Thomas Hirschhorn: Doing Art Politically: What does it mean?

Hirschhorn, Thomas. "Doing Art Politically: What does it mean?." The Royal Academies Schools' Annual Lecture Lecture, the Royal Academy, London, November 5, 2008.

Key Words: politics, the other, form, multi-tack significance, decision

Other Words: mannequin, surfaces, the specter of evaluation, the metaphor of "going behind"

Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn is best known for his large installations marked by their handmade aesthetic. His two and three-dimensional collages combine banal materials including tape, photocopies, low-quality images, toy animals and other familiar “stuff”. Hirschhorn discussed his recent installation at the Succession (Vienna, Summer 2008) in a talk at the Royal Academy (London, November 2005). Of particular interest were his comments on “form,” “other,” and “multi-tack significance,” and how these dynamics relate to the distinction between "doing art politically" and "doing political art".

Form: The question of form, argues Hirschhorn, is always the most important, because it is here the political significance an artwork is determined. At stake in an artist's formal decisions are two concerns in particular: “Where does the artist stand?” and “What does the artist want?”. Hirschhorn believes that artists must answer these questions by determining how their work will "come together": how the aspects comprising it interrelate. In the case of The Eye, these include: (1) the materials (tape, photocopies, etc.); (2) the tool (similar to a motif; in this instance, an eye); (3) the dynamic (the colour red); (4) the technique (collage); (5) the premise (an eye that only sees red); and the goal (a new "sense" with which to create a new world).

Hirschhorn differentiates "form" and "aesthetics". If the form turns on the relations between the parts and the whole, the aesthetics results from these relations by manifesting them with sensory-emotional value. As such, a work's aesthetics is not something that happens in advance. It arises through the artwork’s making and presentation. Interestingly, Hirschhorn claims he is often disappointed in the aesthetics of his work, lamenting, for instance, the tape's shabby appearance. However, this lament is secondary to staying “true” to his formal decisions, because it is here, he believes, that an artist takes a political position.

There is something very reassuring about Hirschhorn’s formula. Making decisions and then following through on them sets a developmental trajectory. At the same time, it makes the lines of affect clear, at least on the surface. This working process bespeaks Hirschhorn's individual control: the terms for his engagement are self-determined in advance.

For better or for worse, collaborative making does not operate in this way. To begin with, very few decisions can be taken for granted. Multiple interpretations of what these decisions mean are shaped by the collaborators’ respective points of view. Rough consensus may help to establish shared understanding but it has limits. It is ill equipped, for instance, to accommodate shifts in perspective at the level of the individual within a collaboration. Collaborators are invited to voice their positions at the time when decisions are made. But unless a decision is reviewed, there is no mechanism in rough consensus for registering how positions change.

This limitation locates a difference between mine and Hirschhorn’s understanding of form. In his case, form is bound up with the political implications of a decision. In collaborations like Critical Practice and Future Reflections, however, form turns on the politics of the decision-making process itself. In other words, decision-making in artistic collaboration could be understood as a form in its own right--though how this form might be understood as art is by no means self-evident. It remains, to the best of knowledge, both underdeveloped in the theory and practice of collaborative art.

Other: Hirschhorn says he makes work for an other, including himself as an other. This is not say, however, that he makes work for himself. His identification of self as other implies a process of self-objectification, of distancing oneself from one’s self to create space for different experience(s).

While Hirschhorn did not discuss making work for himself as a specific other (nor, for that matter, any other other), it is nevertheless interesting to speculate about who this other or others might be. My sense is that Hirschhorn’s other is largely void of eccentricities, particularities and specificities. He is a generic figure whose very humanity resides in his universality. This speculation springs from the (modernist) interest in absolutes at play in Hirschhorn’s work. His art is nothing if not anti-relativist. Good and bad, yes and no, true and false: he embraces binaries to oscillate rather than vacillate between them, perhaps for moralizing effect.

Significantly, the other is not a monolithic category in Hirschhorn’s view. He distinguishes between types of other by declaring that although he makes work for an other, his other is not art critics, curators, etc. While aware and respectful of their assessment of his work, something he terms the “spectre of evaluation” (after all, these people are just doing their jobs), he does not work for them; he does not pander to their interests and expectations. Or at least this is his claim.

Multi-tack Significance: This is not a term Hirschhorn uses. But he implied as much when he talked about the ways in which he chooses objects that invite multiple readings, objects that resonate with various kinds of cultural significance. Consider, for example, his propensity for mannequins. Their various associations make them a useful sign on several accounts: (1) They look like people, they are sculptures of “us”, and he enjoys the instance of misrecognition/recognition they invite upon encounter. (2) They are used to both sell stuff and protest stuff. Although not common practice in my experience, Hirschhorn claims mannequins often don signs around their necks as a kind of protest by proxy. (3) They have a long legacy in the history of avant-garde art; the Surrealists, for example, often used mannequins in their work.

What is striking about Hirschhorn’s multi-tack significance is the way in which he summons all these references simultaneously and does so to create friction between them in his installations. How exactly this unfolds in aesthetic experience is something I am still trying to ascertain.

Making Art Politically vs. Making Political Art: For Hirschhorn, this distinction seems to reside largely in the artist’s decision-making process, in what kind of form his content will take. While failing to address this distinction at length, he emphasized the artist’s responsibility to go behind the surface of theory, practice and images, especially iconic images, in an attempt to empty them out of their specific significance.

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