Shock and awe

Installation view of "Superficial Engagement"Photo: Courtesy Gladstone Gallery

Desperate times call for desperate measures, which might explain Thomas Hirschhorn's powerful and confoundingly complex show "Superficial Engagement," at Gladstone Gallery. The swarming installation combines graphic images of casualties of war, reproductions of geometric abstractions, mannequins sprouting screws, oversize coffins, carpets covered with headlines, an impenetrable text on kinetic physics and a biography of Swiss artist Emma Kunz, who believed her abstract drawings had the power to heal. (Viewers can even vent their frustration about what it all means by hammering nails into strategically placed wooden posts.) TONY met with the 48-year-old, Paris-based  artist at the gallery the morning after his opening.

Time Out New York: All the screws and nails make me think of a terrorist's bomb. But why let people hammer them into wooden posts?
Thomas Hirschhorn: To implicate them. And in World War I, Germans could pay money to pound a nail in a wooden figure, supporting the troops by building symbolic armor.

TONY: The show's title, "Superficial Engagement," sounds a little like a military term. Is it?
TH: No, I heard it during a critical discussion about contemporary art. It was meant as a negative comment, but I heard it and thought, "That's me."

TONY: How so?
TH: If you want to have an impact on something, first you have to touch the surface. You need to have a superficial engagement before you can go any deeper.

TONY: Warhol said he was "a deeply superficial person." The photographs of war dead in your show have an obvious affinity with his "Death and Disaster" series.
TH: Warhol was the first artist who I felt implicated me in his work. When I saw the painting129 Die in Jet as a student in Zurich in 1979, everything changed for me. There was so much power and immediacy and simplicity to just enlarging a newspaper headline. It was like an affirmation of reality.

TONY: The reality in the photos you chose is pretty undeniable. What was your source?
TH: Most of them were taken in Iraq, some are from Afghanistan, a few are from Bali. You can't find pictures like this in the mainstream media like the New York Times. I went online and to underground magazines.

TONY: Given our involvement in Iraq, was it important to show these images in the U.S.?
TH: The context has absolutely nothing to do with it. As an artist I have to confront the reality of the times I'm living in. Even if we don't live in Baghdad, where something like 30 people a day are blown up, it is part of our world. People think far too much about context. They don't have the courage to come face-to-face with things for themselves. I feel very strongly that art has the power to directly involve you. But people want the artist to provide an answer instead. When artists think too much about context, they're like economists or politicians. 

TONY: Why pair abstract images with pictures of death?
TH: It's very important that these are not just photographs of dead people, they're images of destruction. This man [pointing to a photo of a body on fire] is not just dead, he is destroyed. I wanted a confrontation between destruction and images that could be seen as decoration. All the pictures here are just degrees of abstraction and fragmentation.

TONY: Emma Kunz didn't distinguish between the formal, the conceptual and the transformational aspects of her art. Is that your approach?
TH: I love that Kunz said she was an artist for the 21st century almost 100 years ago. But no, I see the world as completely fragmented. I refuse to offer an experience of the whole. That's why I always put so many things inside the work. Not to overwhelm people, but to force them to choose what connections to make for themselves. Don't wait for the artist to tell you what is important.

Thomas Hirschhorn's "Superficial Engagement" is up at Gladstone Gallery through February 11 (see Chelsea).