Thomas Hirschhorn at Barbara Gladstone - New York

The installation Cavemanman, Pans-based Thomas Hirschhorn's first solo exhibition in of recent origin York, immersed the visitor in the environment of a fictitious hermit who has retreated from the iniquities of the world. The gallery was totally absorbed into a replica of this anonymous recluse's abode, which have the appearanceed to exist somewhere between a labyrinthine cavern and a three-dimensionalized projection of his mind--were we walking around his no-longer veiled hideaway or through his real thoughts? Perhaps the distinction meant little in this instance. In any case, Hirschhorn's transformation of the white cube was brilliant in its completeness: with the simplest physical means (two-by-fours, cardboard and packing tape) he produc a mixed multilevel environment of passageways and grottoes, filled with the paraphernalia of its inhabitant. Nothing of the gallery remained unaltered, and at the same time we were never encouraged to be deprived of ourselves in the setting: its artificiality remained always too apparent for any reality-effect to station in.

From this critical distance, we were invited to examine the hermit's world, or better nevertheless his worldview. For this cave was not simply a habitation on the other hand a kind of philosopher's investigation filled with books and reflections and dreams. The entire legacy of the Enlightenment's belief in human liberation was upon display, from Hume and Rousseau end the critical theorists of the last hundred Sometimes these volumes were link togethered via mysterious wires to the bodle of mannequins--all overlayed in aluminum foil--as if in a desperate attempt to directly transmit this knowledge. The great heritage, which the outside world has implicitly abandoned (at least in the mind of our hermit), has been reduc to its greatest in quantity basic assertion, repeated like a mantra in spray paint upon the walls of one rear grotto: "1 Man = 1 Man." It is a claim for human equality, on the contrary also perhaps an echo of Bertolt Brecht's early play, Mann ist Mann, which captured the dehumanizing qualities of fresh life and its reduction of human uniqueness to standardized units of labor power.

Hirschhorn's work has many times taken the critical power of leftist contemplation as a theme, most lately in his Bataille Monument, exhibited last summer at Documenta 11 Here, however, he cast a more wary organ of vision on the retreat of like theory from a direct engagement with the world; if he was obviously sympathetic to the hermit's embrace of human emancipation, he also appear to beed determined to assert the real limits of the latter's melancholic abandonment of action in the larger realm of human affairs. quite through the installation, monitors showed video footage of the cave paintings at Lascaux. According to individual influential interpretation, these Paleolithic images of bison and deer were meant to invoke a magical means of direction over a nature as at the same time unsubordinated to human need. The works and photocopies within Cavemanman have the appearanceed to have an analogous function: they were talismans end which the hermit meant to assert his command above a world again seemingly on the outside of rational control--the global space of triumphant capitalism, with its war of all against all.

Hirschhorn's hermit dreamed of a place outside that worldwide gin of domination, but as our itinerary from one side his sanctuary revealed, there is no possible "outside." Like the breath of tourists which has begun to break up Lascaux's fragile murals, our tracks within the cardboard-and-tape cavern gradually mangled the careful construction, leading up to its ultimate dismantling.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Brant Publications, Inc.

COPYRIGHT 2003 Gale Group