CARGO AND CULT: THE DISPLAYS OF THOMAS HIRSCHHORN
It has proved difficult to imagine what sculpture could be at the beginning of the new century. Indeed, the concept and category appear strained in the expanded field of Thomas Hirschhorn’s displays, ephemeral and unstable constructions of cardboard and foil. The artist insists on the term “display” to distinguish his work explicitly from a putative tradition or genre of “installation”—the contemporary doxa of sculptural production and the target of his taxonomic gesture. Hirschhorn’s terminology seems to be critical regardless of whether “installation” is derived from a practice that was once defined as contextualist and as such had been concerned with questions of site-specificity and discursive and institutional criticality, or whether it is more contemporarily defined as a spectacular set, as theatricalizing narrative, or merely as decorative design.
And yet, one can argue (as I will here) that Hirschhorn’s displays engage a series of questions that have preoccupied the most complex sculptural projects of the recent past. On the level of materials and procedures, for example, his work is in many ways indebted to European sculpture of the ’60s, in particular the work of Joseph Beuys, whose “expanded concept of sculpture” Hirschhorn has acknowledged as a model. On the level of theoretical reflection on the frameworks within which sculpture is situated, his work is indebted in particular to the most radical practices among the post-Minimal sculptors, such as Michael Asher, Dan Graham, Gordon Matta-Clark, and Robert Smithson. Ultimately, Hirschhorn’s displays take up the issues that had preoccupied the most radical sculpture of the earlier part of the twentieth century: whether sculpture can trace or even initiate perpetually changing conditions of simultaneous collective spatial perception and whether it can achieve this goal by approximating architectural structures, by simulating their functions, or by contesting architecture outright as a hegemonic ordering of spatial experience.
There are, of course, numerous reasons for the demise, temporary or permanent, of sculptural production. The first would appear to be the incessant overproduction of objects of consumption and their accelerated obsolescence, which have generated a vernacular violence in the spaces of everyday life that regulates every spatiotemporal order and devalorizes all object relations. Another reason would be the increasing conversion of economic and material processes of production and exchange to a heretofore unimagined level of electronic and digital abstraction, giving rise to the mirage of the transformation of matter into mathematical and digital “equivalents.” Any spatial relation and material form one might still experience outside the registers of overproduction and electronic digitalization will now appear as an abandoned zone, a zone of remnant objects and leftover spaces, rather than as elementary givens from which new spatial parameters and object relations could be configured. A third factor in the disappearance of sculptural production might be found in sculpture’s own collaborations with the forces of spectacle culture and its ideological mediations through postmodern architecture.
The plethora of sculpture—the frequency of its transformations and the multiplicity of its morphologies and object positions within the last thirty years alone—cannot be explained merely as prolific cultural productivity. The desperation of having to respond to the rapidity with which corporate enterprise and its architecture have abrogated even the last remnants of what was once experienced as public space may turn out to be a more pertinent explanation: Architecture has reclaimed and recruited almost every new object type and spatial relation that sculpture has opened up (e.g., Peter Eisenman’s penchant for the phenomenological sculpture of Sol LeWitt and Richard Serra; Frank Gehry’s for the anti-monuments of Claes Oldenburg and Serra; and Herzog and de Meuron’s for Graham’s Foucauldian pavilions). Indeed, it seems that at present any radical aesthetic practice (sculptural or otherwise) must define itself in a contestatory relation, if not manifest opposition, to architecture.
Architecture’s recent embrace of the sculpture of the ’60s seems to originate less in the desire to renew an age-old fraternity than from the insight that, to remain socially viable, architecture has to operate first in the registers of the spectacular and of sign exchange-value: What was once tectonic must now become semiotic in order to achieve the media visibility that has become architecture’s primary horizon of aspiration. In this sense, it is of course paradoxical that radical artistic practices ever since the ’60s have withdrawn from privileging visuality. In fact they oppose their reduction to the sphere of the specular (and the spectacular) by pointing to the dialectical opposites of their constituent characteristics: reduced to fetishes, aesthetic objects incessantly pronounce the urgency to defetishize experience; simplified to be read as mere semiotic structures, they recuperate the somatic and the corporeal; declared to be purely pictorial, paintings point incessantly to their linguistic status, and works of art as textual propositions insist on the simultaneous reading of the textual, discursive, and institutional contexts of their presentation. Above all, radical practice reflects its status within a larger visual apparatus under the regime of the spectacle. It deconstructs rather than abides by this regime, trying to find—even if only provisionally—precisely those spaces in which the hegemony of spectacle has yet to be fully established. But where contemporary artistic practices attempt to undo the principles of total fetishization and spatial control, they return, newly enforced, in the hands of the architects.
