to give a form to the logic of “non-permanency”? And how do the conditions for its precarious persistence take form in absolute necessity and urgency, as opposed to a form of “ephemeral logic” related to objects and death. My problem is: how can my work — and all works of art — resist the many safety and security restrictions that have increased tremendously in museums, galleries, art spaces as well as in public space?

YR The commodity dilemma?
TH Today, I have to confront the hyper-power of security and safety and struggle for my own logic and for the form of my work at almost every occasion to exhibit it. It has even reached the point that security and safety rules tend to influence the form and the aesthetics of works of art. I sometimes ask myself whether the cleanliness and space suitability of some artworks aren’t what they are just because they comply with all the security and safety regulations. My problem is, furthermore, to do a work — in public space or in a gallery, museum or art space — that resists historical facts. How can I do a work that transcends history? And how can I do a work — today, in our reality — that is a-historical? As always, I need grace, and grace, in art, comes from the strength and courage needed to create something despite its precarity, despite the precarity of all things, including of life itself. And my challenge as an artist is to give a form of my own, to affirm this form, but also to assert my own terms in art, to work within the coherence of my very own terms.

YR For several years now you have been using found images depicting the violent death of anonymous civilians and soldiers in countries at war. More recently, in the series Pixel-Collage (2015–17), you juxtaposed these found images alongside advertisements from women’s fashion magazines that you blur with handmade pixels made from cut-out papers. Your work responds to this dichotomy between the arbitrariness of war and the consciousness of wealth. What about this opposition interests you?
TH Yes, there is a relationship, a relationship between everything, really everything which is part of the world, of our world, our unique and only world. To assert and give this a form is fundamental. I am convinced that the collage is a powerful, universal form for asserting this. Doing collages means using existing elements of this world to create a new world. It is fun to make a collage but it is also considered too simple, too fast, not respectable enough or immature. Everyone has made a collage at least once. Collages possess the power to involve the Other immediately. I like this capacity of non-exclusion and I like the fact that collages tend to be seen with suspicion and not taken seriously. Collages still resist consumption, even if they, like everything else, must fight glamor and fashion. In doing collages I want to put together what cannot be put together. I think that’s the aim of a collage and my mission as artist. I want to put the whole world into my collages; I want to express the complexity and contradiction of the world in one single collage. Not the world as a whole but a fragmented world, the world that I am living in. I want to reach, to touch history beyond the historical fact.

YR Do you see a fundamental relationship between war and
wealth?
TH The question is always: what is my position? I want to confront the chaos, the incomprehensibility and the unclarity of the world, not by bringing peace or quietness, not by working in a chaotic way, but by working in the chaos and in the unclarity of the world. I want to do something that is charged and that, in its density, attains beauty. I want to work out of urgency; I want to do too much. The images that I use in a collage are an attempt to confront the violence of the world and my own violence. I am part of the world and all the violence of the world is my own violence, all the wounds of the world are my own wounds. All the hate is my own hate. I love Dada and the collages of the Dadaists; I love the beautiful collages of Hannah Höch and the grand Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama by Johannes Baader. I love John Heartfield and his work. He said “Use photography as a weapon!” I love to do collages, a collage is resistant; it escapes control, even the control of the one who created it. Making a collage always has to do with headlessness. There is no other means of expression with such great explosive power. A collage is charged and always remains explosive. I often stand dumbstruck before it, and as an artist, in particular, it is a matter of enduring this “looking dumb”.

YR In one of the reviews of your inaugural exhibition of the Pixel-Collage series at Galerie Chantal Crousel in 2015, a critic qualified as “troubling” the pairing of corpses and the abstract effect of the pixels. You are one of a very small number of artists who have been addressing the grief and disastrous reality that has defined the lives of hundreds of thousands of human beings living in countries such as Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. What is not that troubling?
TH I don’t know, because I can’t speak for the Other. As far as I am concerned, I need to be courageous, I need to act in headlessness, 74 75 I need not remain disobedient, I need to be precise, I need to act with generosity, I need to work with love. Since the beginning of my work, I have always wanted to attain the complexity, the beauty, the violence, the inseparable world, my world, our world. I always wanted to glue together, in a collage, the beauty and the violence of the world I am living in. I remember that at one of my first exhibitions at Shedhalle Zürich someone from the “art world” asked me if I couldn’t do a work leaving out those images of destroyed human bodies, death and destruction, adding that, maybe, it would be more successful? That is when I realized once again, as I have been ever since the beginning of my work, that as an artist you need to do what you think should be done, what only you think should be done, and what only you think needs to be done. I try to stay true to this.

