Thomas Hirschorn at Barbara Gladstone Gallery
Universal Gym
By: Charles Giuliano - Mar 25, 2009
Thomas Hirschorn: Universal Gym
Barbara Gladstone Gallery
520 West 21st Steet
NY, NY 10011
Through April 11
Yet again, the installation "Universal Gym" by the Swiss born (1957) Paris based artist, Thomas Hirschorn, at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery in Chelsea, is a holy mess. Its mostly a mumbo jumbo clutter of the equipment and detritus that one would encounter in a commercial gym. But all of the stuff is taped down in that inspired Hirshorn, signature manner. It's what makes this art.
Depending upon your point of view this is just a bunch of crap, and yet another instance of the shop worn "Emperor's Clothes" arguments, or, here we go climbing out on a limb, some of the most interesting, provocative and inspiring work being created currently. One might quite effectively go back and forth on the axis of that argument. Perhaps arbitrarily, I opt to view the work of Hirshorn as daunting but fascinating.
This is a position arrived at with some agonizing. A kind of internal aesthetic wrestling match was initiated by the "Camouflage" exhibition (2005) at Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art. It was another bloody mess. The nature of the work was so provocative that I assigned students to go see the exhibition and we discussed it in class. It proved to be fertile material to debate the nature of art. Quite typically their resistance, even by students in my Avant-garde Seminar, proved to be greater than mine. I was always astonished by the conservative approach of students to encountering new and challenging ideas. In the process of debating the merit of the work, which they argued was either not art, or bad art, that only sharpened and intensified my conviction about the work.. The ICA project changed my feelings about camouflage as "benign" in the context of fashion and contemporary consumer culture. Hirschorn brilliantly activated that thinking process. This is one of the mandates of significant conceptual art.
In the Gladstone installation he has taken on gym culture. The initial response upon entering the gallery was the impact of any other workout facility. But the fact that it was all taped down effectively deactivated the equipment and rendered it non functional By this process the objects were reconfigured into works of art.
Of course this aesthetic legerdemain was initiated by the strategy of the assisted readymades of Marcel Duchamp. By combining a bicycle wheel and stool he deconstructed them from functional objects into a sculpture. The art world was forever altered by this simple gesture. In the intervening time we have evolved from the witty, tongue in chic, understatement of Duchamp, to the over the top, excess, everything goes, all out visual assault on the senses of Hirshorn and artists of his generation.
Well, what then to think of Hirschorn's focus on and send up of our fitness obsessed, workout, gym culture? Of course, it means that many young people are now better fit than was the norm for my generation. Back in the 1960s, for example, who ever heard of chicks pumping iron? Now it is a norm. Regarding the topic of athletes on steroid and human growth hormones, please, another ripped from the headlines idea. The sad trickle down of that is that kids are bulking up by shooting up just to compete in Little League. How sad. What ever happened to Wheaties as the Breakfast of Champions? Now twentysomethings sprinkle steroids on their corn flakes.
By coincidence, I happened to be touring the Greek and Roman galleries of the Metropolitan Museum of Art shortly after visiting the Hirschorn installation. It was interesting to draw comparisons to cultures that believed in the concept of mens sana in corpore sano (a healthy mind in a healthy body). The hard body was the basis of classical aesthetics. There was also the pragmatic aspect that the average Greek male would also serve in the military well into middle age. Staying fit was a mandate for national defense. This notion extended to the Platonic ideal of the philosopher king. The greatest example of this was Alexander the Great who in addition to military and political skills was also a babe. The comic twist on this is the life sized, nude, bronze statue in the Met of a Roman Emperor.
The notion of a nude sculpture of an emperor is amusing. It recalls the public outcry when Horatio Greenough created a life size, marble portrait of George Washington, half naked in the classical manner. It makes one long for a bronze sculpture of a nude Barack Obama in an athletic stance. He is surely our most trim and physically attractive President within memory. It is such a pleasure to observe his titubating swagger or the ease with which he bounds up the stairs to the podium. It was revealed in the recent 60 Minutes interview that he and Michelle work out in the White House gym. How inspiring.
Once again Hirschorn succeeds by luring us into an exhibition that holds a mirror to our culture and its obsessions. His approach evokes bulked up aesthetics and art on steroids. Check it out but caveat emptor.