SCULPTURE AS PAVILION
Rather than design sculpture as either a solid monolith (anthropomorphic or stereometrical), serial structure (biomorphic or geometrical),or readymade analogue to the commodity, Hirschhorn has defined his major work in two typologies, the altar and the pavilion. The “altars”—often appearing in “unofficial” public locations—function as devotional or commemorative sets, and the pavilions are hybrid architectural containers that shift between vitrines and shrines housing enigmatic objects.
In the altar model a new type of cult value seems to be posited as the experiential condition of Hirschhorn’s audiences, whereas in the pavilion model the condition of exhibition value itself seems to have become the first subject of investigation. Both types share a radical participatory potential: The altars solicit a positive vandalism by allowing for a random addition of objects, while the pavilions permit a type of vandalizing participation in which crucial elements may be removed at any time; in fact, the scantily built pseudo-architectural structure may itself be eventually annihilated.
A first lineage for Hirschhorn’s aesthetics of pavilion sculpture points to two typological predecessors from the historical avant-garde—one artistic, the other architectural. The first is the history of the Kiosk and of Reklame-Architektur as it emerges from the sculpture of Russian Constructivism in the work of Gustav Klucis and that of Italian Futurists such as Fortunato Depero, where declamatory signs and letters had displaced architecture’s traditional foregrounding of tectonic structures. The second, more purely architectural type is the modernist exhibition pavilion—its most outstanding example being, of course, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s 1929 Barcelona Pavilion, with later embodiments including Gerrit Rietveld’s pavilion for the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo and the work of the Swiss Socialist architect Hannes Meyer and his COOP architecture, in which serial commodity display and the order of the socialist distribution system regulate architectural tectonics. These models all partake of what one could call the rise of a new semiotic architecture of the ’20s and ’30s. This “architecture of signs” develops at the very moment when architecture’s traditional tasks of containing and enabling the various social functions in public space (e.g., labor and production, domestic and public leisure) were displaced by the new tasks of organizing space as “media,” in competition with, if not execution of, the interests of a rising media and commodity culture. In its totalizing culminations in the present, contemporary semiotic architecture (e.g., the strip, the airport, the mall) disseminates consumerist ideologies and extends commodity control into the very fabric of quotidian architectural envelopes.
A second lineage for Hirschhorn’s pavilions points to the moment in the late ’50s and early ’60s when the recognition of the entanglement of commodity production and artistic production and the entwinement of the frames of shopwindows and those of museum displays became mandatory. Fluxus and Happenings artists resuscitated the architectural type of the Kiosk or the Store, displacing assemblage aesthetics. Allan Kaprow’s large-scale structures such as Kiosk, 1957-59, and Apple Shrine, 1960; Robert Whitman’s untitled participatory frameworks and “sets” from 1958 made of cardboard and discarded materials, wooden lattices, and various translucent and light reflective foils; and, perhaps most notably, Claes Oldenburg’s installations The Street, 1960, and The Store, 1961, are crucial examples. Hirschhorn’s work at the Münster Sculpture Projects exhibition in 1997, Skulptur-Sortier-Station (Sculpture sorting station), both emphasized the architectural scale and public access of the sculptural structure (in the way that Oldenburg had presented The Store as a neighborhood venture anyone could enter) and displayed a large number of vernacular objects whose morphologies and materials seemed to have emerged from a children’s class in bricolage rather than a sculptor’s studio.
