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Hirschhorn Response

The installation* of the Thomas Hirschhorn’s ‘The Incommensurable Banner’ in the Fabrica Gallery (a former Holy Trinity Church) as part of the Brighton Photo Biennale is problematic on many levels. I’m left wondering how much consideration was given to how the piece operated within this space of presentation. In my opinion the title is depressingly wordy, and immediately bad foots the majority of its audience. Whenever was a protest banner less explicit in its statement?

Glancing at the table of assembled books (required reading or proof of process?) I began to feel that this shows remit was too broad and over-arching in its project. It seemed to me to be attempting to engage a multitude of discourses including protest, anti-religion, secularity, Islamophobia, free-dissemination ‘v’ propaganda and evidence, all approached with Hirschhorn’s palpable forensic distance and utilitarian handmade style.

The images represent a collection from those in current circulation, sources it seems are barely considered noteworthy, and though the Internet is obviously the primary resource there is no indication of the context from which the images have been pulled. There’s an unnerving sense of clinical slickness as the reader passes through the frosted security screen, past the necessary pantomime that alerts the viewer to the potential for ‘SHOCK’.

Most if not all the images are from comparatively recent conflicts. Though not made explicit, a general scanning indicates that the majority of the victims are not white, Western or European. This is important because the piece is proposed as being ‘created with reference to a tradition of protest’. The victims/parts of victims follow notions of the ‘other’ though in extremis. Then there are, for me, the absentees - absence of identity, location, motive, culpability or purpose.

Hirschhorn’s negation of narrative through collage literally allows only one reading – the representation of the murderous capacity of contemporary conventional weaponry. Where are the images of dead allied western troop types? Why the random inclusion of bystanders? Is the reader simply expected to accept these images irrefutably as proof? How authentic are these and what editorial process have these images undergone pre-collage? The whole is coalesced into a morass of random anonymity and yet T.H. chides us ‘that in respect to identifiers – if we need anymore info than what we’re presented with that we should some how be ashamed’ in his mind we’ve already begun to distance ourselves from the subject. This is a radical assumption and the timbre of T.H.’s assertion shows an un-subtle contempt for the audience/reader. The works ability to “implicate us in the realities of war waged on our behalf” seems an incredibly patronising and incommensurably European proposal, within the perceived maxim that ‘if your not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem’.

The negotiation of the banner in its scale and aesthetic, offers the viewer nothing. It must be said that the form it takes in no way engages in its mimicry or lip service to the protest banner – It naturally fails to offer intimacy (too confusing, too poorly made and yet what a painful endeavour to treat so shoddily), It easily shakes off anything that would articulate it as in anyway sublime (the space is still more impressive than the work it houses). It perhaps speaks best of its direct relationship to an oversized used toilet roll that bears the pre-charnel evidence of the very worst of human incident. Every level of aesthetic care seems to have been abandoned, sacrificed I can only suppose, for the gravity of the piece overall.

The conceptualisation, the text that accompanies the piece seems ridiculously polemical, questionable statistical information strung together with a series of hackneyed quotes from seriously overused and disastrously prevalent sources. Quotes that hang like a litany proposed as scripture. The failure of this work though is not in its general misconception, not in its contempt for the subject or in T.H.’s assumptions about his audience no poignantly it fails in its efficacy as a project because they’re at best only copies of photographs. That’s all.

The proposal of this show - to generate discussion, and to operate as a necessarily uncomfortable juxtaposition for traditional war photography to be seen elsewhere in the Biennial - is perhaps achieved but at what cost?.

*(Here following I do not differentiate between choices, decisions made by Fabrica on behalf of Thomas Hirschhorn)