ARTIFICIAL HELLS

pedagogic projects
into which the project was integrated, and local residents who ran and
used the site. Like Chan in his account of Godot, Hirschhorn gives an
impressively polished lecture about the project, articulating its four
phases (preparation, set up, exhibition, dismantling) and sixteen ‘beams’
of activity, but this structural overview fails to convey the unpredictable
social mix that was magnetised by his idiosyncratic celebration of
Spinoza. In the past, Hirschhorn has produced documentation of his
‘monuments’ in the form of a book gathering together all the correspondence,
images, press coverage and audience feedback into one
overwhelmingly dense publication that serves as a textual analogue for
the event’s social and organisational complexity. Unlike Chan’s clearly
structured rationale, however, there is an overt contradiction between
Hirschhorn’s words and his methods: he makes claims for art as a powerful,
autonomous, almost transcendent force of non- alienation, but
through projects that spill into the complexity of social antagonisms and
deluge us with extra- artistic questions. Underlining this is a montage
principle of co- existing incompatibilities: if Hirschhorn’s gallery- based
installations juxtapose horrific images of violence with high culture and
philosophy (e.g. Concretion- Re, 2007), and (at their best) throb with
social pessimism and anger, his public projects juxtapose different social
classes, races and ages with a fearless defence of art and philosophy, and
pulsate with eccentric optimism. It has become fashionable for contemporary
artists to adopt the role of programming lectures and seminars,
often as a substitute for research; in Hirschhorn’s case, these events stand
in toto as a form of artistic research and social experimentation. The
Bijlmer- Spinoza Festival brought together a series of supposedly incompatible
montage elements to prompt unforeseen collective and durational
encounters; these experiences can in part be submitted to artistic criteria
we have inherited from performance art, even while they also demand
that we stretch these criteria in new directions.
V. Education, in Theory
Hirschhorn is a tricky character to end this chapter on, since he unabashedly
maintains that art is the central motivation of his work, and that he
is more interested in viewers than in students. 47 His contemporaries have
tended to engage with this question by combining the production of
students and viewers in different ways: Bruguera’s Arte de Conducta, and
Anton Vidokle’s unitednationsplaza (2007– 8) and Night School (2008– 9)
all unite an application procedure and an openness to all comers. 48 But in
all of these contemporary examples, the artist operates from a position of
amateur enthusiast rather than informed expert, and delegates the work
of lecturing to others. It is as if the artist wants to be a student once more,
but does this by setting up their own school from which to learn,
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