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Thomas Hirschhorn 'It's Burning Everywhere' DCA 2009
Claire Bishop’s book Installation Art 2005 is a good base for understanding the rise of the walk-in world but holds a few vital floors in its generalisations. She equates the essential difference between the installation and the tableaux as the difference between dream and fantasy. By this we understand that the dream is first person; viewer becomes protagonist within the installation. In the fantasy, or tableaux, we identify with the characters but are prevented from becoming the psychological centre. I find the idea of ‘fantasy art’ particularly hard to grapple with, mainly because of the shiny, metallic-finished, unicorn/fairy painting connotations. I was thinking about Bishop’s analogy when I went to see the Thomas Hirschhorn exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts in November 2009 It’s Burning Everywhere. This is not tableaux, the audience moves in/through the space of the installation as if among a dream, or a horrible nightmare. However, they are not a participator/protagonist; they have no say in the outcome of this work (unlike, perhaps his Bataille Monument in Kassel 2002). The public are navigated around the space, mobilised into mental and physical action, yet restricted to the prescribed route... don’t touch anything, don’t move anything, don’t take flash photography. This last order seemed particularly bizarre as I know for a fact that the entire work was skipped at the end so surely flash photography could not have done too much damage. There is no simple cut and dry Bishop answer to the space that installation fills in the art world. As I have said before, this non-definability is a strength, it can negotiate many complex ideas through the bringing together of disparate elements, perhaps in line with a kind of Dada bricolage technique for the 21st century.
Claire Bishop’s book Installation Art 2005 is a good base for understanding the rise of the walk-in world but holds a few vital floors in its generalisations. She equates the essential difference between the installation and the tableaux as the difference between dream and fantasy. By this we understand that the dream is first person; viewer becomes protagonist within the installation. In the fantasy, or tableaux, we identify with the characters but are prevented from becoming the psychological centre. I find the idea of ‘fantasy art’ particularly hard to grapple with, mainly because of the shiny, metallic-finished, unicorn/fairy painting connotations. I was thinking about Bishop’s analogy when I went to see the Thomas Hirschhorn exhibition at Dundee Contemporary Arts in November 2009 It’s Burning Everywhere. This is not tableaux, the audience moves in/through the space of the installation as if among a dream, or a horrible nightmare. However, they are not a participator/protagonist; they have no say in the outcome of this work (unlike, perhaps his Bataille Monument in Kassel 2002). The public are navigated around the space, mobilised into mental and physical action, yet restricted to the prescribed route... don’t touch anything, don’t move anything, don’t take flash photography. This last order seemed particularly bizarre as I know for a fact that the entire work was skipped at the end so surely flash photography could not have done too much damage. There is no simple cut and dry Bishop answer to the space that installation fills in the art world. As I have said before, this non-definability is a strength, it can negotiate many complex ideas through the bringing together of disparate elements, perhaps in line with a kind of Dada bricolage technique for the 21st century.
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