TY - JOUR
AU1 - Lee, Lisa
AB - In a 2003 interview by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh, Thomas Hirschhorn clarified his typology of sculptural-architectural forms situated between high culture and mass culture, private sentiment and public expression. The Raymond Carver Altar, Piet Mondrian Altar, Ingeborg Bachmann Altar, and Otto Freundlich Altar take the form of spontaneous memorials that so often mark sites of tragic and violent death. In them, motley collections of laminated photographs, flickering candles, cellophane-wrapped bouquets, and personalised mementos declare collective grief and devotion. Like the Altars, the more expansive Monuments – dedicated to Baruch Spinoza, Gilles Deleuze, Georges Bataille, Antonio Gramsci – express what Hal Foster has called an archival impulse, a ‘move to (re)cathect cultural remnants’, namely the work and thought of radical philosophers and artists.1 It was in the face of the ‘failure’ of the Deleuze Monument, which the artist was forced to dismantle prematurely, that Hirschhorn first articulated the principle of ‘presence and production’ that subsequently governed the Bataille Monument, Gramsci Monument, and his numerous other works in public space. 2 Immersive and of limited duration, ‘presence and production’ works are often situated in working class neighbourhoods and realised with the aid of their inhabitants, who have been subjected to the legacies of colonialism and political and economic marginalisation. The Altars and Monuments bear the hallmarks of Hirschhorn’s approach to artwork in public space: adoption of exacerbated weakness in relation to urban surroundings, especially through mimicry of states of devaluation; development of a lexicon of provisional structures; appropriation of the language of non-art material culture; and activation of processes of identification and (as Claire Bishop has stressed) disidentification vis-à-vis the publics to which they are addressed.3 Clarifying for Buchloh his decision to produce only four altars and four monuments, Hirschhorn offered an analogy, ‘It is like a sheet of paper, when I have a plan and it has four corners’.4 It might seem difficult – it once did for me – to square the material heterogeneity and the socio-cultural complexity of Hirschhorn’s works in public space of the late 1990s and after with something so rudimentary, so passive, and so blank as a piece of paper. But what if the sheet were not a surface awaiting inscription, and what if its rectangular format did not constitute a neutral limit? What if the sheet embodied instead a principle, or a premise, or an ideal pertaining to the capacity of art to engage what Hirschhorn calls the non-exclusive public? To retrieve and then to consider these other possibilities, we must turn the clock back twenty years. Trained as a graphic designer at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich between the years 1978 and 1983, Hirschhorn moved to Paris at the end of his studies with the plan of joining the Communist graphic design collective Grapus. Born of the May 1968 protests, Grapus first dedicated itself to realising the graphic identities of the Parti communiste français and Confédération générale du travail, but eventually broadened its scope to include cultural institutions. Its distinct style favoured handwritten text and playful, punning graphics. Grapus’s rigorously collectivist structure originally required consensus on all design decisions, but by the 1980s had evolved into a more conventional division of labour under four creative directors. Hirschhorn brought to his initial meeting with Grapus several examples of his work, such as an announcement for a poetry reading in which information about the event streams down from parted lips to be received by disembodied ears that emerge from the poster’s left and bottom edges (Fig. 1). In the tumble, words and letters appear reversed, a defamiliarisation of reading conventions that suggests words materialised with a front and a back, and thus audible ‘in the round’. Yet Hirschhorn’s dream of working with Grapus’s chief designers as an equal dissipated when he was offered a job as an executor.5 Alex Jordan, one of the chiefs, recalls, ‘We asked ourselves how to manage this impressive “extra-terrestrial” who directly asked us what to create together…. We understood quickly that execution was not his cup of tea. Neither “design” in a classical sense’.6 For Hirschhorn’s part, half a day with Grapus was all that was required to observe the firm’s hierarchical structure and what he describes as the ‘hard core of design’ – its dependence upon, and therefore its answerability to, a client, even if that client is the French Communist Party.7 At the same time, Hirschhorn’s ‘political uncertainty’ vis-à-vis Grapus’s staunch Stalinist position presented itself as an ideological misalignment.8 Thus, Hirschhorn’s Grapus episode came to a swift end. With neither a source of income nor any facility with the French language, Hirschhorn elected to remain in Paris, resolved to produce what he conceived of as ‘Graphic design for myself [Graphisme pour moi-même]’. In retrospect, at least, the irony of this conceit is not lost on the artist. Characteristically, Hirschhorn transformed his predicament into a conceptual higher-ground: above a schematic, dated 1985–1986, showing the possibility of the graphic artist in direct relation to the public while circumventing the client-mediator, Hirschhorn wrote, ‘An image which is not printed or commissioned may [still] be graphic design’9 (Fig. 2). Extant examples of his unsolicited adverts for local businesses show his penchant for non-descriptive graphic elements, boldly and casually executed, combined with pre-printed collage elements. Fig. 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Poster proposition for a poetry reading (Student work), 1982, print, felt pen, pencil, and tape, 29.7 x 21 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. Fig. 1 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Poster proposition for a poetry reading (Student work), 1982, print, felt pen, pencil, and tape, 29.7 x 21 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. Fig. 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Notebook about Graphism, 1985–6 (extract), 29.7 x 21 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. Fig. 2 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Notebook about Graphism, 1985–6 (extract), 29.7 x 21 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. Narratives of Hirschhorn’s early career typically start with the Grapus episode as a near-mythic point of origin from which his career as an artist was promptly launched. In reality, a period of roughly five years ensued, during which a mixture of certainty and doubt – certainty about the strength of his work and uncertainty about how to position it – put in motion the set of developments I analyse here. Along with Buchloh, Sebastian Egenhofer is among the few scholars who have attended to Hirschhorn’s output of this period.10 I am convinced, as Egenhofer is, that 1994 constitutes a line of demarcation in Hirschhorn’s practice, after which the strategies of the late 1980s and early 1990s rapidly evolve into the explosive, engulfing, image- and text-saturated environments for which he is increasingly known. This later work, often made for institutional settings, ‘can no longer be combined into a unified (abstract) form as in the early works which could call on the ground of non-art as the place of their articulation, their giving of form’.11 For Egenhofer, the success of Hirschhorn’s work among curators and collectors beginning in 1994 distanced him from the ground of non-art and necessitated a recalibration of his approach to it.12 This is undoubtedly true, as Hirschhorn’s retrospective exhibition at the Jeu de Paume that year signalled the end of the obscurity that had conditioned the earlier work. Yet my strong sense is that 1994 also marked a moment of resolution to an internal dilemma that pertained to the realisation of Hirschhorn’s most profound ambitions. At stake in this dilemma was the framework under which he might adopt ‘radical responsibility’ for his work as the means to address a non-exclusive public.13 In this reading, non-art is not only the realm of the real, as Egenhofer would have it, but also art’s other in Hirschhorn’s conception at the time, namely graphic design. Consider a letter of March 1986, in which Hirschhorn ruminated upon his failure to obtain a grant from the Swiss government to support his work. He writes, ‘But certainly I was not decisive enough with regard to my commitment to art, on the one hand, and graphic design, on the other. I just wanted one to find “art”’. The Eidgenössisches Kunststipendium [Swiss Federal Art Prize] offered applied art and fine art grants in alternating years, and this bureaucratic differentiation pierced to the heart of the artist’s internal struggle: ‘I wanted to ride two horses at once’. Taking his rejection as a spur, Hirschhorn declares, ‘No disappointment, but self-criticism and reflection above all: How can I present my work unequivocally as Gestaltungs-recherchen [inquiries into form-creation] and thus answer clearly these questions about art or not’.14 Hirschhorn’s slowness to abandon graphic design can be ascribed to reasons ideological, historical, and institutional. Thierry de Duve characterises the irresolvable