Political Art, Distracted

Abstract

THOMAS HIRSCHHORN: UTOPIA, UTOPIA = ONE WORLD, ONE WAR, ONE ARMY, ONE DRESS CCA WATTIS INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA MARCH 10-MAY 13, 2006 I imagine Thomas Hirschhorn's exhibition = World, War, Army, Dress pleased many: artists, art observers, academics (particularly those who have, for the last decade or so, told students that polities and art do not mix), passionate liberals (as well as those who see themselves as timelessly anti-establishment, but who have shied away from activism), and busy art school undergraduates who will be comfortable with the street look and duct tape construction of the exhibition. However, for all its ambiguity, faced with the mass of Hirschhorn's collecting (thousands of objects in tight proximity), one could not help but think about the deformity of war. This was the show's success--though a measured one. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The installation was comprised of uniforms from around the world, documentary and fashion photos of soldiers in camouflage, music videos set among battles and explosions (the singers camouflage-clad), and consumer items appropriating the pattern of camouflage such as snowboards, T-shirts, and halter dresses. There were also scrap wood trees with mannequin bodies, maps, and globes of the world growing camouflage tape mounds. There were toys of war placed both in battlefields and in a large doll house, books on war scattered in a living room covered in camouflage tape, and forty-foot, ambiguous, cardboard forms that could be bullets, missiles, or submarines. The installation filled three galleries--a lot of real estate to take up, and to Hirschhorn's credit, one does not begrudge him his excess. The tragic flaw of Utopia was that Hirschhorn allowed the viewer to see how entirely seduced he is by critical theory; he threw aside a chance to serve as a witness, choosing instead this infatuation, which is unfortunate since he succeeded at making a map that shows the cognitive discord of war. Less importantly, the subtleties of his One Dress message--consumerism's appropriation of camouflage in civilian clothing--was less compelling than the immersion experience he gave viewers of all sorts of objects. In them we could see one enormous, global casualty: ourselves as conquerors, our own loss of righteousness making us victims of politics and greed in the end. If I had not read Marcus Steinweg's accompanying essay, Worldplay (2005), in full, I would have been more inspired by Utopia, which featured printed fragments of the essay in the installation. (1) As posters and signs hung throughout the exhibition space, Steinweg's text fragments functioned adequately as Barthesian empty signs, and contrasted with the very specific war documentation. They could have been taken from any critical theory text. Open-ended, they sometimes related to objects nearby, but their solipsism more often represented other breakdowns of meaning that accompany war in our time. (I found myself remarking that in our time--a time capable of so much technologically--the appearance of brutal carnage seems like a special effect from a science fiction film, a film about an evil civilization in a surreal time. …