The explosion of commodity production, the permeation of everyday spaces by refuse, and the restructuring of sculpture as accumulation of obsolete objects (and as the spatialization of the readymade) were registered contemporaneously in Europe in works such as Arman’s Le Plein, 1960. At the same time, in the theater, gesture and movement were rigidified and restructured as arrested tableaux vivants and actors were buried in growing mounds of debris, as in Beckett’s Happy Days, 1961. It seemed that—once the world of objects had become a wasteland of refuse—sculpture could no longer adequately contemplate the conditions of fetishization when it was conceived as a singular industrially produced readymade. It had to become a theatricalized set of total reification.
Hirschhorn’s rediscovery and rereadings of these legacies position them as paradigmatic—and largely unrecognized—instances in the redefinitions of postwar sculptural practice. But he not only resuscitates Oldenburg’s and Arman’s iconic approach to mass culture and Kaprow’s and Whitman’s performative architectures, he also repositions sculpture within the participatory radicality of that historical context. Theirs were dialectical constructions embodying spectatorial experience without reifying it, dissolving fetishistic objects without denying the pervasiveness of objecthood, conceiving sculptural constructs as mass-cultural mimesis in which the governing conditions of object relations and intersubjective experience in public space were articulated without being monumentalized in affirmation.
A third and equally crucial lineage determining the formulation of Hirschhorn’s pavilions is the reorientation of post-Minimalist sculpture toward an examination of architecture and the conditions of experience (or its absence) in public urban space by such artists as Asher, Graham, and Matta-Clark, work that had further articulated the rediscovery of the semiotic dimensions of architecture. More important perhaps, their spatial interventions and models refuted the suspicion that all sculpture, once positioned in the remnants of public space, would be hostage to a fraudulent monumentality. In an interview with Daniela Salvioni, Graham traces his version of a history of the pavilion structure as follows: “At that point I started to devise sculpture pavilions: works that were hybrids between quasi-functional architectural pavilions and sculpture. . . . The pavilion idea has a lot to do with where you can interface art with the actual world and where you can’t. It evokes history, the park and the city, rather than simply the art world as context. It might happen that some of those ideas will later be used by an architect, so that my piece would be like an earlier visionary example. That I consider okay. . . . The architecture with the greatest influence on me is modernist. Many of my initial forms come from Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion or late Rietveld.”
CONSTRUCTIONS: FRAGILE AND FEBRILE
In pointed opposition to Graham’s late-modernist pavilions, which suture the spectator within the surfaces of the mirrored glass of International Style architecture (in a holdover of the egalitarian expectations of the ’60s), Hirschhorn’s pavilions are made from detritus, the materials of waste and impoverishment. They incessantly remind spectators that at this point even the slightest analogy or formal alliance between sculpture and technoscientistic rationality only exacerbates the masochistic identification with the conditions of experience inside the spaces of control imposed by the corporate regulation of everyday life.
Hirschhorn’s pavilions displace these advanced forms of late-modernist reflexivity, exchanging the notion of a transhistorical subject for a new (ennervated, not to say, hysterical) “phenomenology” of subjects and spaces of advanced reification. Not surprisingly then, his work systematically inverts the characteristics of sculpture embodied in the modernist pavilion: Structures that were rigid now become limp; surfaces that were shiny and reflective now become matte (or at best translucent); and if any reflection is ever allowed on the facades, it is usually light caught in an infinity of small folds and facets of aluminum foil or sheaths of nylon. No longer drawn from the technoscientistic industrialism of Minimal and post-Minimal sculpture or from International Style architecture, Hirschhorn’s structures, materials, and procedures seem impoverished in their resources and infantile in design, leading to a vernacular of amateurish bricolage. They all seem to have been taken from the non-sites of consumer culture, the negative readymades of containers and wrapping materials in which items had been packed and shipped (though the objects themselves are of course never shown), thus salvaging the discarded evidence of a seemingly infinite production of waste.