YR In another body of work you have taken up the topic of the ruin. For the large sculpture In-Between (2015), for example, you built a collapsing building inside the South London Gallery in London. Where did this work start?
TH It started with a wonderful quote from Antonio Gramsci: “Destruction is difficult. It is as difficult as creation.” In its logic, clarity and incommensurability this assertion by Antonio Gramsci points to a dynamic, a movement. I see it as the in-between status of a journey or trajectory. To me, this quote is about the difficulty of positioning oneself in the midst of the moving world, and about not separating, or creating an opposition, between “creation” and “destruction”. Implied in Gramsci’s quote is the non-corruptible and non-negotiable will to survive — and this is the site of “precariousness”.

YR Gramsci wrote this in prison during the rise of fascism in Europe.
TH Antonio Gramsci’s quote expresses the contradictions of our world today and the difficulty of confronting its reality. I love this quote for its simplicity and complexity. The challenge of confronting the world’s reality lies between “creation” and “destruction”. My work In-Between is the affirmation of a precarious dimension, the dimension of the non-guaranteed, the non-dimension of the abyss with its uncertainty. To create destruction is an aesthetic challenge; this is why the aesthetic of In-Between borrows from pictures of destruction — destruction by violence, by war, by accident, by nature, by structural failures, by corruption, by fatality. I have developed an artistic assertion with this aesthetic in several projects: Concordia, Concordia (2012), Break-Through (2013) Abschlag and Höhere Gewalt (both 2014), and Nachwirkung (2015). Following Gramsci’s quote, the assertion is: To give form to destruction is difficult, to
give form to ruin is the problem and to give form to disaster is the aesthetic challenge. Creating destruction is difficult for me as an artist because it means that removing things, destroying things, demolishing things starts in the mind as an “idea”, as the work’s guideline, as the artistic logic. It is to understand — not in a literal sense, of course, but in terms of an artistic gesture that is able to change everything.

YR I think of the work of the past decade, starting with the 2006 exhibition Superficial Engagement, as being symbolically charged with rage but also with uninhibited hope in art. This was tangible in a later work, the video Touching Reality (2012), which Okwui Enwezor included in Intense Proximity (the 2012 Paris Triennial). I remember following with my eyes each movement of the hand that was recorded scrolling through an iPad with dozen of images of corpses, trusting those fingers leading me through tremendous depictions of pain and sorrow. Do you believe in a healing dimension of the experience of art?
TH Yes, there is definitely this dimension in the experience of art. I want to try to be precise here: I understand the healing power of art in the experience of art, in the dialogue with art or in the confrontation with art as an action. Art is not medication that can be used passively and art is certainly not medication you can buy. Art is a tool or a weapon to confront today’s reality, the time we are living in and the world we are part of. If I use the tool of art actively, and if I am ready to engage in the experience of art, then art can cast a new light on reality and can then change the world. Art can do this because, as art, it possesses the power of transformation, the transformation of every human being. Being art, art is autonomous. Autonomy is what gives the artwork its beauty and its absoluteness. Also, being art, art is resistance. Art resists facts, political, aesthetical, cultural habits. Being resistance, art is positiveness, movement, intensity, belief, and healing.

YR You write about your process regularly and recently published an anthology titled Critical Laboratory and published by MIT Press. In the past two years, in your presentations of the series Pixel-Collage 76 77 (2015–17), you included vitrines with “step-by-step” examples of your method for making collages, source materials and references that have inspired your decisions. What drives this decision to make available your process and sources?
TH The point is to say: “You, too, you can think like this!” Therefore I called these vitrines Showcase for Thoughts. There are three reasons why I do them. First of all, the medium of the vitrine is part of the medium of the exhibition; I want to pay tribute to this. I noticed that looking into a vitrine creates a kind of will to intimacy, a will to care or pay attention, which I find beautiful. I find it beautiful because it’s a resistance to consumption. A vitrine is an invitation to spend time, to learn more, to get more. I also think it’s a resistance to comments because it often opens up towards the horizon of complexity — with the elements displayed in the vitrine. I also use the vitrine as a horizontal proposition complementary to the vertical hanging of Pixel-Collage and other works. I always try to give the vitrine its own surrounding space to make it exist as such. I use the vitrine Showcase for Thoughts — my thoughts but also thoughts for the Other — in order to create a space for the beyond, for a possible connection or a non-possible link.

