ARTIFICIAL HELLS

artificial hells
Thomas Hirschhorn, Bataille Monument, 2002. Installation view showing library.
exotic marginalized groups and thereby contributing to a form of a social
pornography’. By contrast, she writes, Oda Projesi ‘work with groups of
people in their immediate environments and allow them to wield great
influence on the project’.
It’s worth looking closely at Lind’s criteria here. Her comparison is
based on an ethics of authorial renunciation: the work of Oda Projesi is
better than that of Thomas Hirschhorn because it exemplifies a superior
model of collaborative practice, one in which individual authorship is
suppressed in favour of facilitating the creativity of others. The visual,
conceptual and experiential accomplishments of the respective projects are
sidelined in favour of a judgement on the artists’ relationship with their
collaborators. Hirschhorn’s (purportedly) exploitative relationship is
compared negatively to Oda Projesi’s inclusive generosity. In other words,
Lind downplays what might be interesting in Oda Projesi’s work as art –
the achievement of making social dialogue a medium, the significance of
dematerialising a work of art into social process, or the specific affective
intensity of social exchange triggered by these neighbourhood experiences.
Instead her criticism is dominated by ethical judgements on working procedures
and intentionality. Art and the aesthetic are denigrated as merely
visual, superfluous, academic – less important than concrete outcomes, or
the proposition of a ‘model’ or prototype for social relations. At the same
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