In dialogue with post-Minimal sculpture, Hirschhorn rearticulates the spatialization of the readymade as it has passed from a morphology of sculptural objects to one of mere spatial demarcations. Hirschhorn’s protuberances (the tentacular and capillary extensions protruding from his objects that he strangely identifies with the English term “ramifications”) remind one of Eva Hesse’s sculptural hybrids of linear and volumetric structures, which—in opposition to Minimalism—had articulated a paradoxical vision of biomorphic machines and mechanomorphic carnalities, of bodies flayed in an uncanny fusion of derma and techne. Modeled from crumpled aluminum and colored foils, these bulbous tentacles meander through Hirschhorn’s sculptural displays like some unknown hypertrophic growth, thus embodying the sculptural equivalent of the governing forms of the advanced and universal reification of desire (and what else could now make up the matter of sculpture?).
PARTICIPATORY TACTILITY AND PLANNED VANDALISM
If Hirschhorn’s sculpture in fact articulates a new “phenomenology” of advanced reification—both in terms of the actually governing modes of object production and the subject positions they enforce—this phenomenology would have to be legible first on the level of spectatorial participation. While reradicalizing the performative dimensions of post-Minimalism (and its precursors), Hirschhorn does not, however, merely resuscitate activities of the late ’70s in which sculptural production was actually displaced by (often provocative) performative interventions in public and semipublic spaces, in particular museum and gallery settings (e.g., Vito Acconci’s Seed Bed, 1971, and Graham’s performance works of the same period).
By contrast, Hirschhorn positions his “work” within a number of existing public sites (e.g., his altars are always placed in the street; other displays show up as surprises in the staircases or courtyards of low-income housing projects), anticipating a rather different type of “participation.” The alien presence of his “sculptural” objects in these spaces of the most abject everyday is bound to generate encounters that differ drastically from those permitted by traditionally protective frames and institutional spaces. When Hirschhorn installs his sculptural structures near public trash receptacles, as in his displays Jemand kümmert sich un meine Arbeit (Someone takes care of my work), 1992, or Travaux abandonnés (Abandoned works), 1992, he solicits a form of “participation” that generates the paradox of planned vandalism in forms of petty theft, barter, and exchange. He thus undermines the assumption that sculpture as a discourse on the conditions of object experience in the present can still be constituted within registers of autonomous objects and spaces, exempt from the universally enforced banality of private property and the terror of controlled space.
Furthermore, the artist’s radical redefinition of late-’60s distribution sculpture and its informe morphologies inscribes his displays within actually functioning circuits of object distribution, such as the circulation of commodities and the rituals of their disposal. In displays such as Souvenirs du XXème Siècle: Marché de Pantin, 1997, or St. Tropez: Exhibition with Artists Showing in the Harbour, 1992, the artist organized his displays in the stalls of markets and offered art reproductions wrapped in frames of silver and gold foil as well as other trivial items to mostly unsuspecting and disinterested audiences (and a few observant art-world members). In exact correspondence, the spaces Hirschhorn treats as “public” are all defined by the most attenuated definitions of “publicness,” like the shelves of cafés and bars (e.g., Zorbas, Paris, 1994) where one normally expects to encounter the decoys of advertising or markers of local and vernacular subcultures (e.g., the bowling club trophies). Even more ephemeral, the artist chooses fleeting and mobile spaces as transient exhibition containers where the absence and inaccessibility of real public space is all the more manifest. Thus, on several occasions he has organized exhibitions inside a van or an old station wagon (Auto-Nacht-Ausstellung [Night car exhibition], Civitella d’Agliano, 1994) or on the flatbed of a banged-up pickup truck (Pub Car, Limerick, 1996) and illuminated the displays for curious spectators passing these strange vehicles at night.
Many of the sculptural/painterly objects that Hirschhorn disseminates in these displays are pieces of wood or cardboard differentiated from mere driftwood by seemingly haphazard or mechanically applied monochrome, painterly marks. Neither painting (signaled by the fact that they are placed horizontally on the floor), nor sculpture (signaled by the fact that they are flat chromatic surfaces), neither readymade objects nor technoscientific geometric constructions, these shards inhabit a precariously ambiguous discursive space, reminiscent of the peculiar status abstraction had acquired in the hands of artists like Blinky Palermo or André Cadere. In their approach, intrinsically connected elements of painting and sculpture appeared as though they were defined by a historically determined dialectical allegory: After the destruction of the utopian promises of abstraction and the disappearance of use-value from the experience of objects, it would now be the task of abstraction to inhabit precisely those spaces and object forms that remained following the double evacuation.
