Hirschhorn’s Dilemma, or How Not to Ride Two Horses at Once

Abstract

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