Thomas Hirschhorn (*1957)

In 1995, at his exhibition Les plaintifs, les bêtes, les politiques (Centre Genevois de Gravure contemporain), Thomas Hirschhorn showed his first collages combining – alongside pictures of himself and reproductions of his own works and those he admires – motifs from fashion and lifestyle adverts with press images of maimed and scarred victims of war. This discomforting association of irreconcilable images marked a radical new departure in the artist’s oeuvre. Hirschhorn demonstrates his confrontational dialectic approach with critical self-interrogation and hand-written commentaries. As in the political collages produced by Dada artist John Heartfield, Hirschhorn is concerned with the simultaneity of disparate realities and with bringing these to our conscious awareness.1 Such a combination also underlies the assemblage of visual material in Buffet. The installation consists of 236 cardboard panels on which Hirschhorn has glued cuttings from adverts, newspaper illustrations, sheets of academic statistics and brand logos, and which he has piled up into a mountain of images with the help of cardboard boxes wrapped in silver foil. Next to the cut-and-pasted images, he has written words of thanks (“Danke”, “Thank you”, “Merci”), sometimes even in conjunction with a (brand) name in order to address those who, in the artist’s view, share responsibility for this unspeakable co-existence of glamour and suffering.

It is no coincidence that the silver pyramid against a yellow background, with its pretty faces and disfigured bodies, calls to mind the angels, martyrs and saints of a medieval altarpiece. […] Since the spiritual promise of redemption has been lost in capitalist society, salvation is linked instead with the consumption of goods. The production and global distribution of these consumer goods in turn maintain the economic conflicts of interest that fuel violent political conflicts. The victims of these conflicts therefore necessarily belong alongside the advertising media and the portraits of political decision-makers on Hirschhorn’s panels. Like a solid sideboard, Buffet brings this unacceptable circle into our comfortable lives, or more accurately into the museum, and demands that we peruse its offerings. […]

Source: Kunst Heute. Die Sammlung Gegenwartskunst Teil 3 / The Collection of Contemporary Art Part 3, Hg. Kunstmuseum Bern / Kathleen Bühler, Bielefeld: Kerber Verlag, 2014, p. 46ff. (Author: Kathleen Bühler)