COMMEMORATION AND CULT
Hirschhorn’s radical reversals of the phenomenological models of participation in sculpture occur most poignantly in the altar displays (e.g., Mondrian Altar, 1997; Ingeborg Bachmann Altar, 1998; Otto Freundlich Altar, 1998), where, in a sudden revelation of the dialectics of subjectivity and cult, the commemoration of some of modernism’s most heroic and tragic figures is strangely short-circuited with mass-cultural forms of celebrity.
In these works, the artist accumulates the most banal mnemonic objects (candles, found photographs, placards, stuffed animals, etc.) and presents them in the manner of spontaneously erected street shrines. Crudely inscribed signs pronounce homages (e.g., “Go Piet”; “Thank you Otto”) in the enunciatory registers of sports fans rooting for their team or star. (These inscriptions are similar to the rhetorical figures in Hirschhorn’s 1996 installation of Artists’ Scarves in Limerick, Ireland, in which names from his artistic pantheon, from Alexander Rodchenko to Robert Filliou, were inscribed in the crude typography of fabric letters appliquéd onto vertically striped, brightly colored soccer-team scarves, a grotesque mass cultural echo of the fate of Daniel Buren’s radical critique with the means of painterly/mechanical geometrical striations.) These are first of all homages—pronounced in the guise of a dialectical allegory of the contemporary cult—to the tragically failed figures and projects of modernity that had opposed the myths of an exceptional subjectivity precisely by enacting a newly decentered, collective subject in order to subvert its industrially produced substitutes. Thus Hirschhorn’s altars demonstrate that in the present the artist’s desire to commemorate is inextricably bound up with forms of mass-culturally engineered adulation operating at the very center of artistic production and reception.
Spectatorial participation and sculptural tactility occur in the work in yet another manner: in the frequently deployed, apparently random accumulations of stickers, decals, and other adhesive labels that have emerged since the ’60s as a kind of mechanical graffiti of preprocessed participation and speech (subversive or affirmative). In these identificatory statements and ideological sutures, subjects can iterate the interests of the culture industry as though they were articulating their own. Considering them simultaneously as instances of collective and anonymous enunciation in public space and as ideological interpellations, the work takes the socially specific inflection of collective speech competence and viewer participation (as conditions of containment and control) much more seriously than previous phenomenological participatory models could have envisaged.
The dialectical opposite to this industrially produced dissent can be found in Hirschhorn’s deployment of his own typographic design, where disfiguration and dismemberment take hold of graphic design at large, even of the letter form itself. Unlike the Conceptualists, whose typographic choice of the typewriter text feigned assimilation with the administrative order of everyday life, Hirschhorn denounces that last modernist alliance of typography and technology. Instead he concocts unsavory combinations of non-design and anti-typography (very much integral to his strategies at large) in which typography as bricolage mingles the domestic and the amateurish with an aggressive stupor, generating writing and letters composed from crude tape applications and ballpoint-pen scribbles, weird hybrids of drawing, the found fragments of advertisements, and design detritus, that appear to spring from the deeper recesses of memory in the digital ages. The most extraordinary examples of these deconstructions of graphic design and typography as forces of control within the larger visual regimes of consumer culture can be found in Hirschhorn’s book Les plaintifs, les bêtes, les politiques (1995).
CARGO CULT AND SPATIALIZED READYMADE
Hirschhorn identifies the objects in his displays with the somewhat untranslatable term of Skulptur-Erinnerungen (“sculpture memories” or “memories of sculpture”). One of his most distinct object types (mentioned above) are the meandering bulbs and febrile linear forms made of silver and colored foils that often traverse an entire exhibition, linking diverse images and objects as a labyrinthine network of spatialized readymades. These “tears,” as Hirschhorn calls the more bulbous among the meandering structures, often grow in size and shape to form veritable caves of stalactites and stalagmites, and they make the universal reification of all spatial experience, its total permeation by objects, pertinently palpable.