contradiction at the root of the Kunstgewerbeschule – the German craft school model on which the Bauhaus was founded and from which Hirschhorn’s education was derived: Throughout the length of their common modernist history, architects, even painters, and especially designers, vehemently denied that they were artists at the same time that they demanded for themselves the highest prerogatives of art: to create something new, to found a new language, to build a new culture, to anchor the social contract in a judgment of taste generalised to the whole of the constructed environment. From coffee spoons to urbanism and landscaping, the Gestaltung would diffuse through the whole of society artistic attitudes and requirements, even as the specific trade and identity of the artist would have to disappear.15 The Gestalter [conceiver of forms] would lay claim to the world-making purview of the artist-artisan, but eschew the latter’s traditional skills. Correspondingly, Hirschhorn’s equivocation resulted from a sense of art as ‘too navel-gazing or too technical’ – ‘too formalistic’. By contrast, he recalls, ‘My goal was clear. I was attracted to the use-value of the graphic designer’s work’.16 Biased though it was, Hirschhorn’s conception of art as wholly consumed with the elaboration of its own language, to the detriment of its capacity to engage the world, constituted a conceptual hurdle for Hirschhorn and, more importantly, an artistic problem to be worked through. Beginning in 1984, and with a decisive turn around 1987, Hirschhorn tackled the question of how to make art in terms commensurate with his conception of what it meant to ‘confront an audience directly with my work’.17 This necessitated an eschewal of the traditional materials and expressive tools of artmaking. It also entailed reckoning with the signal moments of utopian, modernist and avant-garde abstraction to which he felt himself aligned, yet which he could not simply reproduce. Diagrammatic and Deductive (1984–1986) In December 1986, Alex Jordan offered Hirschhorn the inaugural exhibition at Bar Floréal, a non-commercial gallery in Belleville, a working-class neighbourhood of Paris.18 Drawn from roughly three years of production, the exhibited Neocolors – as Hirschhorn terms them, referring to their primary medium, a type of wax-based oil pastel manufactured by Caran d’Ache – combined saturated colour and collage in simple yet powerful compositions. As is his habit, Hirschhorn interrogated the terms of his exhibition after the fact, ‘[Have] I, as a graphic designer exhibiting self-commissioned original works, made pictures that are not “Tableaux”?’19 The question arose from the contradiction at the heart of Hirschhorn’s project of ‘graphic design for myself’ – a contradiction made acute by having offered up the originals for contemplation. Art or not? In late 1986, the answer remained emphatically in favour of the latter. Hirschhorn’s invocation of the tableau stood for everything to which his small, paper-thin, made-to-be-reproduced collages opposed. It stood for Painting.20 Hirschhorn attempted to foreclose any understanding of his works as privileged objects of aesthetic delectation first by multiplying the works on view, and second by disposing them in irregular configurations on the wall. (Refined and intensified, these strategies have become a hallmark of Hirschhorn’s displays.) Though relatively small in number by comparison to the sheer quantity of works that would define his accrochages within a few years, a minimum of fifty works can be counted in the extant photographs of the Bar Floréal exhibition. Taped directly to the wall, some of the drawings were grouped in tight grids, others were clustered, and still others were hung singly. Near the window were suspended four epistolary-cum-artist books that Hirschhorn exchanged with Daniele Buetti, his close friend from the Kunstgewerbeschule.21 In this rather intuitive manner, Hirschhorn utilised nearly the full height and breadth of the gallery walls. Yet it was perhaps in the logic of the Neocolors themselves, rather than through any exhibition strategy, that Hirschhorn most strenuously and effectively worked against the language of the tableau. After all, while the irregular hanging might have denied the singleness of the tableau, it may also have produced an unintended ‘arty’ effect. With overall dimensions conforming to DIN standard paper sizes A4 and A3, the Neocolors referenced the workaday realm of memos and invoices, schoolwork and personal letters, fliers and newsletters – in short, the realm of documents. Hans Rudolf Bosshard, long-time teacher at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich, advises in one of his typographical textbooks, ‘The sizes of the DIN series should be used where mechanical workflows and standardized equipment demand them, as in business stationery or publicity and information printing of all kinds’.22 Indeed, the choice of format was of great significance in Hirschhorn’s then ongoing efforts to find an audience for his ‘self-commissioned’ works of graphic design. Each of the Neocolors was made to be reproduced on a simple photocopier. The original was not privileged as such. In this way, Hirschhorn’s Neocolors exploited xerography to ‘[blur] the boundary between art making, its context, and its publicity’, as Kate Eichhorn argues regarding the use of this technology in the formation of counterpublic cultures.23 Hirschhorn deployed Neocolors in self-published calendars produced for sale, for instance, or as the basis for motifs in freelance projects.24 Although shown on the wall at Bar Floréal, the Neocolors are oriented to the drafting table (where the oil pastel bore down on the sheet), the ream of paper, the photocopier’s scan glass, and the periodical on the counter.25 The last of these was both a source of the Neocolors’ collage materials and their intended destination. The horizontality of the Neocolors, then, relates to the non-art ‘sphere[s] of human activity’ from whence El Lissitzky’s Prouns and typographical innovations derive.26 In Yve-Alain Bois’s masterful analysis of the Prouns, Lissitzky effected a paradigm shift from the verticality of the picture (or tableau) to the horizontality of the document via axonometric projection. Lissitzky mobilised the perceptual instabilities between protention and retention resulting from this means of parallel projection.27 Just as Lissitzky turned to a mode of rendering favoured by engineers and architects in order to defeat the primacy of the vertical picture, Hirschhorn took up the diagram, albeit in its decidedly rudimentary guises. In the Neocolors, the diagram is manifest in the explicit form of a circuit or plan. Above the word EXIL appears a crude map, in which the formal elements of circle, square, and line double as topographic symbols (Fig. 3). Yet, if geopolitical space is conjured – after all, Hirschhorn felt acutely in these years the ramifications of self-imposed ‘exile’ from his native Switzerland – so is the literal space of the page, in which the primary-coloured forms, laid out in rows and columns, occupy different positions in succession. A more complex instance of the diagrammatic can be found in the Neocolor whose four corners are stamped with the words (clockwise from upper left), Kunst, Nein, Krieg, Ja (Fig. 4). A repudiation of art and an affirmation of war – or the opposite? The answer depends upon the direction of reading. The words shunt the gaze, the movements of which are made self-conscious. In concert with the text, which insists upon the page as flat surface across which one reads, the snarl of linear elements impedes access to any projective space. This obstruction is thematically coherent with the collage element, which shows a United States Army missile positioned in a mountainous winter landscape. The bare, spindly trees rhyme with the bristling lines. (What read as the cartographic symbol for ‘railroad’ – a line intersected with dashes – in the aforementioned drawing now stands for barbed wire.) The missile constitutes the lower-left arm of a central X that emerges from the tangle. The X schema directs our reading along diagonals, figuring Kunst/Krieg as a binary analogous to ja/nein. Fig. 3 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Untitled (Early Collage), 1986, wax oil pastel, 29.7 x 21 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. Fig. 3 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Untitled (Early Collage), 1986, wax oil pastel, 29.7 x 21 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. Fig. 4 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Untitled (Early Collage), 1986, print and wax oil pastel, 29.7 x 21 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. Fig. 4 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Untitled (Early Collage), 1986, print and wax oil pastel, 29.7 x 21 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. If Lissitzky served as the revolutionary–utopian model in Hirschhorn’s thinking, Marcel Duchamp was the paragon of playful–diversionary tactics. Small and unassuming, Duchamp’s 1911 painting Coffee Mill shows a cross-section of the grinding apparatus as well as successive positions of the hand crank, complete with an arrow specifying clockwise motion. He reflects upon the introduction of the ideogram, ‘The arrow was an innovation that pleases me a lot – the diagrammatic aspect was interesting … It was a