YR To encourage proximity?
TH I want to offer a space for “thinking” differently, a space to lay out my own thinking, my clarification, my writing, my position. The Showcase for Thoughts is in no way an introduction to, or an explanation of, my work: it’s an extension of my thoughts as an artist. Earlier you referred to some comment describing this as “troubling” — fair enough, but not really interesting because the Showcase for Thoughts, on the contrary, wants to underline that art, that a work of art, that my work, constitutes a “critical corpus”. That is, with, and in, the Showcase for Thoughts I want to create a place and time — because you need to spend time reading and looking into the vitrine — for ideas that interest me, notions that matter to me and concepts I consider important.

YR One of the most liberating aspects of your work for me is the abundance of materials and written language you offer to the spectator. Your work often includes your statements, printouts of texts written and books by your favorite authors for us to read and reference. What is the origin of this decision?
TH It is “doing too much, so that things don’t lie”. The strategy of overwhelming with information is the strategy of having to understand that everything is important, nothing is unimportant, nothing is less important. The effort of consumption tries to teach us that less is more, but I believe that “less is less and more is more”. And my idea is to refuse rarefication and the distinction of things as outstanding in order to lend them importance. I want, on the contrary, to overwhelm, to do too much, too tightly, too densely, too charged, in order to generate veraciousness and alertness. I love to use printed material, I love books because I need them for my work and I need them to live. Books are a necessity. I don’t need books to create my work, but I am open for encounters of concepts and forms between art and philosophy, literature, poetry. Books encourage me and help me. A book never disappoints me.

YR Right, and this relates to your love of philosophy?
TH Philosophers are sculpting concepts with words as powerful tools to create new terms in philosophy. As an artist I, too, invent my own terms with regard to my work. And by insisting on my own terms I can clarify my position. For example, I came up with the concept of “unshared authorship”. “Unshared authorship” is a statement, an assertion; “unshared” stands for clearness, for a decision, for the “non-exclusive”, for the opening toward co-existence.  “Unshared” means accepting complexity and implies multiplication. “Unshared responsibility” allows taking responsibility for what I am not responsible for. Furthermore, “unshared authorship” allows authorship even when I am not the “author” — this is essential, this is what’s new.

YR It has been over thirty years since you have been exhibiting your work. Could you talk a bit about your background? What were some big influences early on in your life? When you moved to Paris in 1983, you worked for a year or so in the design collective Grapus. What were some important lessons you learned there?
TH I do not know why this myth persists but your question gives me the opportunity to clarify once again that I never worked at the Grapus studio, because I left after half a day. It’s true that I wanted to work with them — I wanted to work on an equal level, but they simply did not want me! They, of course, offered that I be one of their “executing hands” — which I refused. And such a failure, having just arrived from Switzerland after finishing my studies at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich, cannot be turned into anything other than what it actually was: my own failure! I loved the work of Grapus and my dream was to be part of their collective, which, by the way, was the reason why I moved to Paris. Their refusal to accept me as one of them, meaning as one of the artistic deciders in their collective, taught me a lot. I was quite isolated, without connections or resources in Paris, refusing to go back home, and had to struggle with what was the central issue for me: How to engage with the world, with the time and with reality through my own work, my own vision, my own utopia? For about a decade I tried to find my own way staying true to what I always loved to do: collages. Consequently, my initial failure of not integrating into the Grapus Collective was the most important learning process.

YR A springboard?
TH As someone who wanted to do graphic design “coming from myself”, as I described it at the time, it was the cruel understanding that graphic design is not possible without a commission. I had to emancipate from the limitation, or self-limitation, of my understanding of “graphic design”. Art opened up a welcoming field for confronting my ideas and my will to give form; art opened up a new dimension: the history of art. Art pushed me to ask myself the critical and crucial questions: what work of art can I do? What work of art should I do? What work of art makes sense to me? And therefore: what work is to be done?

