SEPTEMBER 2011
IN AN INTERVIEW published when his 2008 work Das Auge (The Eye) was installed at
the Power Plant in Toronto earlier this year, Thomas Hirschhorn declared: “I want
to give a form which resists facts, which resists opinion and which goes beyond actuality,
which reaches beyond information—that is why I invented the motif ‘eye and its capacity
to see everything red. . . . The eye doesn’t need to know—the eye just sees and that’s
what counts.”¹ Coming from an artist famous for his impassioned political engagement,
this statement is surprising, if not shocking. Hasn’t a great deal of politically
inclined art, from the advent of Conceptualism to the heyday of institutional critique
and right up to contemporary docudramatists such as Walid Raad and Emily Jacir, flaunted
its proximity to information—taunting and titillating us with “facts” aimed at changing
our minds (or merely confirming our beliefs)? And contra Hirschhorn’s claim that
“the eye doesn’t need to know,” hasn’t the value of art, since Michel Foucault transformed
cultural studies, been linked precisely to its status as knowledge, as discourse?
And hasn’t this discourse been recognized as the mold for something promiscuously
labeled a subject (an avatar put in place of the complexities of human experience
that is so straitened in its capacities, so caricatural in its motivations, that
it strikes me as more like a marketing profile than a breathing person)? Yet Hirschhorn
still insists that he wants to resist facts, to reach beyond information, and to
maintain the centrality of the eye that “just sees.”
What is Thomas Hirschhorn trying to tell us? Does he really mean to say that Das
Auge’s tableau of bludgeoned toy seals, its world flags and protest placards in various
patterns of red, the horrible photographs of shattered bodies that paper so many
of its surfaces, the chic dummies modeling blood-splattered fur on a diagonal runway,
and the giant childlike model of an eye presiding over it all are not meant to tell
us anything? The answer is YES! Hirschhorn understands that we are simply told too
much. Most information, in art as in the media, is prepackaged pabulum: As he declares
in the same interview, “There is more and more to analyze today, media, journalism,
opinions, and comments want to impose their ideology of information. I do not need
to be informed—I need to be confronted with the truth.”²
If there is a politics of art today, it has nothing to do with the bland consumption
of information—whether in newspapers, on iPads, or on museum walls. Neither can it
be found in the inflated, politically correct “deconstruction” of discourse or the
exposure of cartoon subjectivities. Let’s face the fact that most of what we call
political art is no more than mildly polemical grist for the market: radical-chic
consumption analogous in its (largely unintended) affirmative function to the expensive
locavore markets and restaurants that are found in the same cities that serve as
capitals of art exhibition and consumption. A truly political art now—if it is possible—has
little to do with Adornian anti-art strategies of negation on the one hand or representing
explicitly political themes on the other. One may easily glide unperturbed by the
yards and yards of unambitious displays—“professional but flat,” a colleague quipped
to me—of this year’s Venice Biennale, consuming the fully deracinated “politics”
of curator Bice Curiger’s “ILLUMInations” without its having the slightest effect
except mild dyspepsia (if, that is, one can stave off the more virulent affliction
of boredom).
The specificity of our current moment lies in a degree of image saturation that was
unimaginable throughout most of the past century. As we are constantly told, we now
consume images 24/7: on our phones, in elevators, in taxis, etc. Under these conditions,
modernist tactics of trauma or defamiliarization are no longer effective. While ethical
dilemmas regarding the challenges and seductions of spectatorship were central to
the entire history of twentieth-century art, it is a result of critical laziness
in recent years that Guy Debord’s concept of the spectacle—a surfeit of images, accumulated
like capital—is so often posited as a quasi-totalitarian condition of visual domination,
both in the art world and in consumer culture at large. Hirschhorn is among the few
artists who have succeeded in introducing sufficient complexity—and ambiguity—into
the mechanisms of the spectacle to push viewers beyond either blind affirmation or
blanket condemnation. He has put in their place new strategies of selection and affect:
an epistemology of search. When he says, “I do not need to be informed—I need to
be confronted with the truth,” truth for him means making a decision about what to
see and how to look.
