Political art, distracted.

THOMAS HIRSCHHORN: UTOPIA, UTOPIA = ONE WORLD, ONE WAR, ONE ARMY, ONE DRESS

CCA WATTIS INSTITUTE FOR CONTEMPORARY ARTS 

SAN FRANCISCO, CALIFORNIA 

MARCH 10-MAY 13, 2006

I imagine Thomas Hirschhorn's exhibition "Utopia, Utopia = One World, One War, One Army, One Dress" pleased many: artists, art observers, academics (particularly those who have, for the last decade or so, told students that polities and art do not mix), passionate liberals (as well as those who see themselves as timelessly anti-establishment, but who have shied away from activism), and busy art school undergraduates who will be comfortable with the "street" look and duct tape construction of the exhibition. However, for all its ambiguity, faced with the mass of Hirschhorn's collecting (thousands of objects in tight proximity), one could not help but think about the deformity of war. This was the show's success--though a measured one.

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The installation was comprised of uniforms from around the world, documentary and fashion photos of soldiers in camouflage, music videos set among battles and explosions (the singers camouflage-clad), and consumer items appropriating the pattern of camouflage such as snowboards, T-shirts, and halter dresses. There were also scrap wood "trees" with mannequin bodies, maps, and globes of the world "growing" camouflage tape mounds. There were toys of war placed both in battlefields and in a large doll house, books on war scattered in a living room covered in camouflage tape, and forty-foot, ambiguous, cardboard forms that could be bullets, missiles, or submarines. The installation filled three galleries--a lot of real estate to take up, and to Hirschhorn's credit, one does not begrudge him his excess. The tragic flaw of "Utopia, Utopia" was that Hirschhorn allowed the viewer to see how entirely seduced he is by critical theory; he threw aside a chance to serve as a witness, choosing instead this infatuation, which is unfortunate since he succeeded at making a map that shows the cognitive discord of war.

Less importantly, the subtleties of his "One Dress" message--consumerism's appropriation of camouflage in civilian clothing--was less compelling than the immersion experience he gave viewers of all sorts of objects. In them we could see one enormous, global casualty: ourselves as conquerors, our own loss of righteousness making us victims of politics and greed in the end.

If I had not read Marcus Steinweg's accompanying essay, "Worldplay" (2005), in full, I would have been more inspired by "Utopia, Utopia," which featured printed fragments of the essay in the installation. (1) As posters and signs hung throughout the exhibition space, Steinweg's text fragments functioned adequately as Barthesian empty signs, and contrasted with the very specific war documentation. They could have been taken from any critical theory text. Open-ended, they sometimes related to objects nearby, but their solipsism more often represented other breakdowns of meaning that accompany war in our time. (I found myself remarking that in our time--a time capable of so much technologically--the appearance of brutal carnage seems like a special effect from a science fiction film, a film about an evil civilization in a surreal time.) This jumbled use of Steinweg's text works but Hirschhorn himself placed the essay booklet front and center in the installation, both thematically and physically (six-foot stacks of them by the door, offered for free with a giant "take away" sign). And while empty signs evoke creative meanings, when read in the context of an intentionally opaque text, they appear rather as nihilistic thumbings of the nose at explicit values, diplomacy, and activism--the very things that, in the real world, offset greed and violence.

The trendy coupling of visual art with a dense piece of writing that seems only distantly related appeared an unnecessary attempt at additional depth where none is needed, or a way to appease a friend. Frustratingly, one had to read the full essay, if one followed the creators' clues. On the other hand, if one merely glanced over Steinweg's post-structuralist, free-associative work, one was able to remain suspended in a thoughtful, emotionally receptive place vis a vis Hirschhorn's display of very specific accessories of war. But as a team, they chose theory over life, while claiming in Nietzschean terms to do just the opposite. Throughout "Worldplay," Steinweg laid claim to human values such as consciousness, love, and truth, but he writes that they require "chaos" and "violence" to give the full picture. This felt like a class-privileged meditation, betraying a lack of respect for human life. The essay threatens to capsize the project with its hypocrisy.

However, to the credit of Hirschhorn and Steinweg, one can take its two creators at their words, and--with Jacques Derrida footnoted extensively--Steinweg's words are indeed fair game as "authorless" texts. Steinweg's text was cut up and positioned graphically, large and small, as signage and labels in the installation itself. A plethora of slogans marking metaphoric crossroads were appropriately open-ended yet provocative: "Dream World" and "The Exterior," for example, worked as deconstructed fragments in this context. Similarly, axiomatic statements like "to touch truth is to step out of what is knowable" are meaningful and longer thoughts like "deconstruction affirms another image of the subject, a hyperbolic subject of another freedom that overflies its objective boundedness in the universe of facts" amplified Hirschhorn's sincere study of liberation, rather than muffling it.

"Utopia, Utopia" promises to gain in importance as time elapses, marking a pivot back toward the very real fire of world events, and not coincidentally, the art community's timely rejection of the enchantments of Theory.

EMILY KUENSTLER is a 2004 MFA graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute, California.

NOTE

1. Marcus Steinweg, "Worldplay" in Thomas Hirschhorn: Utopia, Utopia = One World, One War, One Army, One Dress (Reykjavik, Iceland: Oddi Printing, 2005).