sort of loophole’. He elaborates, ‘It was there I began to think I could avoid all contact with traditional pictorial painting …’28. Hirschhorn’s turn to the diagrammatic can be understood similarly.29 It offered a way of organising line and form in ways that signalled unmistakably his disidentification with the rarefied language of the tableau and his affinity with the workaday map, chart, and equation. But whereas Duchamp’s formulation emphasises evasion, more affirmative conceptions of the diagram may also be found. So, Sybille Krämer, in her studies of diagrammatology, suggests, Point, line, and plane constitute the elementary repertoire of graphematics. They produce a two-dimensional configurative space that can be implemented as a space for the movements of thought. Cognition is oriented by thinking on paper. Diagrammatic inscriptions serve not only to represent and communicate epistemic states of affairs, but also to produce and explain them.30 Hirschhorn’s dispositions of formal elements posit, speculate, and ponder connections. ‘Thinking on paper’ functions as both gerund and present participle. However apposite, Krämer’s formulations diverge from Hirschhorn’s diagrams on one score: the latter rarely explain or provide justification. The function of the diagram to clarify is eclipsed by Hirschhorn’s repeated visual and textual assertions of noncomputation, incomprehension. Speculative, or even specious at times, the links he delineates yet bear the urge to communicate. Hirschhorn’s diagrams address the viewer–reader directly, contradicting the organic wholeness of the tableau. In this way, Hirschhorn’s diagrams hover in the continuum between ‘blueprints for action’ (Bois on Lissitzky) and forms of ‘spatio-temporal quantification, surveillance, and registration’ (Buchloh on Duchamp).31 It is hardly insignificant that exchanges of thought (and feeling) had been a central preoccupation in Hirschhorn’s work from even before the Neocolors. In his remarkably potent graphite-and-collage works from 1983–1984, the motifs of mutant and mutilated crania abounded. Heads without bodies, no less animated for their severed states, were presented on boards-cum-pillories (Fig. 5); bodies sprouted bifurcated forms that seem construction materials invested with threatening vitality (Fig. 6); crude apparatuses fastened to crania simultaneously enhanced and constricted, connected individuals and held them apart. Hirschhorn’s composite figures had Dada forebears, but in contrast to the mechanomorph’s intricately fitted parts, they featured the blockhead’s obduracy. As the seat of thought, identity, speech, and sight, the head was something that one might trip over, that one could not see past. Fig. 5 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Untitled (Drawing), 1983–4, print and pencil, 21 x 29.7 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. Fig. 5 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Untitled (Drawing), 1983–4, print and pencil, 21 x 29.7 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. Fig. 6 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Untitled (Drawing), 1983–4, print and pencil, 29.7 x 21 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. Fig. 6 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Untitled (Drawing), 1983–4, print and pencil, 29.7 x 21 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. While the extreme augmentation of the head persisted as a motif in the Neocolors, ‘the movement of thought’ was no longer simply illustrated but enacted through the diagram and, relatedly, the equation. Basic mathematical concepts introduced in primary school, 1 + 1 = 2 and 1x1 = 1, were iterated in his drawings to schematise elusive and intractable relationships between people, entities, and phenomena.32 (This same impulse governs Hirschhorn’s much later work Cavemanman (2002), whose inhabitant attempts to make sense of the premise ‘1 man = 1 man’.) ‘The calculation doesn’t work out’, he muses on the topic of romantic entanglements, ‘1 times 1 equals 1, but 1 plus 1 equals 2. And both signs are primarily still crosses!’33 Hirschhorn’s observation regarding multiplication and addition symbols is typical of his diagrammatic thinking. The equal-armed cross, a symmetrical sign without top or bottom – without hierarchy – was repeatedly rotated, reflected, and translated in the Neocolors. A forty-five degree turn of + yielded X. Such geometric transformations emphasised the arbitrariness and instability of signs. In the largest register of a Neocolor, two decapitated giraffes stride forward (Fig. 7). Their heads have been displaced to stacked primary-coloured compartments to the right. Demarcating opposed diagonals against monochrome grounds, the orientation of the heads is collated and schematised as an X in the bottommost cell. Serving little explanatory function, 1 + 1 = 2 and 1x1 = 1 are stamped below the giraffe bodies. Faintly visible beneath the equations is the phrase, ‘seule la tête n’existe pas’. Everything but the head (i.e. intellect), indeed – reason finds no point of entry. Fig. 7 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Untitled (Early Collage), 1984, prints, wax oil pastel, and stamped lettering, 21 x 29.7 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. Fig. 7 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Untitled (Early Collage), 1984, prints, wax oil pastel, and stamped lettering, 21 x 29.7 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. Of all the various manifestations of the diagrammatic in the Neocolors, the one with the greatest implications for his work in the next years, especially in its efforts to defeat the tableau – related to the mapping of the support itself. In a work of 1984, a full-page reproduction of Charles Moore’s documentary photograph of the violent police response to the 1963 civil rights protests in Birmingham, Alabama, occupies the left side of a diptych (Fig. 8). (Moore’s sequence of images appears repeatedly in Andy Warhol’s Race Riot series, of course, where it is set against monochrome expanses. Given Hirschhorn’s admiration for Warhol, this connection is hardly incidental.34) Hirschhorn altered the image with a slash of red Neocolor that intersects the foreground officer’s truncheon at a right angle. The resulting X destabilises the photograph, drawing one of its components out of pictorial depth, up toward the surface where the smear of oil pastel evidently sits. Hirschhorn’s intervention renders a thing a sign – an X: a mark of negation or a mark of position. In this case, X marks the spot just left of centre. In a less literal way, it marks a pivotal moment in American history that remains painfully resonant. In the field of red that occupies the right-hand side, the X-motif is repeated, though now bodied forth, substantial and dense. Faint black marks at the bottommost register are sufficient to transform the red field into a ground on which something might rest. In a reversal of its partner image, the sign is rendered a thing, albeit a dynamic (or unstable) one: each arm of the X is shown in parallel projection, but from a different direction, such that the whole is insistently torqued. Fig. 8 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Untitled (Early Collage), 1984, print and wax oil pastel, 21 x 29.7 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. Fig. 8 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Untitled (Early Collage), 1984, print and wax oil pastel, 21 x 29.7 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. The plasticity of the X on the right is remarkable, not least because it coexists with another quality, that of a deductive structure. So named by Michael Fried, this mode of noncomposition involves ‘the finding of a self-aware and strictly logical relation between the painted image and the framing edge’.35 The X on the right very nearly spans the A5 sheet, corner to corner. Yet there is something fundamentally contradictory about combining the illusion of plasticity with a structure that maps (and therefore asserts) the flatness of the support. This contradiction must have struck Hirschhorn as well. In any case, the plastic form largely fell away in the next years even as deductive structures (the grid, especially) became ever more prominent. Sometimes, the deductive structure exploited the pre-existing diagonals of a found image, as the flagpole in Joe Rosenthal’s Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima (1945) or the periscope markings through which we see the sinking of the Japanese destroyer Yamazake (1942). Just as often, the structures were marked on the found image or support with little evident regard for what lay underneath. In such instances objecthood trumped image. One might identify several consequences of Hirschhorn’s Gestaltungs-recherchen of 1984 to 1986. As evident in these works, Hirschhorn’s penchant, in his earlier collages, to excise figures from their contexts and to incorporate them into striking compositions of graphite or oil pastel, was increasingly relinquished in favour of maintaining the entire image (inevitably rectangular) or the whole page. Correspondingly, Hirschhorn deemphasised drawing as a means of achieving plastic form. (In his future work, the third dimension would no longer be wrested from the two-dimensional surface through an accumulation of marks, but through physical accretion.) Any ‘drawing’, then, was