Thomas Hirschhorn: Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston/Gladstone Gallery, New York

ArtForum, March, 2006 by David Joselit

GLOBALIZATION TYPICALLY CONNOTES the free circulation of capital and information across geographical boundaries. Thomas Hirschhorn knows better. His vision of globalization drags information through the mud: Images are humiliated, subject to cheap Xerox reproduction, rough mounting on cardboard, and ostensibly haphazard composition. This representational idiom rebuts the happy world of network connectivity envisioned by Microsoft or Google with a pestilential mess in which pictures engulf the viewer like sludge. Hirschhorn is a fan of Gilles Deleuze, but unlike many of the philosopher's academic acolytes in the United States who use terms like deterritorialization and reterritorialization abstractly, he enacts such processes formally, causing the streams of images included in two recent exhibitions, "Utopia, Utopia = One World, One War, One Army, One Dress" at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and "Superficial Engagement" at the Gladstone Gallery in New York to form cavernous terrains fit for spelunking. In an educational film produced by the ICA that accompanies "Utopia, Utopia," the artist comments that the presence of "outgrowths" (tumorlike accretions of packing tape in camouflage patterns on the many mannequins and globes included in the exhibition) can denote the emergence of an idea, a passion, a problem--or a cancer. For me this equation between signification and cancerous outgrowth is more compelling than the equation made in the show's title, between utopia and the international dissemination of camouflage designs, not only among armies, but, via advertising and fashion, to civilian populations as well. An outgrowth suggests a form of communication, or information, that does not pretend to a transparency of meaning, but rather operates according to the exorbitantly hyper-reproductive logic of tumors. The circulation of images, Hirschhorn suggests, may obstruct messages as easily as it conveys them.

Hirschhorn is one of the few artists I am aware of who is committed to practicing an ethics of images, by which I mean exploring and demonstrating the ways that pictures fashion our relation to one another and establish the experience of a shared world through representations of community or representations that inspire a communal identification. Within this general project his exhibitions in Boston and New York demonstrated two distinct approaches. "Utopia, Utopia," wherein the theme is the worldwide proliferation of camouflage, arises from the thesis that in displaying a particular abstract motif (by wearing camouflage or buying products emblazoned with it), one joins the One World and One War of a global society. Put crudely, Hirschhorn suggests that fashionistas and pop stars the world over are sartorially "signing up" for the One War brought to us by the likes of George W. Bush when they wear camouflage on the streets of Paris, Los Angeles, or Tokyo. I happen to think that wearing camouflage is distasteful in our current atmosphere of militarism, but I nevertheless find Hirschhorn's proposition extreme and almost comical in its utopianism. The exhibition displays such a profusion of items carrying camouflage designs, ranging from cigarette lighters to underwear, that the motif begins to lose its potency as a point of identification. And yet this drastic accumulation, and the resulting normalization of camouflage, is a logical consequence of the casual consumption of highly charged signs. How did we arrive at a culture where fashion models wear military drag and suburban executives drive Hummers? Are the fashion-driven cycles of consumption themselves a kind of camouflage, allowing a person to blend in, to fade away, so as to forget about the One War? Hirschhorn seems to answer in the affirmative, suggesting that our sense of community belonging is defined by an abstract military sign system that, like the Internet, has migrated into civilian life.

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If "Utopia, Utopia" veered a bit too close to cuteness with its relentless iterations of domesticated camouflage, this was not the case with "Superficial Engagement." Here, an ethical question regarding images was posed in the starkest possible terms: Unbearable photographs representing the shattered bodies of war casualties mixed with the complex patterns of abstract art. The former were collaged and jumbled together as a kind of topographical base in the life-size dioramas that filled the gallery, while many of the latter, including reproductions mounted on cardboard of abstract art by the mystic Emma Kunz, either descended or ascended, depending on one's perspective, from the landscape of carnage in formations reminiscent of birds in flight or Bernini-esque bursts of divine light. "Superficial Engagement" stages an opposition between the capacity of images to injure, sicken, or enrage, and the pretensions of art (particularly abstraction) to heal. Must art's political engagement be superficial in the sense of shallow and futile, Hirschhorn causes us to ask, or is it superficial because it is necessarily rooted in the meaningful, or even mystical, play of surfaces? As difficult as it was to look at the spilled intestines and blasted skulls that Hirschhorn offered up, I felt a sense of relief that finally an artist was taking on the issue of war directly--and right in the heart of cheerful, business-as-usual Chelsea. Although Hirschhorn's opposition of figurative evisceration and abstract healing risks extreme simplification in its stark dichotomy, his directness is bracing. It gives the lie to our American world of euphemism in which devastating bombardments are advertised as "surgical strikes" and wars are planned by Halliburton.