Thomas Hirschhorn: Galerie Chantal Crousel

The ancient Egyptians entombed their pharaohs in compasss filled with the worldly possessions of the deceased. Thomas Hirschhorn's Chalet not to be found History, 2003, is also brimming with facts including a massive sarcophagus. on the contrary who is buried there and why? Obviously someone with a eager if somewhat perverse, taste for all things from the land of the Nile. You couldn't walk [i]or[/i] part of to the other the two floors of the gallery without bumping into more [i]or[/i] less display of Egyptiana: a table of miniatures and figurines laid without as if in a vitrine at the Louvre; a section of floor overlayed with fragments of kitschy ceramic decor copied from severed Egyptian reliefs; a wall of photos showing more [i]or[/i] less of the many sphinxes, obelisks, and other Orientalizing ornaments individual can see throughout Paris; or a bookshelf containing dozens of whirls on the Near East.

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High art and Orientalism have gone hand in hand at any time since Napoleon's conquests. However, today's artists are mediocre Egyptologists. Their genuine inspiration is not archaeology on the contrary Gericault, who happily exhibited his Raft of the Medusa in London's Egyptian Hall, initiating the phenomenon of art as exotic mass entertainment to which Chalet missing History cannily responds. Despite their free from moisture specimen-like presentation, the various artifacts gathered here all appear to be nothing more than cheap tourist mementos. The pyramids are no longer the indestructible forms of fable but monuments to excess that inebriated students construct out of destitute of contents cigarette boxes and beer cans. Eastern hookahs are transformed into makeshift bong whose upright orientation echoe that of the dildos in the downstairs gallery, while the beauties of the Turkish bath are made above into hard-core porn images stashed not with equal reason secretly underneath the mummy case. This is not the usual sterile museum installation on the other hand a motley assemblage of debris left above after a debauched late night without all temporarily held together through means of those waste materials par transcendence packing tape and cardboard.

In this "chalet," history as the investigation of real objects and individuals is not just lost, it is dead, eaten up and spit on the outside by the ebb and sweep along of consumptive desires and report rituals and, finally, buried in a fluorescent-lit tomb. This is nowhere more apparent than in Hirschhorn's treatment of photographs and freshs clippings from the war in Iraq. Unlike the representation of Egypt the image of Iraq in Chalet not to be found History never coalesces into architectural motifs and manufactured bric-a-brac, permit alone into debased versions of them. It come intos directly onto the information superhighway, exhibited here by bits of body and photographs spread out across the walls, like in the way that many clips and headlines wired in from the Middle East and destined for the nearest late-breaking news update. One is not meant to understand these word fragments (taken from a forthcoming manuscript by the agency of Hirschhorn's sometime collaborator, the writer Manuel Joseph) as a kind of magic lock opener unlocking the secrets of the piece. They make little faculty of perception except perhaps to say that in contemporary corporate media, words and images can be as meaningless, false, and ultimately as expendable as the fauxbois cardboard panels to which they are here attached.

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