limited to the offhand execution of flat, elementary forms such as the equilateral cross, the X, the circle, the solid square and rectangle (with the minus sign and the equal sign as iterations of the rectangle). Sometimes, these forms were put into play in pastiches of Malevich’s aerial Suprematist paintings, the decorative tendency of which became pronounced (Fig. 9). Occupying the white space between images of an atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud and a kitten, primary-coloured circles – analogised to the balls of yarn tantalising the young cat – are evidently closer to kitsch than cataclysm. More significantly, for the purposes of my argument, we observe in Hirschhorn’s division or reiteration of the rectangular surface the increasing prominence of the aforementioned deductive composition. Hirschhorn favoured the simplest division of the page – inscribing its horizontal or vertical midpoints, its corner-to-corner diagonals. Fig. 9 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Untitled (Early Collage), 1984, prints and wax oil pastel, 21 x 29.7 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. Fig. 9 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Untitled (Early Collage), 1984, prints and wax oil pastel, 21 x 29.7 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. Lest one think the constraining of the drawn mark greatly contracts the possibilities of art to produce meaning, one need only consider the capacity of these elementary forms to signify. In their distinct ways, artists from Malevich to Joseph Beuys explored the signifying potential of such basic emblems as the equilateral cross. The spiritual dimension that each exploited was greatly reduced in Hirschhorn’s work, not least because he undercut the iconic status of the cross by casually and continuously manipulating it. In Hirschhorn’s deductive compositions, the plus sign is the Greek cross and the symbol of Switzerland. Turned forty-five degrees, it becomes the cross of St. Andrew. Perpendicular extensions added to each arm, the X forms the basis for the Swastika. More simply, it is the X that alternately divides and negates or multiplies and affirms, embodying thereby what one scholar of ideograms has termed ‘the law of polarity of meaning of elementary graphs’.36 ‘The logic of the deductive structure is … inseparable from the logic of the sign’, Rosalind Krauss writes in relation to the early stripe paintings of Frank Stella, which inscribe the Cross even as they purport only to reiterate the support. ‘The real achievement of these paintings is to have fully immersed themselves in meaning, but to have made meaning itself a function of surface – of the external, the public, or a space that is no way a signifier of the a priori, or the privacy of intention’.37 Consider the consonance of Krauss’s assessment of deductive structures with Brian Rotman’s conclusions regarding mathematical diagrams – a consonance brought about by semiotic approaches to their respective objects of study: When ‘mathematical writing is seen not as secondary and posterior to a privately engendered intuition’ one is able to perceive that it is always ‘already intersubjective and public’.38 Perhaps now Hirschhorn’s elucidation of his Altars and Monuments by way of the plan and the four corners of a sheet of paper is sufficiently illuminated: Hirschhorn turns toward the diagrammatic for its essential publicness, which displaces meaning from the artist–subject to an external language that is either manifest (‘a function of surface’) or given (a matter of ‘rules, conventions, dictates, protocols, and such’39). One might frame this as a search for motivation, recalling once again key concepts in the development of abstraction.40 Of course, abstract signs were not the only public and external elements brought to bear in Hirschhorn’s works. Differently public are the images he appropriated from the mass media. Whether photo-documentation of events of world-historical import or commercial advertisements, these images reference and derive from a common culture. Abstract signs and the products of mass media do not sit easily with one another, however, and sometimes it seems that their disparateness is held in check by sheer force of the deductive structures that bind them to the page itself. Search for New Forms (1987–1989) Taking a cue from the turning of a new year, Hirschhorn laid down for himself a set of artistic and ethical guiding principles. It’s all about this: To search for new forms To be responsible for content To act on the environment What it’s not about: Formalism Decoration Illustration    1.1.198741 These notes appear in the first of six Cahiers [Notebooks] that Hirschhorn created over the next months. Crudely bound by adhering pages one to the next, the Cahiers are unique objects, ungainly and emphatically material. Their heavily cockled pages are laden with black ink, Neocolor, printed matter, and tape. As the name suggests, the Cahiers functioned as exercise books – repositories of daily thoughts, artistic experiments, conceptual workings-through. Many of the Neocolors’ tropes and concerns are distilled in them, now bound to the sequential structure of the book. Collage elements interject into their pages the world’s cruelties, trivialities, and achievements. The diagrammatic prevails, as do deductive structures. Schematised by the opposed + and –, binary terms are repeatedly inscribed in the Cahiers: over and under, before and after, poor and rich, power and powerless, appearance and reality, past and present, form and content. Specific motifs developed in the Neocolors appear, reworked. The note of New Year’s Day, for instance, is overlaid on a colour facsimile of the ‘map’ of squares and circles previously discussed (excluding now the original legend). One tracks through these rough-and-ready artist’s books Hirschhorn’s overt engagement with art: the burden of its tradition (‘Future+Past: Let Picasso die now’), its relation to politics (‘In war art is not important. Why?’ and, correspondingly, ‘In art war is not important. Why?’), the value of kitsch (‘Kitsch for life’), the power of the image (‘Simplicity, modesty, sincerity’) – and these are just examples gleaned from the inscriptions. The non-verbal claims, propositions, investigations, and impulses registered in the Cahiers are just as articulate, perhaps even more so. This essay cannot accommodate an in-depth discussion of the Cahiers, which could sustain a scholarly article of their own. My intention, then, is to isolate moments in the Cahiers that illuminate the terms of Hirschhorn’s passage from ‘not art’ to ‘art’. A retail circular for sofa covers appears on the left-hand side of a page-opening in Cahier No. 6 (Fig. 10). Lengths of beige masking tape simultaneously affix and frame the advert. Four different lace or quilted coverings are shown, one in each quadrant of the square image area. On the facing page, masking tape is again deployed, this time to form an equal-armed cross that isolates and exaggerates the white space buffering the images in the advert. In the movement from left-hand page to right, ground and figure are reversed, negative space becomes positive space. The inconsequential is made emblematic: the cross made of masking tape spans a square of red Neocolor, bodying forth the Swiss national flag. On the level of content, Hirschhorn bitingly recasts Swiss neutrality and scrupulousness as a mixture of blitheness and banality. (All this concern for the state of its couches!) On another (formal) level, Hirschhorn made perspicuous the intersection of deductive structure and the typographic grid in all his work of this period. In other words, Hirschhorn’s partitioning of the page or sheet asks to be read in relation to principles of graphic design layout, and specifically as a travesty of the grid system that defines the Swiss International Typographic Style. Fig. 10 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Cahier No. 6, 1987 (extract), print, tape, ink, and wax oil pastel, 29.7 x 42 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. Fig. 10 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Cahier No. 6, 1987 (extract), print, tape, ink, and wax oil pastel, 29.7 x 42 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. Josef Müller-Brockmann, first a student of the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich in the early 1930s and then an instructor there in the late 1950s, states simply, ‘The grid divides a two-dimensional plane into smaller fields or a three-dimensional space into smaller compartments’.42 Thus an A4-page, partitioned into 8, 20, or 32 grid fields, offers a vast number of solutions to the lucid and rhythmic arrangement of image and text. Müller-Brockmann can be said to have popularised the modular mode with publications like Gestaltungsprobleme des Grafikers [The Graphic Artist and His Design Problems], published in 1961, and Rastersysteme für die visuelle Gestaltung [Grid Systems in Graphic Design], published in 1981.43 Influenced by constructivist thinking, and El Lissitzky in particular, Müller-Brockmann cast the grid system in terms of the ‘laws of universal validity’ and granted good design a consequential role in the construction of society: ‘Design which is objective, committed to the common weal, well composed and refined, constitutes the basis of democratic behaviour’.44 If he perceived any potential