YR You have dedicated your work to artists and authors you admire such as Raymond Carver, Robert Walser, Ingeborg Bachmann, Emmanuel Bove, Meret Oppenheim, Fernand Léger, Lyubov Popova
and Otto Freundlich. You have also dedicated monuments to Baruch Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, Georges Bataille and Antonio Gramsci. I am drawn to your insistence to remember and celebrate their work and legacy. Could you talk about this aspect of your work and what drives you to honor them?
TH I wanted to pay tribute to these artists, writers, poets and philosophers, because they are the ones who changed the world. Through their work and life, they cast a new light on the world and asserted their way to engage with the world. They touch the reality of our time with hope and engagement. I wanted to point this out by giving form to it. The other important thing is that my tribute to all these women and men to whom I dedicated an altar, a kiosk, a map, a monument, a sculpture or a festival is always a decision of my own. I decided to do it because I am a fan. I am definitely a fan of Robert Walser, Meret Oppenheim, Hannah Arendt, Gilles Deleuze and all the others. It is important to act — and for me as an artist, to give form — as a fan. No one can commission a homage, no one can ask me to pay tribute to someone I don’t admire. Being a fan carries some sort of resistance within itself. Being a fan allows using absolute thinking.
I want to confront myself with pure thinking. Politics are not pure. I want to confront thoughts which provoke the activity of thinking, the activity of my own thinking.

YR In addition to making art, what else provokes your thinking?
TH Pure philosophy can do this. I love Spinoza and Deleuze for that. Philosophy is interesting because it is not politically oriented even though it may incorporate politics. In this sense it is not just non-political but trans-political. This means it is a way to think the political without being political or becoming political. The conflict between the political and philosophy is irreducible, but there is no conflict between art and philosophy. A philosophical notion such as the Multitude in (Hardt and Negri’s) “Empire” cannot be fulfilled by any historical fact. There is an irreducible gap between the fact and the notion. The scene of philosophy is not on the side of facts, nor is it on the side of opinions. It lies in this absolute distance, this absolute conflict, it is the abyss between the two dimensions. Both philosophy and art are contentious. It is like a war of sorts. Philosophers and artists are warriors, not politicians. As an artist I can, and must, go to war for my work, for my form, for myunderstanding of art. Doing this is a mission as well as a pleasure. And I do it in the awareness that I am not, and never was, alone in
doing it.

YR Can we circle back to your love of Meret Oppenheim? I find her fur-covered cup, saucer, and spoon [Object, Paris, 1936] immensely powerful and wildly subversive. What about her work
moves you?
TH Loving someone does not need an explanation, but I will try to provide one for you — and for me — regardless, because the notion of love, the love of art, for art and in art, is important. I must be categorically “in favor of” the artist that I love — such decidedness is really important to me. Hence, there are artists that I have loved for a long time, Meret Oppenheim being one of them. To love an artist means to love everything, even the smallest works, and it means to love everything n his or her life. It’s not about criticizing. It’s about saying “yes!”, saying “yes” to everything. It’s about not distancing yourself and about not neutralizing. That’s what love means in art. That’s what matters and that’s what helps me. A breakthrough can only happen if there is an absolute decision “in favor of” a work and the artist. This breakthrough that art can generate, it happens when something new, a new form, a new concept is created. It’s only and always about this breakthrough and Meret Oppenheim achieved it with each one of her works, from the most famous ones, such as Le Déjeuner en fourrure, to those least known. This is why I love her. I love her for the “fur cup” as much as for everything she did before and after that. My decision “in favor of” her wasn’t because of the “fur cup” ordespite the “fur cup”, but rather thanks to the “fur cup”, and thanks to every other work as well. Loving someone serves to cut short the “art historical discussion”, which doesn’t address wholeness. The wholeness of a work of art, the wholeness of being an artist is what matters. Everything is important. Nothing is unimportant and everything has its own significance, and no one can tell me what should be important, or less so, in art! Therefore, a love for someone — my love for Meret Oppenheim — is not to be discussed.

YR The “fur cup” is a fascinating work, André Breton called it Le Déjeuner en fourrure (The Luncheon in Fur) but Oppenheim called it Object. It is simultaneously alluring and disturbing, exciting and eerie. What do you recognize in this work?
TH The “fur cup” is a good example of how a specific artwork is not helped by being isolated for the purpose of developing some theory, because this work is, as much as really anything Meret Oppenheim made, a wonderful piece of art. I love Meret Oppenheim because in her work form is given to what matters in art: being free with what comes from within you. This seemingly simple, seemingly easily reached goal — by means of form — is the great challenge in art. Meret Oppenheim achieved it with each of her works. I look at her work and can always see the moment of breakthrough: when one’s own self becomes universal. The universal is what matters in art, and you can only touch the universal — truth is another word for it — with what comes from within you. Each and every work by Meret Oppenheim improves this. Each of her works is a statement, a pure statement! Meret Oppenheim has shown that it’s about one’s own self and not about the personal! It’s about one’s own self and not about “circumstances”! It’s about one’s own self and not about the “social”! It’s about one’s own self and not about “identity”! It’s about one’s own self and not about “tradition”! It’s about one’s own self and not about “culture”. I see this in every work by her, and this clarity makes me happy, especially nowadays with regard to the debate about “identity” and the never-ending apolitical “context” discourse. Meret Oppenheim has shown in her work where the true struggle lies: on the boundless field of freedom. Freedom with yourself! Meret Oppenheim struggles with her own claim to freedom. I see this in her works, in each one of them. In her work and in her carnets she is in a state of conflict with her dream of freedom.

