Thomas Hirschhorn thrives on contradiction.
He is a sculptor who does not sculpt and a political artist who does not serve political ideology.
He creates environments for particular spaces but resists having them called installations and rejects site-specificity.
He overwhelms viewers with the number of objects in his pieces and at the same time denounces contemporary art that intimidates.
This all has served the Swiss artist so well that scarcely a year after his Chicago debut in a group exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art, he has returned with not one but two solo offerings, at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Renaissance Society.
The Institute piece, “Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake,” is new, created especially for the museum; “World Airport,” at the Renaissance Society, is an adaptation of a work shown at the 1999 Biennale in Venice, Italy.
Both installations have handmade objects of cardboard, plastic and aluminum foil that the artist has linked to hundreds of texts and images. Broadly speaking, the pieces are about the current state of the world and what is known as globalization, though they convey this far from clearly.
“I am interested in giving an image of the world like I feel it — in fragmentation,” says Hirschhorn. “The world is very, very complex, too complex for me, and I try to understand the complexity. My contribution as an artist is to link things together that I can’t understand. I deal with contradictions, confusions.
“I try to give the world in my head a physical aspect in space. I know I have too much information (in each piece) but I will not make a selection. I’d like to show the most that I can. I don’t think everything is important but it can be. I don’t say, `This is important.’ You, the spectator, have to make such a judgment for yourself because I have not understood the whole. I’ve only understood what’s important for me.”
One matter of consequence for Hirschhorn has been to work simply and economically, with materials everybody uses. Another is to have each and every inclusion in a piece result from a conscious selection that gives structure despite the possible appearance of chaos. Further, all objects should be only the size they need to be, never inflated for the sake of intimidating spectacle.
Hirschhorn creates assemblages or collages in three dimensions but calls himself a sculptor, following the example of Joseph Beuys, the protean German who came to believe art was inseparable from social organization. That kind of ecumenism presently defines Hirschhorn’s politics, though it was not always so. He began his career in the mid-1980s as part of a Parisian collective of communist graphic designers.
“It was my education. That’s all,” Hirschhorn says. “In the collective I realized I was not interested in doing (advertising or propaganda) even though I agreed with the human ideas. I didn’t want to do work that was in the service of an ideology. So I had to make the choice to be an artist. I was always against it before, but it was an error of mine. It was a political error because I had felt an artist was somebody who didn’t care about society.
“I was concerned with social ideas. That was always true. It’s what for me makes the work. I cannot understand how an artist can work with no critical position. I really can’t understand it.”
“Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake” is about the need to eat — and the possibility of not eating — in the present world order. Each of its 12 Brobdingnagian spoons celebrates a different idea, person or organization as on commemorative spoons of the past. Each honoree relates to a specific vision of utopia, which the piece’s texts and images explore. Those explorations are, in turn, connected by tinfoil arteries to a huge central form Hirschhorn calls a “world cake.” It is divided like a pie chart and “decorated” with problems such as famine and war.
Taking in all of this is quite a task for the viewer. Intense looking is, of course, necessary but soon proves not enough. Scrutiny is only the beginning.
“I am very optimistic about the human capacity to reflect,” Hirschhorn says. “What is beautiful? When people reflect on ideas. Obviously, you have to look first, but then I want people to think about (what they’ve seen). I believe in the spectator’s capacity to reflect. It’s the one thing that is human. That’s why I give all this information.”
“World Airport” presents an artificial tarmac with 24 handmade airplanes representing different nations. A control tower relates to Hirschhorn’s welter of information, which viewers can examine from seats that suggest a waiting room. The central idea is that airports are neutral zones in which all the world’s people and problems are nonetheless represented. The artist employs the notion to suggest, among other things, a cynicism that he feels is part and parcel of globalization.
Hirschhorn’s adaptation of “World Airport” to the unusual space at the Renaissance Society indicates what he calls his pragmatism. He does not want to make pieces that are specific to one site. Instead, he welcomes changes forced by different spaces, enjoying the challenge.
“I’m not interested in an aesthetic result,” Hirschhorn says. “I’m interested just in the artistic will, which can be adapted. Of course, you have to respect the spirit of the work, and I try to do it. But aesthetics are a dead end for everybody. I am only concerned with giving a form that is the clearest reflection of a momentary image in my mind.
“I don’t believe in quality. I am against it. Always there is thinking about quality: This is better, that is less so. I have suffered from it. But I just like to work with energy. When you do something `better,’ it’s worse. I know it. For me, it’s very, very important not to attach ideas of quality. Not at all.”
Is his work, then, a call to action, a tool to change the world?
“No. The action is for people to reflect,” Hirschhorn says. “That’s the kind of action I want. I hope that I want to change the world, but I do not use art as a tool. Never. Art is not a tool. Art is not an approach. Art is a free space for the possibility for people to reappropriate the world.”
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Thomas Hirschhorn’s “Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake” will be at the Art Institute of Chicago, 111 S. Michigan Ave., through April 9; “World Airport” continues at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 5811 S. Ellis Ave., through Feb. 27.