contradiction between this ideal and the corporate and commercial interests that his Rastersysteme were also meant to serve, his texts do not let on.45 It is little surprise that Hirschhorn reflects, ‘Our training [at the Kunstgewerbeschule] positioned us against the advertising industry, yet our teachers were great Swiss-German graphic designers who had worked in advertising. None of my fellow students wanted to work in advertising, but everybody knew that 95% of job opportunities were in this field’.46 Hirschhorn did not respond to Müller-Brockmann per se, but to the contradictions embedded in his educational formation, on the one hand, and, on the other hand, to the ‘reheated 1950s Swiss graphic design’ that prevailed even in the mid-1980s.47 Hirschhorn took up the grid so insistently because it embodied both that discipline’s highest aims (as ‘the basis of democratic behaviour’) and its mundane utility (as the ordering principle for retail circulars, for example). As Pamela Lee writes, Hirschhorn makes plain ‘the ways in which [the graphic sign], the carrier of radically different types of information, can be mobilised to temporally specific purposes as the usual bait and switch of co-optation sets in’.48 The grid is also, crucially, a paradigm of modernist abstraction that ‘declares the space of art to be at once autonomous and autotelic’, as Krauss writes in an influential essay.49 In 1987, at the cusp of Hirschhorn’s decisive move into the field of art, the grid offered itself as an exceedingly efficient motif through which to take stock, settle accounts, and chart the future. His search for new forms – as outlined in his note of New Year’s Day – turned out to involve (perhaps not unexpectedly) a confrontation with one of the most persistent and stubborn forms of modernist abstraction, the history of which overlaps with that of modernist graphic design.50 It is also in the sixth and final volume of the Cahiers that Hirschhorn emphatically disrupted the planarity of the page by pasting in small carpet samples (Fig. 11). Could Lissitzky have imagined this when he called for the surpassing of typography’s topography – ‘The printed sheet, the everlastingness of the book, must be transcended’?51 The monochromatic and square swatches continued to function as (and travesty) abstract compositional elements. At the same time, the breaching of two-dimensions, even by a few millimetres of pile, and the introduction of found objects were significant enough to exceed the boundaries of graphic design (understood as the arrangement of image and text across a two-dimensional surface). Art or not? In the course of producing the Cahiers, Hirschhorn finally came out in favour of the former. Fig. 11 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Cahier No. 6, 1987 (extract), carpet samples, tape, 29.7 x 42 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. Fig. 11 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Cahier No. 6, 1987 (extract), carpet samples, tape, 29.7 x 42 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. Then Hirschhorn took a pivotal step: he diversified his supports. At some point in 1987, Hirschhorn’s exclusive use of DIN formats, as well as the format of the bound book, gave way to the sheer diversity of found scraps of cardboard. I would argue that when he ceased to privilege the standardised sheets (at least for the present), Hirschhorn severed a crucial connection to graphic design practice and the ideals that he had attached to it. Hirschhorn’s rationale for using the A4 and A3 formats had always been their ease of reproduction and distribution. Their practical applications formed the basis of their use-value and thus, for Hirschhorn, their political efficacy. But one should not mistake his move away from DIN standards as a surrender of the political aspirations of his practice, for Hirschhorn shifted the balance of his attentions from the logic of production to the logic of consumption. The cardboard remnants that now formed his non-neutral supports were ubiquitous reminders of capitalist overproduction, just as Hirschhorn’s photographic collage elements were the traces of overproduction in the information sphere. Once the support was materialised as a thing, it also ceased to function as a constraint: neither the edges nor the surface needed to be preserved. In several works of 1987, the closed rectangle is interrupted by physical extensions. In Untitled (Early Work), a hastily painted black rectangle anchors three horizontal registers (Fig. 12). Two identical images of cows extend upward from the left and right margins, leaving a gap between them. The lower register is divided into three vertical sections. At centre is an image of British military personnel transporting a hooded prisoner during the Falklands War of 1982. Square scouring pads flank the photograph. A plus and a minus sign have been excised from the left and right, respectively, and each cut-out has been filled in with black paint. Everything about this work perplexes, from its irregular contours to its incompatible contents. The interruption of the edge found its corollary in the building up from the surface. In 1988, Hirschhorn produced a large number of Eponge [Sponge] works, which featured colourful kitchen sponges, scouring pads, foam balls, and plastic flower frogs. These miscellaneous household items functioned as readymade abstract elements – squares and circles – that obviated the question of pure form. Fig. 12 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Untitled (Early Work), 1987, prints, sponges, tape, and ink, 74 x 80 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. Fig. 12 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Untitled (Early Work), 1987, prints, sponges, tape, and ink, 74 x 80 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. These experiments clearly tested the capacity of the support to withstand trespass. Put differently, they asked what the artwork is able to accommodate. Hirschhorn approached this question rather literally in his series of Recipients [Containers] of 1989, which often take the form of rounded extensions from one or more edges of the support that are filled in with felt-tipped marker. (When the bottom edge is augmented, the resulting shape is strongly reminiscent of coats of arms, a connection made explicit in related works on paper that feature the shield of the Swiss Confederation.) A single example makes the question of content acute. Hundreds of corpses stretch out before the camera’s gaze in a photograph taken during the liberation of the Mittelbau-Dora concentration camp in April 1945 (Fig. 13). If Hirschhorn has more recently denounced ‘iconism’ – the media’s reduction of events to a single, emblematic image – his earlier use of famous photographs from Mittelbau-Dora, Iwo Jima, and Birmingham, Alabama, suggests a short-circuiting of the mechanisms dividing the iconic from the generic.52 Then as now, he identifies neither the sources nor the contents of his found images. Hirschhorn’s ink-filled, semi-circular addition below Recipient, 1989, begs aesthetic-ethical questions: can a work of art encompass this harrowing content, what happens when the work of art generalises the historically specific? Fig. 13 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Recipient, 1989, prints and felt-tipped marker, 25 x 20 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. Fig. 13 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Recipient, 1989, prints and felt-tipped marker, 25 x 20 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. Having hewn to standard supports for so long, Hirschhorn must have regarded his newfound freedom with some bewilderment. If so, he answered with energy: to search for new forms, to be responsible for content. Occupy Painting (1989–1990) By 1990 Hirschhorn’s resolve in favour of artistic practice coincided with the greater resolution of the works themselves. For the next two years, he produced a large number of works, some of which he has subsequently organised into series: Lignes [Lines], Courbes [Curves], Gribouillages [Scribblings], Coins [Corners], Cadres [Frames], and Pleins [Fulls].53 All of these works were produced using found supports – salvaged fragments of particle board, jagged cardboard remnants, tear sheets from magazines and circulars – embellished with adhesive tapes, collage elements, and felt-tipped markers. Even India ink and Neocolor, with their fine art associations, were abandoned. In this next phase, Hirschhorn took head-on some of modernist abstraction’s most consequential developments, namely the elaboration of non-hierarchical compositions and the assertion of objecthood. But he remade them in his own fashion, repeatedly turning to pre-existing forms to generate the terms for an abstraction that remained tethered to the quotidian. Hirschhorn describes his efforts in this next phase in terms of ‘establish[ing] a kind of a vocabulary for the occupation of a given support’.54 His choice of the word ‘occupation’ seems pointed, for it abjures the relational arrangement of pictorial elements in favour of a taking up of space that may be matter-of-fact or forcible. The resulting works are exercises in non-composition, in that they sought their motivation and validity outside the individual subject. The Lignes began as exercises in negation. Hirschhorn appropriated printed matter and blacked out passages of