Nothing to Say: Hirschhorn’s Universal Gym
by CMatlin
The Installation View of Thomas Hirschhorn’s Universal Gym
I have always been suspicious of Swiss-born installation artist Thomas Hirschhorn’s art; it always strikes me as a little too easy. The blatant in-your-face qualities of his installations recall a petulant teenager who really wants to shake things up but can’t get out of his own way. Hirschhorn’s 2006 show Superficial Engagement, at Barbara Gladstone, was at its core an assault on the viewer, one which seemed more intent on being upsetting than saying anything of real value. Made up of four large platforms that the viewer had to navigate through, the jerry-built work combined ghastly images of violence and war in the Middle East, mannequins studded with nails and screws – made to look like African fetish objects – textiles, references to the Swiss mystic Emma Kunz, video monitors, and newspaper articles with headlines stuck to the walls. The space became so cramped from the mass of objects that it was impossible for the viewer not to be confronted with some image of horror: a headless body, a dismembered corpse, the disfigured body of a small child.
Hirschhorn’s argument for the piece is that by never letting the viewer relax the engagement with the images becomes superficial, which is to say that the experience is kept on the surface; we remain confronted by the things we see, unable to argue or pontificate our way out of the encounter. The things we see remain unfilterable and through this experience art might allow us to be healed in the face of the world’s terrors. A nice idea, but it ultimately fell short. The chaos of the installation made it impossible to be truly horrified or indignant. Those that did feel that way are always looking to be offended in some way or another. Pictures of terror are just the things they saw at that moment. Yet with all these images leering at the viewer, one ultimately became inured to the experience. Superficial Engagement turned out to be less terrifying and merely interesting, perhaps even comic in its absurd aggression. The use of Emma Kunz, as the New York Times critic Ken Johnson pointed out, seemed out of place in Hirschhorn’s narrative. As Johnson aptly put it, “For all its brutal obviousness and faux-populism, there is something deeply confused and confusing about Mr. Hirschhorn’s project…He bullies the viewer and induces a vague, free-floating guilt.” Is a work really so powerful when we have to be deliberately hit over the head with our own helplessness and impotence so that we can’t help but succumb to an agenda, in this case one that is both political and artistic? One never gets the sense when viewing a Hirschhorn that the art is dangerous, that it has menace and can wound us. Not like Edward Kienholz (and later Nancy Reddin Kienholz), whose installations really are terrifying and unsettling. Duchamp was right when he declared that Ed Keinholz was “a marvelously vulgar artist.” The same can’t be said for Hirschhorn.
And now Hirschhorn is back, pointing out the problems of the world and still carrying the torch for art as social critique. But what if that social critique is empty? What if its meaning really is meaningless (and not in the way Camus believed in the freeing power inherent in lack of meaning) and it all comes down to trying too hard? There is no denying that Hirschhorn is smart and thoughtful, but that isn’t enough. There are plenty of smart and thoughtful people in the world, though most are probably not as ambitious as Hirschhorn, and this is where his work falls apart. It coasts along on its own painfully evident intent. Universal Gym is his first New York solo show since Superficial Engagement and once again he is forcibly making his point known. There is something to be said for subtly, for not providing all the answers to the viewer at once. Thomas Hirschhorn doesn’t believe this. He lays it all out and explains it away, negating any chance for real involvement with the work. I had heard that Universal Gym was really just that, a gym for anyone in the heart of Chelsea. It seemed like an inspired idea. It is not. Instead Hirschhorn is still bound up in his old ways, still slapping things together with tape and cardboard, going for that D.I.Y approach, and as heavy-handed as ever.
