Thomas Hirschhorn, In-Between exhibition review: mystery of the crafted chaos
To walk into the South London Gallery is to enter a ruin. Thomas Hirschhorn’s installation In-Between stretches to the highest point of the gallery, and into its furthest corner. We’re in a building, perhaps an apartment block, which has been ripped apart by a bomb or other explosion.
All around is the detritus of this cataclysmic event: stones and boulders, steel beams, air-conditioning pipework, electrical wires, broken windows, all fashioned from cheap materials — cardboard, packing tape, sheets of polystyrene. In among all this crafted mess are real objects such as toilets and wardrobes, hinting at human lives torn apart by this violent event.
On the back wall is a big sheet with a scrawled quote from the Italian politician and thinker Antonio Gramsci: “Destruction is difficult. It is as difficult as creation.” Hirschhorn sees the Italian’s words as a challenge: to take on the idea of creating destruction and in doing so provoke “the essential questions: Where is my position? What do I want?”, he says.
This is the fourth time the Swiss artist has made a work along these lines. Hirschhorn says it’s based on “known images of destruction”, but he keeps it general to allow broad interpretation. Yet, despite how instantly evocative it is of media shots of bombed-out buildings, it’s somehow lacking in impact.
In the past Hirschhorn has included horrific, devastating news images of violence amid his cardboard constructions, to powerful effect. Here, there's no shocking material to pull us up short and the cardboard ruins are almost cartoonish. Impressive though his construction is, it doesn’t quite provoke the visceral, profound response he’s aiming for.
Until September 13 (020 7703 6120, southlondongallery.org)
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