The kind of confrontation Hirschhorn demands is a form of witnessing. You and I don’t
need an artist to tell us for the thousandth time that wearing fur is bad. We need
to feel it incumbent on us to decide for ourselves. Witnessing requires us to shift
our spectatorial position: to enter the time of image circulation and make a judgment
about what we see there. The acts of being present and giving testimony sound deceptively
simple, since any visit to an exhibition, no matter how casual, requires physical
presence and the expenditure of some modicum of attention, a prerequisite for testimony.
But passing by a long sequence of works on, say, the walls of the Arsenale in Venice
and ticking them off with an art-historical sound bite (i.e., a “meaning”) does not
cross the threshold of presence, let alone witnessing. It merely constitutes consumption,
which requires nothing from us (except, when necessary, that we pay). To be present
in a deeper sense requires what Boris Groys has identified as a vivid realization
of contemporaneity: the status of being “‘with time’ rather than ‘in time,’” or that
of being a “comrade of time.”³ Consumption implies closure: We consume what has assumed
a form (even if that thing and that form are “immaterial”). Being a comrade of time
means that the work unfolds simultaneously with our reception of it. While this is
hardly a new idea (it has motivated a great deal of art since Minimalism), it is
one that has become harder and harder to realize as it has become easier and easier
to commodify or monetize anything from garbage to shares in mortgages anywhere in
the world.
The two most talked-about art events in New York of the past couple years—Marina
Abramović’s The Artist Is Present, 2010, in her retrospective at the Museum of Modern
Art, and Christian Marclay’s The Clock, 2010, at Paula Cooper Gallery (and currently
in Venice)—are both paradigms of works that stage vivid situations of contemporaneity
(not coincidentally, each was set up in a kind of theater within a museum or gallery).
It was extraordinary that so many visitors to MoMA waited in line for hours to gain
a place across a table from Abramović in order to meet her gaze as part of The Artist
Is Present. What I found more surprising was that crowds with no intention of seeking
a seat at the table spent significant lengths of time riveted by the sight of others
having this experience. What did they see? No more (and no less) than a naked version
of the fundamental creaturely link: a mutual gaze. At any moment this gaze could
be broken or generate unpredictable effects (tears, yawns, giggles). Although Abramović
was criticized by many in the art world for self-promotion, I see her work differently.
It was an uncompromising and undoubtedly exhausting commitment to liveness—at the
very moment when liveness seems most under threat by our famously mediated forms
of socializing. The Clock, on the other hand, which marks time on a twenty-four-hour
cycle through a collage of film clips featuring clocks showing the actual time, creates
an oxymoronic form of mediated liveness. Viewers are simultaneously in the time of
cinematic narrative (with its formulas of suspense, horror, conflict, and romance)
and still rooted in the time of their own unfolding day. I found myself watching
The Clock just before a lunch date, glad to be both immersed in the work of art and
on time for my appointment. The “escape” function of cinema was bent back into the
everyday exigencies of marking time.
Such kinds of contemporaneity fulfill one precondition of witnessing. Aside from
presence, however, a further requirement is the positive decision to testify, which
is a decision not only about how and what a spectator sees but also a weighing of
its veracity, its authority, its ethical consequences, etc. This necessity of taking
a stand is what makes witnessing a political form of spectatorship. But I wish to
be explicit here: I am not arguing that the onus of creating the conditions for presence
and testimony falls entirely (or even preponderantly) on the spectator. The role
of artists is not merely to provide content for such experiences but to generate
situations that enable witnessing. We are used to consuming countless images in endless
streams—it’s easy to become inured to even the most horrific pictures that enter
our field of vision. On the other hand, it is an affirmative, political act for an
artist to establish an occasion on which witnessing must occur—and this is extremely
difficult to do.
Here is where Hirschhorn’s work has been so inventive. Crystal of Resistance, 2011,
the artist’s installation in the Swiss pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale, offers
the latest example of the various types of pressure that he applies to visitors to
lead them to confront their ethical position as witnesses. First, all of his environments
are purposely and extravagantly overproduced, so one inevitably asks oneself on entering,
“Where should I look first?” There is a kind of blindness involved in the horror
vacui of Hirschhorn’s works that makes one acutely aware of the difficulty of finding
a place for one’s gaze to rest. Consequently, the possibility of “comprehending”
(or consuming) the structure of one of his installations is correspondingly remote.