Another of the more enigmatic aspects of Hirschhorn’s sculptural iconography are the hypertrophic objects whose seriality follows the law of the commodity, not that of Minimalism. Thus, for example, in his display Pilatus Transformator, 1997, the artist modeled a series of giant rectangular volumes from gold foil that seemed to articulate either a child’s image of the chocolate holdings of Switzerland or the gold stock of the country’s banks (which had just attained the apex of infamy at the time, as the degree of their collaboration with fascist economic interests was revealed). Other hypertrophic objects such as the giant watches (or more recently the giant memorial spoons in his display Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake at the Art Institute of Chicago, 2000) are equally modeled from a variety of tinsel.
In the serial installations of his menacing watch props (high-end Swiss models such as IWC and Rolex exclusively), the spectator recognizes not just the threatening violence of the fetish’s universal presence but also the grotesque power operative in this particular cult: What, after all, would be more absurd than the delusion that a luxuriously crafted chronometer could assist a subject in differentiating him-/herself from the universal law of the digital quantification of time? These objects appear as though they had been fabricated by the bewildered members of a distant cargo cult who—in some kind of reverse anthropology—attempt to fathom advanced forms of capitalist fetishism and intensified rituals of commodity culture and private possession.
From the more limited perspectives of sculptural history, the watch props do in fact teach us that fetishism as an overpowering condition of experience was not yet central to the object relations articulated, for example, in Oldenburg’s hypertrophic readymades. Yet it was not the technological per se that was absent from his iconography of the domestic and the vernacular but the object as fetish. The reasons this condition remained largely outside of Oldenburg’s aesthetic purview are undoubtedly complex, but at least I would want to suggest one argument: that in all of Oldenburg’s objects some remnant of a utopian positivity toward the world of commodity consumption as a transformation of everyday life still seemed to apply, an attitude toward the object’s beneficial abundance typical of the ’50s and that was undoubtedly already on the verge of breakdown by the early ’60s.
Hirschhorn’s most haunting structures are these instances of material mimesis, grotesque juxtapositions of commodity objects where the travesty of failed utopian aspirations sparks negative epiphanies. These strategies culminated, for the time being, in his display Very Derivated Products, 1998, where a series of little red rags attached to a serial lineup of vertical fans wildly flutter in the airstream, conjuring lethal memories of the not-too-distant past when utopian aspirations had deteriorated to the military parades of the May Day celebrations in Red Square.
Yet, Hirschhorn’s grotesque dialectics provide sudden insight into the conditions and consequences of the present, where a totalizing atopia flares with even greater menace. Another typical object-structure in this display was the serially arranged umbrellas sold and thrown away by hundreds of people in Manhattan on any rainy day: All the more comical in their most pristine product state, they already anticipate their instant disappearance as waste, the squandering of resources and labor they embody.
The temporalities of these objects (their geopolitical sites and phases of production, their cycles of usage, disposal, and exhibition) are strangely compressed in Hirschhorn’s displays, as though all the object states now had to be collapsed into a single, simultaneous stage. The rush from production in a third-world country to distribution in the first, and from the production of exchange-value to a brief performance of use-value and imminent dismissal as detritus in ever-decreasing temporal cycles, seems to have become the universal condition of the commodity that Hirschhorn’s artistic practice mimetically follows.
Hirschhorn’s work thus confronts an advanced state of fetishization, one from which all ambiguity has been extracted. Recognizing the protototalitarian conditions of consumer culture, Hirschhorn’s practice confronts the linguistic spasms generated by the iterative experience of name recognition and the perceptual branding enforced by the stridency of design with a delinquent mimesis and a hebephrenic semblance of disintegration and destitution. The artist seems to apply what one could call the “Canal Street” model of the public sphere, a condition of spatial experience that is simultaneously both abject and totalitarian in its complete submission of every temporal and spatial unit to the instantaneous enactment of random acts of acquisition, small, incremental incidents of surplus-value production, and a vast production of instantaneous obsolescence and, correlatively, detritus, which is inherent to the total elimination of use-value from all forms of everyday life.
Benjamin H. D. Buchloh is an art historian and critic based in New York. A 2001–2002 Getty Scholar and professor of twentieth-century and postwar art history at Columbia University and Barnard College, Buchloh is the author of numerous books of criticism.