text, sometimes more and sometimes less completely, using the broad edge of a chisel-tip marker. The redactions quickly became autonomous lines on blank supports (Fig. 14). As such, they were clearly related to the use of placeholders for text when mocking up graphic design layouts. Signifiers of content – either suppressed or hypothetical – the lines were also boldly graphic elements.55 As if segmented line graphs with no frames of reference, the Courbes featured single lines that rose and fell as they spanned the support. Again, the diagram, specifically the operational diagram, offered itself as an alternative to the tableau. (The Courbes mimicked economic graphs rather than ECGs – for Hirschhorn, culture is of interest, not nature.) When the ‘hand’ returned, it was an anonymous one. The looping skeins of the Gribouillages seemed to emanate from an idle and distracted mind. Meandering marks made without intention, they expressed nothing of what Howard Singerman describes as drawing’s ‘narrative of the time of artistic decision making, of pauses, hesitations, and possibilities not chosen’.56 Likened by Hirschhorn to the process of trying out a pen, neither did this kind of automatic drawing make claims to tap the artist’s psyche à la surrealism. Fig. 14 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Lignes, 1990 (Series of 4), paper and felt-tipped marker, 62 x 86 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. Fig. 14 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Lignes, 1990 (Series of 4), paper and felt-tipped marker, 62 x 86 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. Whereas the Lignes, Courbes, and Gribouillages tackled line, other works confronted the question of the figure by isolating a single element within a photographic reproduction – a vehicle, an animal, a plant, etc. Hirschhorn achieved this by using opaque tape to either mask out the remainder of the image or to tightly circumscribe the figure (Fig. 15). And just as he liberated the Lignes from underlying text, Hirschhorn frequently removed the photographic component, so that what remained was a jerky contour wholly inarticulate about its previous contents. Figure was figured as absence. Buchloh compellingly describes the works of this period as ‘evacuated abstractions’. What has been emptied out is abstraction’s heroic potential: ‘Once it was cut off from its spiritual and utopian promises, once it had to see its musical chords voided, to lose its sinuous or architectural correspondences, it would inevitably end up as vacuous’.57 In all of these works, line was rid of its association with the distinctive movement of the wrist so prized in drawing. Black, red, blue, and green felt-tipped markers were deployed so as to avoid the modulations, the swells and narrowings, that convey individual style. Most drastically, the hand-rendered line was replaced by lengths of packing or electrical tape, which declared their mechanical origin and functional use. Expressive colour, too, was nullified, restricted to matters of availability and the demands attending to manufacturing and marketing. Fig. 15 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Untitled, 1991, print and tape, 29.7 x 21 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. Fig. 15 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Untitled, 1991, print and tape, 29.7 x 21 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. The Coins, Cadres, and Pleins were concerned with surface and objecthood rather than with mark making. The Coins occupied or circumvented one or more corners of the support. The Cadres delineated the four edges of the support, and sometimes involved its further division into halves or quadrants. Often, they reinscribed actual frames within the printed matter. The fullness indicated by the title Plein was variously affected: by the modular grid, by the monochrome expanse, by the non-hierarchical distribution of scribbled marks. If the expressive dimension of art had been evacuated from these works, as in the related series, so too had the stringency of the deductive structure. Hirschhorn’s inexact partitioning of the support was flagrant and demonstrative. In the Cadres and Pleins the supposedly autotelic grid was open, not to spirit (as Mondrian or Malevich envisioned it), but to utter heterogeneity and mundanity. The forty components in Plein of 1990 presented an overview of the grid as a functional matrix (Fig. 16). The grid’s immutable verticals and horizontals became the perpends and beds of brickwork, the muntins of a window, and, most significantly, given Hirschhorn’s training, the margins of a page, the gutters and flowlines of a graphic design grid, the compositional guidelines according to which a ‘good’ photograph might be composed. Hirschhorn intended Plein to be exhibited on a horizontal surface, and thus viewed from all directions. Once again, echoes of Lissitzky’s disorientation of the object (and viewer) may be detected.58 Fig. 16 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Plein, 1990 (Studio view – Series of 40), prints, paper, cardboard, tape, and felt-tipped marker, 160 x 250 cm. Courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, France. Fig. 16 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Plein, 1990 (Studio view – Series of 40), prints, paper, cardboard, tape, and felt-tipped marker, 160 x 250 cm. Courtesy Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris, France. The objective in all these works was to produce a work of art without recourse to drawing or painting, without involving any of the considerations associated with composition. In his illuminating account of the project of noncomposition in painting around 1970, Howard Singerman observes, ‘The philosophical program of composition is threatened early on, perhaps from the outset by “surface design”, by the corruption of utopia by usefulness, and soon by commerce’.59 In other words, composition, understood as the relational placement of formal elements in response to ‘inner necessity’, is haunted by utility and external demands. In his determination to produce works that were not tableaux, Hirschhorn repeatedly materialised this threat through the diagrammatic, to which he turns precisely because already given and external to himself. The grid system contravened the myth of the autotelic arrangement of verticals and horizontals. (Even the noble, world-making aspirations that motivated avant-garde graphic design of the 1920s coexisted with its most unimaginative and instrumental uses.) It is worth noting, however, that Hirschhorn directed the menace in the other direction as well. Abstraction vitiated functionality: the operational line graph was unmoored from its coordinate system, the blind text was removed from the design workflow, the photograph was detached from the informational matrix. The governing logics of the various series were not mutually exclusive: Gribouillages could also be Coins, Cadres or Gribouillages could also be Pleins, etc. Recall that they were not conceived as discrete series but developed concurrently. They were all tactics for Hirschhorn’s ‘occupation’ of the space of painting. If the term readily suggests an act of aggression, it can also describe a form of protest or, more simply, a condition of inhabitation. Perhaps now Hirschhorn could finally be at home in art. Composition by Other Means (1992–1994) I have heard Hirschhorn’s works of the early 1990s dismissed by an important curator as ‘a dime a dozen’. The judgment pertains to the copiousness of these works, I gather, and something of their quality. Certainly, Hirschhorn made them in large numbers and then grouped them for exhibition and sale in such a way as to emphasise quantity. But in employing a monetary idiom, the speaker captures an important dimension of the next series of works, Fifty-Fifty (1993) and Moins (1993), in particular. Having claimed his entry to the history of art by reckoning with the terms of modernist abstraction, Hirschhorn explicitly invested his works with extra-aesthetic, political, and economic concepts. Both Fifty-Fifty and Moins were governed by rudimentary non-compositional formulas – in the former, half the surface is covered by a collage element, in the latter, less than half. ‘I think more is always more’, Hirschhorn avows. ‘And less is always less. More money is more money. Less success is less success. More unemployed are more. Fewer factories are fewer. I think entirely in terms of economics. That’s why I’m interested in this concept: more is more, as an arithmetical fact, and as a political fact’.60 The principle ‘less is less, more is more’ is also a direct refutation of the modernist design edict, ‘less is more’. Fifty-Fifty expressed the ideal of total equality or the stalemate presented by a 50–50 vote in the democratic process. If the deductive structure has often served to assert the work of art as a self-contained whole, the partitioning of the surfaces in Fifty-Fifty and Moins was emphatically outward looking. Composition became a means to reflect upon the workings of democracy or to adopt positions regarding the allocation of resources. In 1987 – a year of feverish experimentation, as it turns out – Hirschhorn iterated (at least twice) an ink drawing that read, ‘Auriez-vous 1F ou 2 pour manger [Do you have 1 franc or 2 for food]’, based upon the wording and lettering of an actual panhandler’s sign he found shortly