Taking up all of Barbara Gladstone’s West 21 Street gallery space, Universal Gym is a simulacrum of an upscale health club, replete with workout equipment, mirrors, fans, free weights, exercise balls and mats, stationary bikes, treadmills, and TVs. Hirschhorn has put motivational imagery of steroid-ripped muscle men on the wall next to a wallpaper image of an exotic beach at sunset. The word “Sculpt” is emblazoned on the back wall. There is a map of the world on the other. Plastic water bottles and aluminum cans of Coke are taped to the floor. And then, as is his tradition, he goes over the top. Never content simply to let things alone, Hirschhorn can’t help but fill things to the brim as if he has some sort of obsessive-compulsive disorder that doesn’t allow him restraint. There is an enormous black medicine ball that sits in the middle of the room; to the right of it is a make shift room filled with TVs and a treadmill, the televisions displaying what look to be readings of heart and lung function, like some sort of sports-science training facility. Behind the medicine ball are four mannequins in Plexiglas cages. They stand with their right arms extended: one holds a weight, one a heart, one an enormous pill made out of a globe of the earth, and one a tub of protein supplement. All are missing their hearts, a hole in each chest signifying where they once were. One of the mannequins has no flesh but is wearing expensive trainers, one is nude, two are clothed.
All of the workout equipment is unusable, taped up to itself or down to the floor. Hirschhorn’s familiar cardboard and brown tape is everywhere. Apparently this is some sort of commentary, the gym as metaphor for all of us. The press release states that, “the Universal Gym becomes somewhat comic, a ship of perfected fools sailing blindly through the storm.” Hirschhorn himself has written that the piece “is a space for exhaustion, for hanging on, for staying upright, and staying in shape while the world falls apart.” Is this what passes for social critique, poking fun at those who go to the gym, analogizing that concern with one’s physical appearance is akin to removing one’s heart? How trite and easy. There is no bravery to this art. Even as misguided as Superficial Engagement was, there was some heart to it, some attempt to say something. With Universal Gym, Hirschhorn is merely making empty value judgments and providing the viewer with no legitimate questions to ask herself.
Edmund Burke wrote that “a clear idea is therefore another name for a little idea,” Hirschhorn tries so hard to be clear and is so desperate to say something that his ideas become little. But one gets the sense that his thought itself is not little, and this is what makes him all the more maddening. That he is so deliberate, so committed to his ideas, ultimately serves to undo him. The point is made the minute one enters the gallery and forgotten as soon as the doors close on the other side. I had hoped that Universal Gym would really be just that, a gym open to the public in blue-chip Chelsea. Now that would have been daring. Were Hirschhorn to have provided a free gym for two months, a place where all walks of life could congregate, the work would have been legitimately interesting. Perhaps that little slice of life would allow us to see if we really are trying to “stay in shape while the world falls apart.” Instead we are presented with an unusable space filled with empty metaphors on the human condition, a condition that needs no sugarcoating, for the very act of living allows us to know the problems of being human.
By playing at social critique and engaging with the most obvious ideas Hirschhorn succeeds in being just as ineffective as if he had remained silent and made nothing at all. He has written of his work: “What I want is to stay disobedient! I want to try to resist, protesting and I want to refuse myself the tendency of making things ‘arty’, nice and clean. I want to work without cynicism, without negativity and without self-satisfying criticism – I do not want to be critical – I want to do work, which resists the moralist and nihilist tradition!” This, however, is not the work of protest. He succeeds in not making things “nice and clean,” but fails not to make things “arty.” This is not cynical art, but it is nonetheless deeply self-satisfied and moralist. Hirschhorn is nothing if not a moralist. His critiques are couched in making us disappointed in ourselves, in trying to make us better, the better becoming that which we are not. I am unsure if this is actually us becoming better or becoming little Thomas Hirschhorns. Hirschhorn should embrace his moral high ground and tell us how to remake our disastrous selves. Perhaps his work would be more powerful if he was overtly cynical and a little surlier. As it stands now he tries to terrorize us from afar, pushing us around but pretending he has no agenda. He’s slick, but he’s also transparent and clumsy. The only people that find his work upsetting are those longing to be upset. Let them have him and leave the exploration of really terrible things to those artists who not only know them when they see them but are unafraid to let those things run amok and be truly terrifying.
