Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn has often relied on an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink aesthetic, using detritus, mannequins, books, boulders, flashlights and photographs, tying them all together with his signature brown packing tape. What makes his jumbles of debris worth viewing is their underlying polemics. Or maybe it’s the other way around: His tendentiousness is easier to take when presented as landfill.
This time, Hirschhorn takes inspiration from the headlines, specifically, the 2012 sinking of the cruise ship Concordia, in which he finds much drama but only a hint of class warfare. One’s first impression on entering his installation is, Holy cow! The gallery has been transformed into the interior of the ship, turned on its side, with any furnishings not bolted down tossed against one side. The chintzy decor—brown and gold carpeting, striped upholstered chairs, glitzy light fixtures, cheap wall moldings—is priceless, redolent of a lower-middle-class vision of luxury. There’s also a grand piano, a mezzanine bifurcating the space, dozens of orange life jackets and hundreds of smashed dinner plates, filling the ship from wall to wall. The only hints of politics are provided by pages from a Marxist economics text scattered among the furniture and a large-scale reproduction of Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa plastered on the ceiling.
Unfortunately, with its three-dimensionality and punchy color scheme, Concordia, Concordia is a little too reminiscent of a Judy Pfaff wall relief or worse, a scene from The Poseidon Adventure sans Shelley Winters. Perhaps the incident itself is too lightweight a subject for the artist. After all, this mishap wasn’t the result of a war or anything, but rather the fault of a captain who decided to show off his hometown to passengers and ran aground in the process. Hirschhorn should stick to what he knows best: conflict, nuclear disasters and the demise of Western civilization.—Barbara Pollack