after arriving in Paris (Fig. 17). In 1993, Hirschhorn returned to the inspiration of mendicants’ cardboard signs, initiating the works eventually included in the defining publication Les plaintifs, les bêtes, les politiques, which gave renewed prominence to the direct address of handwritten text combined with collage elements.61 Utterances of helplessness (‘I do not understand!’, ‘I can’t decide!’, ‘I am lost’) are mixed with phrases excerpted from the press or from advertising. The simplest remarks intimate existential quandaries: the arbitrariness of values (‘OK, Not OK’), the impossibility of judgment (‘Who is the winner? Who is the loser?’), the unavoidability of complicity (‘Is this my work?’). Exclamation points, arrows, and question marks, vigorously drawn with short strokes of the ballpoint pen, are mute but urgent commentaries. Fig. 17 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Untitled (Early Work), 1987, paper and ink, 40 x 55 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. Fig. 17 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Untitled (Early Work), 1987, paper and ink, 40 x 55 cm. Collection of the artist, Aubervilliers, France. It would seem that Hirschhorn finally set aside – put to rest, even – the formal questions of composition and objecthood that had preoccupied him during the previous years. Art and design’s intersection with politics, however, came under intensified scrutiny. Several collages reproduced in Les plaintifs, les bêtes, les politiques deal directly with the totalitarian appropriation of photomontage.62 ‘Please help me!’ the text of one such collage implores, with arrows pointing to an Affiche Rouge circulated in 1944 by the German occupation in France. ‘This poster was designed by the Nazis, but I think it is beautiful. Why?’63 And in another, ‘Please help me! I think this poster is beautiful although I know what Stalin has done. Why?’ (Fig. 18) In this second instance, the poster was designed by Gustavs Klucis, one of the earliest practitioners of photomontage in the nascent Socialist state. Klucis went on to produce propaganda for Stalin’s regime, as did many of the Russian avant-gardists, Lissitzky and Alexander Rodchenko among them. Expressed in the material terms of panhandler’s signs, these questions become existential in more than the philosophical sense. Fig. 18 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Les plaintif, les bêtes, les politiques, 1995 (extract from the publication), original: 15 x 23.5 cm. Published by Centre d’édition contemporaine, Geneva, Switzerland. Fig. 18 Open in new tabDownload slide Thomas Hirschhorn, Les plaintif, les bêtes, les politiques, 1995 (extract from the publication), original: 15 x 23.5 cm. Published by Centre d’édition contemporaine, Geneva, Switzerland. How Not to Ride Two Horses at Once (1984–1994) Common wisdom advises against changing horses midstream. Hirschhorn’s decade-long Gestaltungs-recherche suggests a working through of the intellectual, political, and artistic implications of a reorientation – from not art to art – as well as a working out of the mechanics of such a move. He insistently turned to the defining cultural developments of the late 1910s and early 1920s, when avant-garde art and design were unified with radical revolutionary politics. Even the framework of Gestaltungs-recherche is strongly reminiscent of the scientistic rhetoric surrounding the Constructivist laboratory phase. This period of formal exploration in 1921 and early 1922 ended, of course, in the declaration of ‘uncompromising war on art’ in favour of ‘intellectual and material production’, in the words of Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova.64 Startlingly, perhaps, Hirschhorn moved in the opposite direction from his heroes. Even as he identified with the utopian aim to bring about a new consciousness through design’s very means – an identification that was not without a critical dimension, as we see in his confrontation with the Klucis poster – he recognised the absence of a political basis for it in the present. Art, not design, would be the site of his production. In having narrated this series of transformations in Hirschhorn’s work so linearly, I do not mean also to suggest that they unfolded teleologically. If any logic is evident, it is only that which is generated when an artist follows the implications of his or her own discoveries in the studio. I wish, rather, to emphasise the intensely exploratory dimension of Hirschhorn’s Gestaltungs-recherche, to which certain of the works’ lack of resolution – failure, even – bears witness. When Hirschhorn writes in 2008, ‘I understand art as a tool to encounter the world. I understand art as a tool to confront reality. And I understand art as a tool to live within the time in which I am’, we now know that this was not always a foregone conclusion.65 Art’s use-value had to be discovered. Footnotes 1 HalFoster’s essay argues for an archival impulse in contemporary art characterised by an ‘idiosyncratic probing into particular figures, objects, and events in modern art, philosophy, and history’. Along with Hirschhorn, Foster includes Sam Durant and Tacita Dean as makers of archival art. ‘An Archival Impulse’, October, vol. 110, 2004, p. 5. 2 Regarding the evolution of the principle of ‘presence and production’, see Lisa Lee, ‘Preface’ in Lee and Hal Foster (eds.), Critical Laboratory: The Writings of Thomas Hirschhorn (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), p. xiv. 3 As Claire Bishop has persuasively argued, Hirschhorn’s mode of engaging the public space maintains contestation as a basis for democratic engagement. ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, October, vol. 110, 2004, p. 76. 4 Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘An Interview with Thomas Hirschhorn’, October, vol. 113, 2005, p. 84. Reprinted in Lee and Foster, Critical Laboratory, p. 335. 5 See Thomas Hirschhorn, ‘My Own Graphic Design’, in Léo Favier (ed.), What, you don’t know Grapus? (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2014), pp. 185–7, and ‘Lettre à Manuel’, in Thomas Hirschhorn, 1 Auflage (Künstlerhaus Bethanien: Berlin, 1995), pp. 40–2. 6 Correspondence with author, 13 December 2019. 7 Conversation with author, 2 May 2016. See also Pamela M. Lee, Forgetting the Art World (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2012), pp. 117–20. 8 Conversation with author, 2 May 2016. 9 The schematic appears in Hirschhorn’s Notebook about Graphism, a copy of which can be found in the artist’s archive. 10 Sebastian Egenhofer, ‘What is Political About Hirschhorn’s Art?’ in Thomas Hirschhorn (ed.), Thomas Hirschhorn: Establishing a Critical Corpus (Zurich: JRP-Ringier, 2011), pp. 98–123. Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Thomas Hirschhorn: Lay Out Sculpture and Display Diagrams’, in Alison M. Gingeras, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, and Carlos Basualdo, Thomas Hirschhorn (London: Phaidon, 2004), pp. 42–93, especially pp. 47–52. Pamela Lee stresses the significance of Hirschhorn’s formation as a graphic designer, but she does not attend to the work of this period, in Forgetting the Art World, pp. 117–20. 11 Egenhofer, ‘What is Political About Hirschhorn’s Art?’, p. 122. 12 Egenhofer writes, ‘It is apparent to me that Hirschhorn’s work of the last twenty years is not simply undergoing an autonomous stylistic development, but it is explicitly and strategically reacting to its altered relationship to its context’. ‘What is Political About Hirschhorn’s Art?’ (2011), p. 121. Perhaps it goes without saying that the internal dilemma I am hoping to surface is far from anything like ‘an autonomous stylistic development’. 13 What I call Hirschhorn’s dilemma in these formative years should not be confused with what the artist describes in his 2011 statement, ‘Guggenheim Dilemma’, written in the context of an artists’ boycott of Guggenheim Abu Dhabi in response to its exploitative labour practices. Hirschhorn’s text grappled with the dilemma arising between ‘the politics of the “good intention”’ – e.g. signing a petition – and ‘the real political power of art’. See Thomas Hirschhorn, ‘The Guggenheim-Dilemma’, <http://www.thomashirschhorn.com/the-guggenheim-dilemma/>. 14 Thomas Hirschhorn Daniele Buetti, correspondence book, vol. 4, note dated 21 March 1986. See fn. 21. Gestaltung is notoriously difficult to render in English. Certainly, its common translation as design offers little satisfaction. Better would be ‘form-creation’, or Hirschhorn’s more plain-spoken, yet fervently avowed, ‘to give form’. 15 Thierry de Duve, Pictorial Nominalism: On Marcel Duchamp’s Passage from Painting to the Readymade (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 113. 16 ‘Interview: Alison M. Gingeras in conversation with Thomas Hirschhorn’, in Gingeras, Buchloh, and Basualdo, Thomas Hirschhorn, p. 11. 17 ‘Interview’, Gingeras, Buchloh, and Basualdo, Thomas Hirschhorn, p. 9. 18 Bar Floréal, of which Grapus’s Alex Jordan was a founding member, was a collective of photographers dedicated to social activism with an exhibition space in the Belleville neighborhood of Paris, France. This is one instance of the Grapus members’ continued support of Hirschhorn during these years. Hirschhorn’s brief exhibition took place between 12 – 20 December 1986. Hirschhorn’s official biography gives the Bar Floréal exhibition as his first solo exhibition. 