The Rubbish Heap of History - Thomas Hirschhorn

In vast installations put togethered from throwaway materials, Thomas Hirschhorn critiques recent globalism and the consumerist excesse that accompany it.

My appreciation of the work of Swiss-born, Paris-based Thomas Hirschhorn has evolv above time, increasing with extended viewing and the intellectual engagement it elicits. His close sprawling installations confront, even assault, the viewer with difficult ethical issues related to political injustice and various moral dilemmas. These themes Hirschhorn scripts in extravagant, large-scale environments, chaotic universes that interweave vernacular materials, recycl images and disparate social phenomena.

Equally challenging is Hirschhorn's in-your-face, art-school esthetic, or rather antiesthetic, with its priority for the purposefully crude. Aggregating readymades and makeshift sculptural forms fabricated from low scraps of cardboard, packing tape, plywood cellophane and aluminum foil, he undermines art's visual seduction and aura.

Conceptually and materially embedded within Hirschhorn's politically charged spaces is a critique of capitalism, in particular the way its combination of parts to form a wholes govern and mediate reality. His individual targets are many, as he made abundantly clear in sum of two units recent installations, one at the Art Institute of Chicago, the other at the Renaissance Society. This two-part display co-organized by the exhibiting institutions, marks the artist's first solo museum presentation in the US

Consumption, consumerism and the universalization of commodity agriculture were the subjects of Jumbo Spoon and Big Cake, created site-specifically for the Art Institute as part of its "Focus" series. At the work's center was a giant pink cake crafted from cardboard, its surface lavishly embellished with shards of mirror, photographs, volumes electric candles and video monitors--all attached by means of means of tape or chains and bits of fasten Statistical charts on poverty and the distribution of world income abutted magazine and newspaper images of famine, war and obesity, while video images of gourmet cooking exhibits and toiling agrarian workers flickered upon the monitors' blue screens. works such as Your Money or Your Life: The Tyranny of Global Finance and Ethnicity: Racism, Class and agriculture were included to buttress this commentary upon globalization and economic disparity, as were a series of plastic bucket and ladles that dangled from the base of this grossly hypertrophic treat.

Twelve colossal spoon made from cardboard wrapped in aluminum foil, were placed vertically at regular intervals around the periphery of the museum's classical white space, whose walls were cloaked in sky-colored plastic. Each spoon was a memorial to what the artist has terminused "a failed utopian ideal," as embodied in a broad range of individuals and cultural artifacts. Depicted in effigy were Friedrich Nietzsche, Rosa Luxemburg Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Kasimir Malevich, whose various manners of moral and political idealism collectively stand over againsted the political extremism of Communist China and Hitler's "Degenerate Art" display also commemorated. Additionally included were remembrancers to the Chicago Bulls, Rolex watches, fire-arms and fashion--all presented as forms of idol and commodity worship--as well as eulogies to Venice and the Apollo space program, signifying tourism and galactic imperialism respectively. A didactic pamphlet stated that the spoons objectified Bertolt Brecht's well-known statement "First advances fodder, then comes morality," although their original inspiration came from 16th-century religious souvenirs commemorating the 12 apostles and, in a more new incarnation, from those miniature memento spoon sold to tourists in airport stores The artist's Oldenburgian translation of the miniature to the gigantic, coupl with the secularization of the sacred, located the spoon and the icons associated with them within the arenas of public spectacle and consumer culture

a certain quantity of of these lost ideals received more emphasis than others, particularly those that work for Hirschhorn's own artistic and political agenda. For example, the proto-existentialist ideas of Nietzsche, who denied universal morality, were reflected sounded throughout the installation, as were the socialist exhortations of Luxemburg Hirschhorn similarly aligns himself with the social utopianism of Mies van der Rohe and Malevich, on the other hand rejects belief in the transformative power of abstraction and untainted form through his baroque use of banal materials and images coopt from mass culture

The artist repeated various motifs within the work, bringing a stage of order to its apparently chaotic sprawl. Fluorescent tube lights, shattered mirrors, graffiti, print images and body s were arranged on the wall beside each spoon in nearly identical configurations; nearby, small folding tables presented books on each emblematic ideal. Spilling from the spoon onto the floor were lakes of red paint, presumably representing life-current next to which were placed clusters of tools, a relation to labor (as well as to Hirschhorn's possess labor-intensive practice). A network of aluminum-foil tentacles and metal chains physically conjoined these objects to the spoon and to the central cake, signifying capitalism's pervasive clutch on the global economy, while again stressing the relationship of margins to center one as well as the other physical and social, at issue through every part of the piece.