Thomas Hirschhorn:
Proposal

In Münster I am making a sculpture sorting station. It is a freestanding, precarious construction of roof battens, plastic, wood, plexiglas, neon tubes, and cardboard. The neon lighting is important, because I want the interior of the station to be visible day and night, seven days a week. The lighting is also important, because it gives the space an autonomy, makes it an alien body, a space without time, a space free of hierarchy. Of course the electricity for the lighting has to come from somewhere. But I like the fact that this also demonstrates a connection, a dependency, a belonging: even this room must be supplied with energy, must be supported.

The viewer cannot enter the room, but is able to look in from all sides. The space is subdivided into ten different parts, into stalls, as it were, draped with differently coloured, printed or unprinted linen sheets. The size of the stalls is determined by need. In them are exhibited the sculptures or videos that I will make especially for this purpose.

First of all, the sculptures and things to be shown. They are relatively large, handcrafted trademarks made of cardboard: the Mercedes logo, the VW logo, then the peace sign and the Chanel logo. All of them are flat forms covered in silver paper, the kind of things seen in television reports of demonstrations. This group of sculptures, for example, is placed in a stall draped with a red sheet. I should add that the stall doesn’t reach to the ground, but only to about table height, like a display window. Sculptures similar to the trademarks are the aluminium cups. Trophy forms are again cut out of cardboard, so as to resemble the kind seen at soccer games or other sporting events where the fans wave handcrafted oversize trophies - World Cup, Cup of Champions, European Cup, Cupwinners’ Cup, Intercontinental Cup - in order to spur their team on. These sculptures are exhibited in a stair-step form in a special stall, as in any clubhouse. There is also an Otto Freundlich video: I plan to go to Pontoise, a suburb of Paris, and film the two bronze sculptures by Otto Freundlich - whom I adore - in the garden of the local museum there, in order to show them in Münster. Of course in Münster there is also a wonderful sculpture by Otto Freundlich, but it is exhibited in a terrible location, which means that his work still isn’t given the distinction it deserves, namely the very highest! Even the Nazis paid tribute to the explosive plasticity of his sculptures by using a picture of one of his sculptures, Der neue Mensch, for the title page of the catalog Entartete Kunst. My video is a homage.

In another sculpture, likewise a homage, I will reconstruct a work by the artist Rudolf Haizmann which is no longer in existance. A small illustration of this sculpture is shown in the catalog Entartete Kunst of 1937 in Munich. In the catalog, the 1928 work is calles Fabelwesen (Mythical Creature). We know only that it was made of marble, of unknown dimensions, and acquired by the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg. Presumably it was destroyed. The artist was born in Villingen in 1895 and died in 1963 in Niebüll. For Münster I will create a cardboard and wood reconstruction of the photographed sculpture, which I have known for a long time. In doing so I want to recall it, reexamine it, imitate it, just as when an important scene is replayed again and again in slow motion, in order to comprehend it better.

A Marlboro video will also be shown as an unending video especially for the sculpture sorting station. In it, someone tries to erect a monument out of empty cigarette boxes; it collapses again and again.

There will also be a stall with tears, silver paper tears, which I first made in Berlin in the Künstlerhaus Bethanien and called them Robert Walser Tränen. These tears are of varying sizes, and are made from coloured silver paper or covered with spray paint. There are red tears, blue tears. Two videos of a woman making a slight up and down movement with her head will also be shown in the stall. In one she is associated with red, in the other with blue tears hänging on the wall behind her.

Another stall shows stalagmites and stalactites of silver paper, hanging in front of a theme panel with the subject of "spoons for collectors". The stalgmites and stalctites are proof of the reversal of the prevailing fascination with the dominant discourse, since the one that rises from below becomes greater and greater, while the one that grows from above becomes smaller. Hence also the "spoons for collectors" theme: here I want to take seriously the unbiased, inner illumination of these spoons, but also their limitation. No place for kitsch, no space for cynicism, no air for 2éme Dégré.

In another stall, art postcards and posters of sculptures are shown, which are given volume by being pasted onto wood. They are a personal sculpture collection. It is not my collection, but I am attached to them inasmuch as they apprehend the sculpture not as volume, not as the mastering of space, but as a picture, i.e. something two-dimensional.

All of my sculptures for Münster proceed from the two-dimensional. it is the rejection of context, background, origin, circumstances. My works in public space are never about context. Nor am I trying to provoke some reaction or other. For me, questions of context and, more recently, of decontextualization are only the stuff of conversation, a distraction from work. In fact, this empty conversation is eminently suited to avoiding discussion of questions of commitment or the strengths and weaknesses of the work. Works in public space, however, have a great deal to do with weakness, of plastic weakness. For me that is commitment, not being shrewd, smart, clever. I don’t want to have ideas for public space, I want to show my work, anywhere, with no distinction between important and unimportant places, just as I don’t want to distinguish between important and unimportant people. It is also the resistance to the virtual: being up is being up, being down is being down. More is more, less is less. An unemployed banker is as unemployed as an unemployed taxi driver. The motor of my creation is not esthetic questions or art questions. Rather, it is the human condition and questions of life that give me the energy to work. I want to work from necessity.

Back to the stalls: in a double stall there will be a Robert Walser Prize and an Emmanuel Bove Prize. For both writers I will make trophies in different sizes, statuettes like those awarded to the prizewinners at the Oscars or the Goldener Löwe. For Münster, of course, this is just an excuse to make a sculpture for my beloved writers, a mobile monument, so to speak. The sizelessness of these sculptures is important, for they can be larger or smaller; an essential part of them is reducibility, enlargeability, multiplicity. Another stall shows an architectural model of wood, cardboard, and styrofoam and a gallery model in which eight of my works are real. It is not the works that are reduced, but the space, so much so that now the works appear gigantic, because the viewer optically enlarges them.

The name sculpture sorting station is derived from the location of my work. It is a provisional location, since the construction will be dismantled after the exhibition. But it is a location that is unequivocal - unequivocal because I am invited to Münster, a city I don’t know and whose history and inhabitants I know nothing about. But I come with the desire to make sculptures and show them to the residents and visitors of this city. And so I don’t want to make reference to anything that has to do with the city; that would be pretentious. For that reason I need a location where, on the one hand, my work can be viewed day and night, seven days a week, and which on the other could just as well be in another city, another country. So I selected a location that is a non-place, i.e. a place where people can or must go for reasons that have nothing to do with the geography or history of the place. One such place is the paper and glass recycling depot, those lines of containers where people go to bring their garbage, not for art. There are other such places - automatic bank machines, telephone booths, cigarette and condom machines. I chose the garbage collection site, because materials with which I work are brought to it: cardboard, old magazines, plastic, aluminium. I work with these materials, because they are economical. Economical is not cheap; economical is political. I work with these materials, because everyone knows and uses them. These materials are disposable. They exist, though not for the purpose of making art. Economy interests me. Economy has nothing to do with rich or poor; economy needs connections, it connects. Economy is boundless, economy is active, offensive. Ecology, on the other hand, bores me, and this nombrilistic, dull, passive ecological thinking has long been a source of irritation for me. These garbage collection depots are an expression of it. Here nothing is constructed, no projects are devised; rather, good conscience is collected and conformity verified. The human energy needed to distinguish between brown and green glass is energy drained, energy burned, which is then unavailable to perceive real differences, make life decisions, adopt positions. Someone who cleans, collects, and carries yoghourt cups to the recycling center has no energy left to fight injustice, racism, and burgeoning fascism. But that’s what I want to do. I want to make my art political.