Thomas Hirschhorn

17.07. - 04.09.1999
Thomas Hirschhorn (CH), Mathilde ter Heijne (NL), Susan Turcot (D/K), Via Lewandowsky (D)
Group exhibition at Arndt & Partner, Berlin

27.04. – 07.07.07
Thomas Hirschhorn
“Stand-alone”
Solo exhibition at Arndt & Partner, Berlin

PRESS RELEASE
Arndt & Partner is pleased to present its fourth solo show of the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn, to mark the opening of the Third Berlin Gallery Weekend.
Thomas Hirschhorn's sculptural constructions and environments are famous for transporting knowledge and information by alienating the usual means of presentation and skewing our perspective on things. To achieve this, Hirschhorn frequently favours elaborate, expansive installations, seemingly chaotic structures that use everyday materials that are nonetheless symbolically charged. Hirschhorn's spatial assemblages are skilful stagings of the imperfect, wild associative landscapes whose energies are intended to inspire thought, as Hirschhorn himself stresses: "I don't want to make interactive art, I want to make active art, work that activates the brain." The result are installations where the beholder has to engage with signs, symbols, and memories, and which change our perspective on the possibilities of art and life.
In Hirschhorn's new work "Stand-alone", which will extend over all four rooms of our Gallery 1st Floor, the beholder also is confronted with the richness of visual materials that is so typical for the artist, materials that make connections between apparently unconnected things. Kicked-in doors, sofas and armchairs wrapped in tape, are made equal by their wrapping and placed next to each other. Cardboard fireplaces, old electronic devices, wood, clocks, books, and other documents form a spatial collage, the purpose of which is "to create a new world from elements of the old one." Without pretension and exceedingly cleverly, Hirschhorn succeeds in creating a sense of profusion, chaos, and the potential of conflict that goes hand in hand with the experience of current life worlds.
In his latest exhibition, Thomas Hirschhorn is showing a three-dimensional realisation of his plan "Where do I stand? What do I want?" (which is available for visitors of the gallery) that thematizes the question of the artist's own position, possibilities of giving form, and independence in terms of content. "How can I make a work that doesn't in any way subject itself to historical facts? And how can I make a work that touches the beyond of history (which I live in)? How can I make in the current - my historical filed - make a super-historical work?"
Faithful to his unique way of giving form, the confusing architecture of his latest installation follows its own artistic logic. And if apparently excessive demands are raised to a principle of form giving, this is informed in Hirschhorn by a concept, because "chaos is the world in which I live, and chaos is the time in which I live," as he explains. Art, on the other hand, for him is a tool "to get to know the world, to confront it, to experience the age in which I live."
The choice of materials is also a conscious political decision. The cheap product packaging materials of the consumer goods industry for Hirschhorn are an appropriate, stringently used means of expression for his socially critical art. In them, his resistance against cultural grievances is articulated, as is a revolt against capitalisms desires, which Hirschhorn translated into a state of permanent creative anarchy. Available in every household, because of their everyday familiarity they avoid any appearance of exclusiveness, and thus underline the inclusion of the beholder which is so important to Thomas Hirschhorn: "Stand-alone is, as always, made for a non-exclusive audience, and as always, I want to include without neutralising, I don't want to exclude anybody."
With "Stand-alone", Thomas Hirschhorn once again reveals his ability to translate, through his aggressive visual worlds, political ideas and philosophical language into an accessible understandable language, to create reference and literally create new spaces for ideas and engagements. The result are art productions that make no aesthetic claims, but instead call for confrontation and dialogue about existing conditions, and which the New York Times considers "some oft the best being made today."
Thomas Hirschhorn was born in 1957 in Berne; from 1978 to 1983 he was a student at the Schule für Gestaltung in Zurich. Since the mid-1990s, he has gained international acclaim for his installations, and today he is considered one of the most important artists of his generation. He has been living and working in Paris since 1984. His works have been shown in countless solo and group exhibitions. He conceived and realised more than 50 works for public spaces.

14.12.2002- 30.1.2003
Thomas Hirschhorn (CH)
“Doppelgarage”
Solo exhibition at Arndt & Partner, Berlin