19 Thomas Hirschhorn Daniele Buetti, correspondence book, vol. 5, note dated 26 December, 1986. See fn. 21. 20 ‘Tableau’ is used here in a general sense, not in the specific sense of an absorptive scene as explored in depth in the scholarship of Michael Fried. 21 Hirschhorn and Buetti (a Zürich- and Munster-based artist then living in Berlin) co-authored eight artist books by post between August 1984 and March 1990. In addition to missives about their lives and work, the correspondence books are filled with drawings, collages, and photographs. Volume 3 was lost not long after it was completed. The remaining seven volumes are in Hirschhorn’s archive. I have drawn on the correspondence books for invaluable insight into Hirschhorn’s private and artistic struggles. 22 Hans Rudolf Bosshard, Der typografische Raster / The Typographic Grid, trans. Andrew Bluhm (Sulgen and Zürich: Verlag Niggli, 2000), p. 13. 23 Kate Eichhorn, Adjusted Margin (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), p. 93. 24 In the artist’s archive may be found a 1985 calendar that features Neocolors. The calendar sheets, not the ‘originals’, were subsequently exhibited in 1987 at the Kaos gallery. Neocolors also served as the basis for numerous graphic design assignments facilitated by Grapus. 25 This list recalls the one that Leo Steinberg marshals as analogs to the ‘flatbed picture plane’: ‘tabletops, studio floors, charts, bulletin boards – any receptor surface on which objects are scattered, on which data is entered, on which information may be perceived, printed, impressed’. ‘Other Criteria’, in Other Criteria: Confrontations with Twentieth-Century Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972), p. 84. 26 El Lissitzky, ‘From a letter (1923)’, in Sophie Lissitzky-Küppers (ed.), El Lissitzky: Life, Letters, Texts (London: Thames and Hudson, 1968), p. 348. In the same volume, see also Lissitzky, ‘Typographical facts’, pp. 359–60. The German-language version, ‘Typographische Tatsachen’, is one of a number of Lissitzky’s texts reproduced in a comb-bound book in Hirschhorn’s archives labelled ‘Typography’. It evidently dates to Hirschhorn’s student days at the Kunstgewerbeschule. See fn. 51. 27 Yve-Alain Bois, ‘El Lissitzky: Radical Reversibility’, Art in America, vol. 76, no. 4, April 1988, pp. 160–81. 28 Pierre Cabane, Dialogues with Marcel Duchamp, trans. Ron Padgett (New York: Viking Press, 1971), pp. 31, 37. 29 This aspect of my argument is strongly inflected by my readings of David Joselit, ‘Dada’s Diagrams’, in Leah Dickerman (ed.), The Dada Seminars (Washington, DC: Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, National Gallery of Art, 2005), pp. 221–39, and Molly Nesbit, ‘The Copy’, in Midnight–The Tempest Essays (New York: Inventory Press, 2017), pp. 43–61. 30 Sybille Krämer, ‘“The Mind’s Eye”: Visualizing the Non-visual and the “Epistemology of the Line”’, in Image and Imaging in Philosophy, Science, and the Arts, Vol. 2 (Warschau/Berlin: De Gruyter, 2011), p. 286. 31 Bois, ‘El Lissitzky’, p. 175; Benjamin H. D. Buchloh, ‘Hesse’s Endgame: Facing the Diagram’, in Catherine de Zegher (ed.), Eva Hesse Drawing (New York: The Drawing Center/ Yale University Press, 2006), p. 119. Compelling, though less germane to Hirschhorn, Margaret Iversen presents a model counter to Buchloh’s opposition between diagram and body in ‘Desire and the Diagrammatic’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 39, no. 1, March 2016, pp. 1–17. 32 A recurring text in the Neocolors, ‘simple chose [simple thing]: 1 X 1 X 1 = 1’, thus rings with irony. This may be variously understood – as a typically Hirschhornian assertion in favour of the unpretentious, superficial, or stupid, or as an ironic commentary about that which is precisely un-simple. Still another (speculative) possibility – one with a biographical valence – is a reference to Saint-John Perse’s famous poem ‘Exil’, with its line ‘la simple chose, la simple chose que voilà, la simple chose d’être là, dans l’écoulement du jour’. 33 Thomas Hirschhorn Daniele Buetti, correspondence book, vol. 1, note dated 1 January 1985. See fn. 21. 34 In this context, the diptych structure is also potentially significant, as Warhol used it in Mustard Race Riot, 1963. 35 Michael Fried, ‘New York Letter’, Art International, vol. 7, no. 5, May 1963, p. 69; reprinted in Art and Objecthood: Essays and Reviews (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1998), p. 300. 36 Carl G. Liungman, Thought Signs: The Semiotics of Symbols, Western Non-Pictorial Ideograms (Amsterdam: IOS, 1995), pp. 558–65. 37 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Sense and Sensibility: Reflections on Post-60s Sculpture’, Artforum, vol. 12, no. 3, November 1973, p. 47. Emphasis in the original. 38 Brian Rotman, ‘Thinking Dia-grams: Mathematics and Writing’, in Mario Biagioli (ed.), The Science Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 1999), p. 437. 39 Rotman, ‘Thinking Dia-grams’ (1999), p. 438. 40 See especially, Yve-Alain Bois, ‘Strzemiński and Kobro: In Search of Motivation’, in Painting as Model (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990), pp. 123–56. 41 Thomas Hirschhorn, Cahier No. 1, entry dated 1 January 1987. 42 Josef Müller-Brockmann, Grid systems in graphic design: A visual communication manual for graphic designers, typographers, and three-dimensional designers, trans. D.Q. Stephenson (Salenstein, Switzerland: Verlag Niggli, 1996), p. 11. 43 Richard Hollis, Swiss Graphic Design: The Origins and Growth of an International Style, 1920–1965 (London: Laurence King Publishing, 2006), p. 178. 44 Müller-Brockmann, Grid systems, p. 10. 45 See Müller-Brockmann, Grid systems, pp. 133–9 46 ‘Interview’, Gingeras, Buchloh, and Basualdo, Thomas Hirschhorn, p. 9. 47 Thomas Hirschhorn, ‘Zur Grafik’, note dated 19 September 1986. Printed in Favier, What, you don’t know Grapus?, pp. 188–9. 48 Lee, Forgetting the Art World, p. 119. 49 Rosalind Krauss, ‘Grids’, October, vol. 9, Summer 1979, p. 52; reprinted in The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985), pp. 9–10. 50 One historian of the grid writes, ‘In major respects, the page grid undergoes few significant alterations in its development during the five-hundred-year period between Gutenberg and graphic design. As with Gutenberg, the modernist grid is a field defined by either large zones created by perpendicular axes and/or by small zones in the form of individual typographic modules’. Jack H. Williamson, ‘The Grid: History, Uses, and Meanings’, Design Issues, vol. 3, no. 2, Autumn 1986, 30 fn 9. 51 El Lissitzky, ‘Topography of Typography’, in Lissitzky-Küppers, El Lissitzky, p. 359. This essay is included in a collection of notes and documents from Hirschhorn’s coursework at the Kunstgewerbeschule. See fn 26. For an excellent discussion of how Lissitzky reimagined such a topography in the context of the avant-garde journal G, see Maria Gough, ‘Contains Graphic Material: El Lissitzky and the Topography of G’, in Michael Jennings and Detlef Mertins (eds.), G:An Avant-Garde Journal of Art, Architecture, Design, and Film, 1923–1926 (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Research Institute, 2010), p. 22. 52 Thomas Hirschhorn, ‘Why Is It Important – Today – to Show and Look at Images of Destroyed Human Bodies’, in Lee and Foster, Critical Laboratory, pp. 100–1. 53 The Lignes, Courbes, Gribouillages, Coins, Cadres, and Pleins were begun in 1990. 54 Email correspondence with the author, 22 August 2018. 55 One might consider these works in relation to Edward Ruscha’s so-called Censor Strip paintings, from the mid-1980s and onward, especially in light of Ruscha’s early training in graphic design and typography. 56 Howard Singerman, ‘Noncompositional Effects, or the Process of Painting in 1970’, Oxford Art Journal, vol. 26, no. 1, 2003, p. 139. 57 Buchloh, ‘Lay Out Sculpture’, p. 50. 58 See Bois, ‘Radical Reversibility’, p. 174. 59 Singerman, ‘Noncompositional Effects’, p. 132. 60 Thomas Hirschhorn, ‘Less is Less, More is More’, in Lee and Foster, Critical Laboratory, p. 2. 61 Thomas Hirschhorn, ‘Les plaintifs, les bêtes, les politiques’, in Lee and Foster, Critical Laboratory, p. 9. In the same volume, see also Hirschhorn, ‘Letter to Thierry (On Formalism)’, pp. 29–31. 62 See Buchloh’s authoritative analysis of these works in ‘Lay Out Sculpture’, pp. 52–57. 63 ‘Aidez-moi! S.V.P. Cette affice est faite par les Nazi. Mais je la trouve belle, pourquoi?’ This collage holds a crucial position in the series, as it is the first image in Les Plaintifs, les Bêtes, les Politiques (1995). The collages included in the publication date to 1993–1994. 64 Alexander Rodchenko and Varvara Stepanova, ‘Programme of the First Working Group of Constructivists’, in Charles Harrison and Paul Wood (eds.), Art in Theory 1900–1990: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 318. 65 Thomas Hirschhorn, ‘Doing Art Politically: What Does This Mean?’, in Lee and Foster, Critical Laboratory, p. 74. © The Author(s) 2021. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - Hirschhorn’s Dilemma, or How Not to Ride Two Horses at Once
JF - Oxford Art Journal
DO - 10.1093/oxartj/kcaa022
DA - 2021-06-17
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/hirschhorn-s-dilemma-or-how-not-to-ride-two-horses-at-once-eO6PxFbFPd
SP - 1
EP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
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