Thomas Hirschhorn — Gladstone Gallery, New York
Through a monumental installation titled Fake it, Fake it — till you Fake it. at the Gladstone Gallery in New York, Thomas Hirschhorn attempts to address the question of creation in times of crisis, urgency, and the challenging of all conditions of humanity in a world under bombs.
Facing ambiguity, all-encompassing justification of the unjustifiable, the role of creation is to offer a space that embraces these paradoxes without succumbing to communication strategies. By appropriating the famous Silicon Valley adage, “Fake it till you make it,” he reimagines our mediated relationship, influenced by new technologies, with the tragic reality of conflicts concluded in blood, indifference, or at the very least, powerlessness.
To create, to imitate, to fake; but “never lie”. That is the essential principle for the artist to find, in reinvention, the dimension of an essential truth. Using office supplies (various tapes, reproductions on paper, cardboard), Hirschhorn reconstructs a concrete openspace figuring an entryway to the virtual world. While always remaining in the realm of decor and falsehood, it accumulates and saturates the space with information to emphasize the lack of meaning in our reality. The cleanliness of the installation itself seems precarious. A gust has ravaged its end, a wave threatens to cover its sides, while smiley faces drip from the ceiling, external manifestations as necessary for the system’s maintenance as they are absolutely obscure in their intrinsic value.
As effective as it may be, this new order therefore overturns meaning and deploys its own logic by subverting the value of life and feeding on its contradictions. Within this system, interests converge, from the economy to power, from politics to the eruption of new technologies, dimensions forming screens between the transition from an immaterial order to its materialization for a population that no longer corresponds to an individual but once again to a quantity; cannon fodder. A concept that Thomas Hirschhorn develops in his definition of a “fake-utopian” as opposed to dystopia, a regime of reality that never admits its utopian nature and persists in the fantasy it has set until it injects reality itself with its absurdity.
Always armed with a militant humility and fundamentally oriented towards the viewer’s future involvement, the artist sets the framework for an open plastic reflection. Error, lack, and bias are constituent elements of a practice anchored in sensations and the urgency for him to “react.” The temptation to create in order to raise questions rather than to realize in order to impose his own direction adds significant value to the commitment of the work. Questions take the place of mantras and slogans that insinuate themselves into our imaginations, and the shadows, the ambiguities of this representation, become possible escapes, allowing each individual to draw, despite the horror of the reality it reflects, their own freedom.
In this regard, Hirschhorn emphasizes the ability of the work of art to use its detachment to embrace contradiction, incorporate distance, and the possibility of crisis in the world it inhabits to reveal, each time anew, the danger of obviousness.
Thomas Hirschhorn: Fake it, Fake it — till you Fake it., Gladstone Gallery, New York, from January, 24 to March, 02, 2024 Read more
