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Swiss artist thomas hirschorn, in association with the Pompidou Centre in Paris.

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part 1 Art, Paris, porn and the web.

part 2
Looks at art and porn in the context of still imagery and film.

part 3 asks: is sex in art cultural satisfaction?

letter from paris : : matthew rose

thomas hirschorn in paris: under the L 

Thomas Hirschorn, the Swiss artist, recently exhibited some unusual work in a most unusual place: Beneath the Stalingrad metro station in Paris. Ricardo Bloch, an artist himself, discovered this unusual installation and supplies a look...

After seeing Nanni Moretti’s The Son’s Room, I was walking back home along the Canal de l’Ourcq on my way to the Stalingrad elevated metro station when I noticed what I thought was some neighborhood activism. A small structure, made with particle board and strapping tape, which consisted of ten little “dioramas”, five on each side, lit by flourescent lamps. Each piece could have been the work of a clever neighborhood agitprop artist, nevertheless the strange structure turned out to be a “satellite” exhibit from the George Pompidou Center: Thomas Hirschorn’s skulptur sortier station.

Each mini-installation consisted of “sculptures” made with cheap hardware store materials: duct tape, masking tape, styrofoam, scraps of wood, tin foil, postcards, and several video monitors (in the street!) flickering into the busy intersection.  What is odd and potent is the locale: this is one of the poorer quarters of Paris, filled with immigrants from North Africa and Senegal. When after climbing dozens of steps you finally get to the #2 metro line, you are surrounded by a Family of Man menage of Arab men in desert wear, bleach blond black men, women in wildly colorful African dress with portable phones, Sri Lankans, Turks, and a few orphaned whites.

Each of Hirschorn’s pieces refers to the fate of politically engaged art in the context of (art) history and capitalism.  One displays two mock “prizes,” named after two writers: the Austrian Robert Walser and the Frenchman Emmanuel Bove.  These make-believe awards, covered in golden tinfoil and with photocopies of the authors’ portraits, are given to nobody (as prizes often are), but stand as objects which honor individual expression tossed in the teeming metropolis.  Another contains huge Mercedes and Volkswagen logos made of wood wrapped in tin foil. Iconic and silvery, they mock a glorification of capitalism. All of the pieces are bitterly ironic and yet hermetic. What could the immigrant passersby make of this work? Still the work has not been trashed or grafittied, as if its integrity magically demands respect. No, there isn’t a security guard.

Another piece presents a gallery of postcards of famous sculptures, while on the outside a strip of white paper, roughly written with magic markers, delineates a time-line of art. Another is a video loop of a man stacking Marlboro boxes until they fall down - the pamphlet supplied by the Pompidou Center, which in keeping with the spirit of the exhibition is taped to an adjacent telephone booth, suggests that this piece is an “interpretation” of Brancusi’s “endless sculpture.” Most of the work is obtuse, like the one in which tin foil stalactites hanging in front of images of souvenir spoons. Others are tributes to relatively unknown sculptors who died in the Holocaust or were featured in the Nazi “degenerate art” exhibition as threats to German culture. One piece I really liked is simply and wonderfully crappy: A couple of flat trophy cups covered with tin foil evoke both religious chalices and the glorification of sports.

Beyond the wonderful museums Paris offers, this is one of the most exciting exhibitions I’ve seen in a long time.  Why?  Because it seems to meld into its “place” (and who is to say that being in the “Stalingrad” neighborhood is a coincidence!) - there’s something correct about its materials--cheap stuff. It has an immediacy and an urgency. And it is also dead serious. It all makes me think of the difference between American artists and Europeans, where the Americans are still quoting cartoon characters while the Europeans continue to dig into the Holocaust and capitalism’s commodification of art.

Further explanation: http://www2.centrepompidou.fr/expositions/hirschhorn/

Journal and images of the exhibition: http://www2.centrepompidou.fr/expositions/hirschhorn/journal00.htm

Ricardo Bloch is an artist living and working in Paris.  His e-mail is: rbloch@club-internet.fr

Matthew Rose is a Paris-based artist and writer. His e-mail is: mistahrose@yahoo.com

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