BENJAMIN H.D. BUCHLOH

Thomas Hirschhorn is a Swiss-born artist who emerged in the 1990s art world, and known for his giant, labour-intensive, room-sized collages of low grade materials. Tinfoil, cardboard, plywood, plastic and masking tape bring together an infinite variety of debris, including handwritten texts and images culled form popular magazines; miniature toy airplanes and trains; knick-knacks by the hundreds; armies of plastic goldEwatches; effigies of Nietzsche and Princess Diana; household fans blowing red flags which flutter violently; monitors duct-taped into vitrines, ad infinitum. Borrowing from the languages of installation art, junk art, Pop and others, Hirschhorns work comments on the proliferation of consumables (very derived productsE the artist calls them) in our shopping-driven society. Despite its overt politics, installations like Bataille Monument (Documenta 11, 2002) Ehis temporary structure situated in a predominantly immigrant Kassel neighbourhood Emaintain a light, contemporary wunderkammer feel to be enjoyed by aficionados and non-initiates alike. Half-sculptural, half-architectural and fully revolutionary, some of his most elaborate installations, such as the multi-room Cavemanman (Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, 2002), transform ordinary spaces into a labyrinthine, parallel universe of hybrid forms and fascinating accumulations. A key player in the contemporary art scene today, Hirschhorn moves beyond such recent art forms as the readymade, the post-conceptualEand video, to offer an important, unprecedented direction for 21st century art.

Frente al dogmatismo de las concepciones que consideran las neovanguardias como una visión reciclada y una repetición espúrea de las vanguardias históricas, Benjamin H. D. Buchloh propone en el presente libro una relectura al respecto en el doble ambito de las practicas artisticas europeas y norteamericanas, partiendo del supuesto de que la neovanguardia no tiene por que convertir lo antiestetico en artistico ni lo trasgresor en institucional.La dilatada labor critica y teorica de Benjamin H. D. Buchloh ha venido dictada por un empeño por precisar distinciones y puntualizar vinculaciones entre la produccion artistica de ambas vanguardias, tanto en su dimension politica como estetica, elaborando un discurso critico que engrana las relaciones entre la produccion cultural y la formacion ideologica. Y ello en un complejo proceso de contextualizacion, en el que cada situacion se articula en un desarrollo historico mas extenso.