YR What do you mean by that?
TH She describes a dream in her book Poèmes et carnets that’s about how her own patriarchal attitude attempts to devalue, to kill, her feminine side and how she (as always) failed to encourage or support her masculine side so as to ultimately create something new and whole. I love her openness, her strictness and the significance of it, the significance of something being created. Meret Oppenheim is never sentimental and never narcissistic. Her work is always an act of emancipation, of self-determination, and this is why it is marked by precision and truth. Many terms come to mind when I think about her: ethics, beauty, intensity, conflict, strictness, dignity, certainty, hope. All these are terms that I love and they are all positive terms. I love Meret Oppenheim for her resistance. Every one of her works is resistant: resistant in itself. That is an important model for me; Meret Oppenheim demonstrates it in each of her works. A case in point is Brunnen (Fountain) (1983) on Waisenhausplatz in Bern. I believe that this work is one of the very best works of “public art”. I don’t know any other work that so miraculously manages to address the question of form anew each day. The question of whether it makes sense to give nature — this includes people and their “acts” — form at all? Meret Oppenheim made a statement with this piece of work that withstands and augments the question with irony, humor and grace. She was truly touched by grace. I love Meret Oppenheim for all of this as well as for what I don’t know. What is exceptional about Meret Oppenheim, is that there are thousands of “reasons” to love her and that only few are loved like that. Could it perhaps be the privilege of those who were fully aware that they loved more than they were loved?

YR To date, you have made nearly 70 works in public space. You have written about your interest in exhibiting outdoors as a way to reach audiences that not necessarily visit galleries or can afford the admission ticket of a museum. What has your experience of building your work in public spaces contributed to the work you make in your studio?
TH Every experience in art contributes to my will and my effort to fulfill my mission as artist. Besides the incredible fun and hypercomplexity which I encounter in doing it, working in public space has always pointed to the question of audience in a beautiful and cruel way. My experience with work in public space and the notion of public space tells me that it is possible to touch — that is to say, create — a “non-exclusive public”, whether in a neighborhood in the urban periphery, in a museum or on a street in the center of a city. The non-exclusive public always constitutes the essential public to conquer and reconquer. I learned how important it is to aim my work at the “non-exclusive audience”, which is the Other, the stranger, the one I don’t know, the one not interested in art, the one struggling with other problems. In public space this is the majority, as opposed to in the museum, gallery or art space.

YR Meaning that there is a difference?
TH The audience in public space and art institutions is the same — it is only a difference of proportion, of majority and minority. And the point is to never exclude anyone. Therefore, you really need to be in contact with the “non-exclusive audience”, because that’s the hard-core audience. You learn that notions such as equality, justice, truth or universality really do make sense. The “infight” and the confrontation of my work in public space taught me to make sure not to exclude anybody even in a museum, gallery or art space. To include every human being, one by one, is the lesson I try to take away from public space and carry over into the museum: non-exclusion through the choice of materials, through the choice of light, through the dimensions, through the work that is done and the way it is done. I learned from working in public space as well as in institutions that non-intimidating work which refuses to play the added-value game can make sense because it is based on non-exclusion.

Yasmil Raymond is Associate Curator in the Department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. From 2009 to 2015, she served as the curator of Dia Art Foundation. Prior to that, she was associate curator at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Her exhibitions include, among others: Allora & Calzadilla: Puerto Rican Light (co-curated with Manuel Cirauqui); Carl Andre: Sculpture as Place, 1958-2010 (co-curated with Philippe Vergne); Thomas Hirschhorn: Gramsci Monument; Jean-Luc Moulène: Opus + One; and Koo Jeong A: Constellation Congress. Ms. Raymond has been a senior critic at the Graduate Fine Arts Program at the University of Pennsylvania since 2009.