PRESS RELEASE:
THOMAS HIRSCHHORN DOUBLE GARAGE
On the integrated texts by Marcus Steinweg:
I will write at least ten texts each of which can be read on its own. At the same time there is a thematic cohesion  to the texts consisting in the common presence of Nietzschean motifs. Each of these texts is closed within itself  and intact. They are texts which have been made available to Thomas Hirschhorn as material for his Double  arage. The texts will be integrated into the work, either magnified or reduced in size, as required. Just as my contribution to the Bataille monument in Cassel represents the attempt to go beyond Bataille to the thinking of  the present, these texts too are not supposed to be texts about Nietzsche. They are texts beyond Nietzsche. It is  a matter of appropriating the problems of Nietzsche’s thinking – with Nietzsche and without him –, to demonstrate  and to re-activate the continuity and pertinence of his motifs for today’s political philosophy. The critique of  Christianity and its anti-life doctrine will be examined with respect to the extent to which the birth of economic  liberalism (capitalism) out of the spirit of resentment and revenge (that is, from that ideology which Nietzsche links to an essential unfreedom) opens up the question concerning the possibility of a second birth of freedom, a  freedom which eludes the economy of rights and its politics of compensatory justice.
From here a revision or revaluationf all the concepts and categories of moral philosophy results. An altered  concept of action, politics and practical reason becomes necessary which with the re-erection of the philosophical  category of the subject extends the subject’s responsibility into infinity in order to withdraw it from the  (postmodern or late capitalist) protectorate of its constitutive impotence. Seen in this way, Nietzsche would be not  so much the thinker of perspectival illusionism or relativism, but rather the philosopher of irreducible, unsharable and ungroundable responsibility, a responsibility which is also a name for freedom insofar as Nietzschean  discourse, in struggling against Christianity, also struggles against the entanglement of the Christian subject inguilt, pangs of conscience and resentful cowardice. To declare war on Christianity means for Nietzsche at first  (and that is the point where he touches on Spinoza and Deleuzian Spinozism) to vitalize the subject within the  horizon of a responsibility which isolates it and to redefine it through the body and its sensuous capabilities. “To annihilate the passions and desires simply in order to prevent their stupidity seems to us today to be itself merely  an acute form ofstupidity. We no longer admire the dentists who extract teeth so that they can no longer  cause pain…” (Götzen-Dämmerung, KSA 6, p. 82) The subject of responsibility is a sensuous subject, not a  sentimental one. It is sensible without being
sensitive, narcissistic or whingeing. It does not avoid every act of cruelty in order to be responsible vis-à-vis the  real which in itself is a kind of violence and cruelty, a kind of brutal asymmetry. And Nietzsche does not tire from  evoking this cruelty with diverse names, citing and recapitulating it, so to speak, in order not to share with those whom
he calls his enemies the displeasure, credulity, naivety and fearfulness which are supposed to protect against life  and becoming as such. The praise of cruelty unfolds as a recognition of the multiplicities and irreducibility of the  contradictions and differences and their conflict. “The decisive feature in a Dionysian philosophy, saying yes to contradictions and war, to becoming…” (Ecce Homo KSA 6, p. 313). The grand politics which nature expects of  himself and Nietzscheanism is a politics of difference, of instability and permanent development, a politics of  affirmation of the open and the undecided, i.e. of the undecidability of every difference. It is neither a politics of  heteronomous, totalitarian, dictatorial and always negative, disempowering incapacitation, nor does it correspond  to the anticipative, a priori weakened morality of the levelling of every form of difference and otherness (at
present it is above all Slavoj Zizek who speaks up against this always insincere morality of capitalist multiculturalism and its repressive and, one must add, resentful tolerance, thoroughly in the sense in which  Nietzsche appraises as an invention of  Goethe, “the tolerant human, not out of weakness but out of strength,”  Götzen-Dämmerung, KSA 5, p. 151). The tasks which arisefor reactivating and affirmativelytaking up Nietzsche’s  olitical  ontology must first reject these two errors, the two figures of “false relatedness”, a relatedness which, as  Deleuze says, “can be found inthe train of every ‘cursed thinker’  (penseur maudit)”:  . The assimilation of this  thinking into Nazism and anti-Semitism promoted by Nietzsche’s sister, Elizabeth Nietzsche, whose obvious  falseness and absurdity happily seems to be generally recognized today and 2. The other also scarcely acceptable
reduction of Nietzsche to his (undoubtedly imposing and affirmable) Europeanism and cosmopolitanism, etc., that  is, the reduction of Nietzsche to the good  Nietzsche which makes itself guilty of a further censorial defusing of his  work. (One should take Nietzsche seriously even where it hurts!) To open Nietzsche up to the presentmeans  rhaps  first of all – and that would be an act of political and not just philological responsibility – to deal responsibly  with his texts even there where they are not closed to the experience of a cruelty which is today  lmost taboo, but to mobilize this cruelty which by definition represents an excessive demand for any thinking, as an  excessive demand on one’s own thinking instead of enclosing oneself in the phantasma of a future which is spared cruelty. Non-liberalist freedom therefore represents the condition of possibility of the most extreme  responsibility (which is always also responsibility towards what is most extreme, towards cruelty and the absolute otherness of the other) as well as its highest degree of endangering. I will try to show that Nietzsche’s insight into the equiprimordiality of ethicity which is not morality and the violence which threatens it steers all his movements  in thinking and that the denial and negation of this equiprimordiality is part of the conscious or unconscious  hypothesis of all ideological systems, whether they be primarily political, economic, social, religious or ontological  dispositives, whose concrete cruelties are witnessed by history in general. If to think with Nietzsche means to think  dangerously in a certain sense, then this also means that a strong and uncompromising concept of responsibility,  of communication, ethicity, justice and decision is necessary, the redefinition of freedom as the responsibility to  freedom and the freedom to responsibility in order to withdraw the subject from the control of morality, the  imperative of conscience, history, society and its opinions (doxa) and its pathos of self-righteousness. Subjectivity can only be thought as this continual conflict. Marcus Steinweg Marcus Steinweg, born in 1971, author of  hilosophical and literary texts, lives in Berlin. His latest publications are:  „Krieg der différance“ and „Autofahren  mit acan“ (both Koblenz 2001) and „Der Ozeanomat. Ereignis und  Immanenz“ Cologne 2002). Coming soon:  „Bataille Maschine“ (Merve Verlag, Berlin 2003). Translated from the German by Michael Eldred, artefact text &  translation, Cologne  .

22.01. - 20.03.1999
Thomas Hirschhorn (CH)
„Das Bernsteinzimmer“ - "The amber-room"
Solo exhibition at Arndt & Partner, Berlin

02.03. - 14.04.1996
Thomas Hirschhorn (CH): „Virus Ausstellung“
Solo exhibition at Arndt & Partner, Berlin
 

18.04. - 13.06.1998
Kabinett: Thomas Hirschhorn (CH)
„Flipper mit roten Tränen“
Solo presentation at Arndt & Partner, Berlin