In short, one must decide how to navigate them. Second, with Hirschhorn’s recent
use of extremely explicit images of war casualties, typically drawn from the Internet,
one must also ask oneself whether to look—on account of both squeamishness (they
are very painful to see) and delicacy (there is something obscene about peering at
these shattered and often partially naked bodies gruesomely turned inside out). Finally,
there is the fundamentally political question of one’s personal responsibility for
looking. Hirschhorn can lead a spectator to this point, but it is her own responsibility
to act on it (or not).
The dense environment of Crystal of Resistance features several sculptural effigies
of mobile devices such as smartphones and iPads, as well as a cyclonelike tower of
monitors whose screens show images of fingers scrolling through a seemingly endless
digital-camera roll of photographic carnage and occasionally zooming in, as if human
digits were literally probing the gaping bodies made accessible through technological
reproduction. A visitor encountering this tower is pressed to ask herself, What does
it mean to “touch” these bodies? Is it OK to have the world on one’s smartphone and
adopt “scanning” (the same type of looking fundamental to window-shopping) as one’s
principle of global mobility? Is looking enough, or is looking too much? As the philosopher
Peter Sloterdijk recently declared, “The reality construction of subjective capitalism
is in fact fully built on competitions for visibility.”⁴ Hirschhorn stages such competitions
as lures for the spectator.
The most profound species of question prompted by Hirschhorn’s work is how to give
meaning to looking. Networks are often imagined as sleek, smooth, and frictionless,
while in reality they are full of trash, redundancy, and jury-rigging—just like Hirschhorn’s
extravagant environments. As its title indicates, Crystal of Resistance makes use
of crystalline principles of construction, characterized by a process of repetition
and reflection that is rhizomatic in its irregularity and thus distinct from the
geometrically ordered seriality of Minimalism or Conceptual art. As in nature, the
crystalline in Hirschhorn’s hands is organic, so pictures and objects combine into
formations rather than conforming to an “intelligible” discursive structure as would,
say, a photo essay. Hirschhorn operates from the conviction that images follow their
own set of “natural” laws. The mechanism of celebrity offers a good analogy. After
a certain tipping point of dissemination, images begin to generate more and more
reiterations: They become newsworthy in and of themselves. In other words, pictures
grow like crystals, proliferating rapidly after their initial nucleation. Consequently,
it is not the iconography of crystals that matters in this work, but rather the behavior
of crystals—as a model of the origin, replication, and concentration of images. Hirschhorn’s
environment, one might say, crystallizes out of the spectacle: Its form is as indigenous
to its ecological conditions as stalactites and stalagmites are native to the environment
of caves. The artist insists on this primacy of emergent form when he writes, in
his statement accompanying the piece, Art is the problem and art can give form to
the problem. There’s no solution to figure out—on the contrary—the problem must be
confronted. And this is only possible in a panic. Panic is what gives form and this
form is art.”
In its initial equation of information with objects, and in its subsequent belief
that promulgating information can lead to “figuring out” a solution (even if through
subversion or “deconstruction”), Conceptual art has lost its relevance. It and its
progeny have tumbled into the status of just another “service product” sold in a
knowledge economy. If, as Hirschhorn exhorts us, there is no right answer (or, in
other words, no art-historical sound bite with which to categorize an artwork), we
must be more alert in our looking and in our attesting to art. Hence the insistence
that we must be present in order to make a decision about a formation of images,
and that we must then testify to its effects, both personal and political. But first
an artist has to lead us to the point of caring—perhaps even put us in a panic. For
if art is ever to become genuinely political again, it will have to do so through
a politics of witnessing. And this presumes the vivid, visceral assertion (at which
Hirschhorn excels) that looking itself is not innocent—it is a commitment, a contract,
an embarrassment, an accusation, a turn-on, and an assault, but never just a simple
act of consumption.
David Joselit is Carnegie professor of the history of art at Yale University.
—
NOTES
1. “Gregory Burke Speaks with Thomas Hirschhorn,” in Thomas Hirschhorn: Das Auge
(The Eye) (Toronto: Power Plant, 2011), unpaginated.
2. Ibid.
3. Boris Groys, “Comrades of Time,” in What Is Contemporary Art?, ed. Julieta Aranda,
Brian Kuan Wood, and Anton Vidokle (New York: e-flux journal, 2010), 32.
4. Peter Sloterdijk, Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation, trans. Mario
Wenning (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 203.