HANNOVER.- With his three-dimensional collages, the themes of which virtually thrust themselves upon the viewer, Thomas Hirschhorn counts among the most discussed artists of the international contemporary art scene. His works never fail to trigger controversial debates on the question concerning art and its potential and/or necessary contribution to societal themes. Of central importance to Hirschhorn is the kind of art in which form can constitute a possible resistance to and within those social circumstances that have such a factual force that they seem to outshine everything.

As the winner of the Kurt Schwitters Prize, the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn has produced two completely new installations for Hanover. Standing at No. 5 Waldhausenstrasse, the site and origin of Kurt Schwitters’ first Merzbau, is the “Kurt Schwitters Platform”, Hirschhorn’s homage to the artist who gave his name to the prize. The installation “Low Threshold Control” in the “Look-in Hall” of the Sprengel Museum is the latest in the artist’s series of overflowing material collages, the previous one being “Crystal of Resistance” in the Swiss Pavilion at this year’s Venice Biennale. While both works are completely independent of one another, they interrelate by reason of Hirschhorn’s approach, which is as personal as it is societal.

The outdoor installation titled “Kurt Schwitters Platform”, which Hirschhorn has deliberately located on the more or less exactly reconstructed site of the historical Merzbau, affords its viewers the possibility of standing virtually in the Merzbau itself and familiarizing themselves with the work of Kurt Schwitters. This installation by Thomas Hirschhorn is a continuation of his series of homages and altars to such intellectuals, artists and philosophers as Spinoza, Ingeborg Bachmann and Georges Bataille, whom he has revered ever since the beginning of his artistic career. When asked about his Hanover project, Hirschhorn speaks of the idea of a place of pilgrimage, an idea, in other words, that implies not only reverence but also a sharing of what one might perhaps call a special gift of energy: the still vibrant energy of an artist who, in his own private world transports himself back into the society of the Weimar Republic. It was through his Merzbau, with its appropriated, reinterpreted and reshaped fragments of reality, that Schwitters was able to connect with the world without losing himself in it.

In his rooms on the raised ground floor of his house at No. 5 Waldhausenstrasse, adjacent to Hanover’s Eilenriede Forest, Kurt Schwitters began building his first Merzbau at the beginning of the 1920s, changing it and extending it continuously. The house and, with it, the Merzbau were destroyed in an air raid in 1943.

Schwitters’ art is distinguished as that of an artist who works with found objects in a normal everyday situation and, through his vision, transforms them into an outstanding work of sculpture – the Merzbau. Schwitters attained a position that not only lays claim to universality but also stands for the potential of art as an active part of the world we live in. What is also important are the strength and conviction with which Schwitters pursued his vision, for Schwitters built his Merzbau three times all told, first in Germany and then in Norway and England, his places of exile during the Second World War. It is against this background, too, that Schwitters counts among those artists who have had an essential influence on Thomas Hirschhorn’s work. Hirschhorn’s installation at the authentic site of the Merzbau reactivates this vision. The artist Schwitters, to whom nothing at this historical site has so far made reerence, will now be brought closer to visitors and local residents alike, not only through the platform itself but also through displayed books and other information.

The installation “Low Threshold Control”, which according to Hirschhorn himself may be understood both as “statement” and “form in itself, has a new perspective as its aim. The artist appropriates the architecture of the interior, which through its frameless, full-height windows and its continuous paving seemingly opens out freely to the outside space. The scenario starts out from the assumption that the hall was inadvertently left open during the night and squatted by strangers. The result is a labyrinth of nooks and crannies, each crammed full with all kinds of personal relics – books, hobby work, cuddly toys – and all of them connected by strings of gluedtogether cottonwool sticks that remind one of the synapses of the human brain and, by the same token, of a network of mental associations. These “synapses” also link up with mass-media images of violence and hence with the reality of the outside world. There is also the recurring motif of the park bench featuring the typical necessities of life: beer bottle, cigarettes, lighter, mobile. Illuminated as brightly as a crime scene, the entire scenario is decked with banners bearing slogans generated from headlines and logos from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.

Only a few elements of this vast three-dimensional collage have been mentioned here. While it is a work that cannot be summed up in one single statement, one might say that its overriding theme is the possibility of understanding the world and gaining access to it despite constantly overwhelming odds.

Indeed, it is absolutely impossible for the viewer to gain an overview. The situation is such that the viewer must forever change his viewing position and, for want of gaining an overview, attempt to see through the complexity of the installation from as many different angles as possible. The space is occupied but not defined. Hirschhorn’s work seeks, in keeping with the principle that also lay behind Schwitters’ Merz, to “create relations […] with all things of the world”, but without any loss of energy and without falling into arbitrariness. It is the energy that lies in continuation, in the persistence of artistic self-assertion and, finally, in the appropriation of a space by the artist. The title “Low Threshold Control” thematizes not only the low thresholdness of a particular situation but also the complexity of reality in general, for reality can be summarized neither theoretically nor aesthetically.

Hirschhorn sees art as an “absolute assertion of form” that can give rise to new thoughts – indeed, to thinking per se. In this regard, the two installations in Hanover offer completely new points of focus for the debate on such central issues of art practice as the collage, the universality of artistic expression and the question of the autonomy and the potential commitment of art.