Thomas Hirschhorn

“Concretion-Re” repeats (with slight variations) an exhibition held in 2006 at the Creux de l’Enfer art center in Thiers, France. Once again, Hirschhorn aims to “give form to the geological or medical term Concretion,” which refers to a stony mass within the body or in the earth. As one walks through the labyrinthine gallery—transformed by his signature brown adhesive tape, handwritten messages on torn bits of cardboard, flattened boxes, and harsh fluorescent lighting—it becomes evident that Hirschhorn is as concerned with the process of hardening as he is with coalesced form itself. Moving through this architecture, one encounters texts and images, glass cases containing store mannequins or their parts, and books, magazines, and photographs that piece together a macabre portrait of the present.

References to Goya and Susan Sontag reiterate the omnipresent themes of disaster, war, and pain. Mono Show-Case (Goya), 2007, houses a male mannequin with the word LOVE taped to his chest. Books about the artist are laid at his feet, one of which has been replaced by a monstrous protuberance of tape and stone. Similar outgrowths line the walls, hang from the ceiling (Pendulum, 2006), and materialize from the bodies of other mannequins placed in vitrines. One pathway leads to a double row of nude figures, attached to one another by horizontal beams taped to their heads, lined up opposite an entire wall of decapitated mannequin heads stuck with nails and screws (Embedded Fetish, 2006). These are interspersed with the same bloody photographs of destroyed bodies and faces that paper the walls throughout. Hirschhorn’s own mute talking head appears on television screens barred by the ubiquitous brown tape, a silent pendant to Alain Badiou and Mehdi Belhaj-Kacem, the wordier philosophers he references. Even more remarkable than the violence and the force of its presentation in this exhibition is the concretion of Hirschhorn’s desire, in this case, to find a form for truth.