Burning Cars, Eternal Flame
Counterpublicity in Thomas Hirschhorn’s Artworks
Brianne Cohen
Abstract:
This essay examines Thomas Hirschhorn’s creation of counterpublics in his neighborhood installations. Against the fraught image of the burning car in the mass media – a reductive signifier for a morass of socioeconomic problems in European banlieues – Hirschhorn attempts to establish alternative, cross-mediated discursive frameworks concerning such marginalized groups in the larger public domain. This paper investigates the transformed image of the burning car as it particularly galvanized his recent publically engaged installation at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Flamme éternelle (Eternal Flame, 2014). Résumé:
Cet essai étudie la création d’installations contre-publiques de Thomas Hirschhorn. Contre la « fraught image » de la voiture en feu présentée par les médias de masse – image au signifié réducteur utilisée pour dépeindre les problèmes socioéconomiques des banlieues européennes – Hirschhorn tente de proposer une alternative, des cadres discursifs multimédias ciblant de tels groupes marginalisés à l’intérieur d’un domaine publique plus large. Cet article analyse l’image transformée de la voiture en feu telle que présentée récemment dans une installation publiquement engagée au Palais de Tokyo à Paris, sous le nom de Flamme éternelle (2014).
Keywords:
Burning vehicles are a popular trope in contemporary art recently.1 In 2013, one could point to Willie
Doherty’s Remains, Mathieu Pernot’s Fire series, or even the burnt-out car in David Claerbout’s Highway
Wreck. Doherty’s and Pernot’s pieces are specific in their treatment of certain fraught subjectsviolent
kneecappings in Northern Ireland and a Romani funeral ritual in France, respectivelywhereas Claerbout’s suggests more general questions concerning mass spectatorship and the hyped media coverage of charged events. Yet all of these artists work in an interstitial space between photography and film, blending aspects of each to rethink the circulation of hybrid documentary images in a mass-mediated public sphere today. Perhaps the work that best exemplifies such a photofilmic mélange is Superflex’s
Burning Car (2008), which showcases the spectacular demolition of a silver, vintage Mercedes. It is
completely decontextualized, artfully set against an empty, black background. What distinguishes this generalized, seemingly timeless burning car image, however, is its stretching of time, from a clip that might otherwise last ten seconds on the evening news hour, to a high-definition, panoramic portrait of the Mercedes’ crackling demise for a ten full minutes. Now here, it insists, is an image to watch.
Superflex’s piece is both timely and historically resonant.2 In the last decade, it comes as no
surprise to see a spate of hybrid documentary pieces working on a similar register, as the burning car clip has become the mediated image par excellence of socioeconomic turmoil throughout Europe. It is iconic, in fact, of a contested New Europe, marking riots in French banlieues, troubled sink estates in the United Kingdom, violence following the Danish cartoon crisis, and most recently, social upheaval in the suburbs of Stockholm. In 2005 in France alone, over 10,000 cars were set on fire across three hundred cities, signaling a morass of tense issues bursting forth across the banlieues, including social inequality, discrimination and racism, ghettoization, and police brutality. In Fast Cars, Clean Bodies:
Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture, Kristin Ross provides a brilliant account of
the car’s significance in developing, post-World War II France as a pregnant symbol for the country’s intertwined events of accelerated, Fordist modernization and the dismantling of its colonial empire.3
The car promised freedom of movement and social mobility. It represented workers’ solidarity and the liberal youth of May ‘68 in the union strikes at the Renault factory. Yet it also played a key role in the formidable renovation of Paris, with construction of the Périphérique, the highway encircling Paris, beginning in 1956. Cars also facilitated, in other words, a dramatic restructuring of French society with the displacement of the working class, mostly newly arrived North African immigrant labor, to the grand
ensemble, sometimes called “vertical bidonvilles” (shantytowns), on the outskirts of the city.4 The icon
of the burning car emerges in the wake of such a social reordering, extending beyond the confines of Paris to other historically immigrant-dependent metropolises in 20th century Europe as well.
It is these longer histories of post-war European modernization and decolonization, particularly in the French context, which permeate and vivify Thomas Hirschhorn’s controversial neighborhood installations. In this essay, I will focus on the transformed image of the burning car as it particularly 1. I would like to thank Alexander Streitberger for his helpful comments on an earlier version of this essay. 2. For more on this, see Brianne Cohen, “Burning Cars, Caricatures and Glub: Negotiating Photofilmic Images in a New Europe,” Third Text, 28, 2 (Mar 2014):190-202.
3. Kristin Ross, Fast Cars, Clean Bodies: Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1995).
galvanized his most recent publically-engaged installation at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Flamme
éternelle (Eternal Flame, 2014). Hirschhorn’s oeuvre appears to indiscriminately address charged topics
in the public sphere, often assaulting viewers with graphic documentation of conflict and death. Yet it is his more utopic neighborhood installations that, at their core, respond to the image and underlying problematic of the burning car in Europeof economic precarity, racism, ghettoization, police harassment, and violence by youth, in particular, who formed, for instance, the majority of rioters in France in 2005.5 In contrast to an effect of homogenized spectatorship catalyzed by a global media
industry today, Hirschhorn’s banlieue installations, in particular, offer a model of counterpublicity based upon deeper cross-audience, multi-form engagement. Against the vacuous image of the burning car, their manner of negotiation between diverse local and international publics offers a more positive, alternative framework for circulating discourse concerning such marginalized groups in the larger public domain. And though Eternal Flame was not organized in such a banlieue, atypical for Hirschhorn’s publically engaged pieces, it is precisely its lively staging within a dominant, Parisian institutional space that demands, again, such counterpublicity for those historically relegated to the periphery.
Image 1 Thomas Hirschhorn Flamme éternelle, 2014 Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2014 Courtesy the artist and Palais de Tokyo
5. Dider Lapeyronnie, “Primitive Rebellion in the French Banlieues: On the Fall 2005 Riots,” trans. Jane Marie Todd, in Frenchness and the African Diaspora: Identity and Uprising in Contemporary France, eds Charles Tshimanga, Didier Gondola, and Peter J. Bloom (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2009), 34.
Images 2, 3 Thomas Hirschhorn Flamme éternelle, 2014 Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2014 Courtesy the artist and Palais de Tokyo
Nothing forefronts the empty iconicity of the burning car image more than Superflex’s artwork. The abbreviated video clips of burning cars on the news hour or on YouTube, often shot “democratically” by people on the street and then rapidly re-circulated, are the visual equivalent of a hashtag on Twitter, acting merely as a repetitive signifier of vague, social dissensus instead of offering in-depth commentary from those same marginalized groups “on the street.” As French sociologist Didier Lapeyronnie notes about the three-week riots in France, despite the dominant image of the burning car, media commentators largely ignored the rioters’ voices during and after the event: they were the “center of attention, but without ever managing to be heard.”6 As one seventeen-year-old youth described the rioting at the time,
“It’s the only way for us to be heard. But we know very well that not a single camera will be left once everything calms down. We won’t exist anymore.”7
Instead, the ubiquity of burning grabs attention. Though brief, these clips’ duration does serve a unique purpose in the mass media, offering a viewing experience that photographic documentation alone may not. In video form, they show the burning of the car as an event. And this event is customized to fit contemporary spectators’ limited attention spans, habituated as they are to animated GIFs and thirty-second YouTube videos. In offering viewers a mesmerizing portrait of crackling paint and billowing flames for a full ten minutes in Burning Car, Superflex parodies the type of “possessed spectatorship” that Victor Burgin cautions against, one where a collective of individuals transforms into a homogenous and impersonal mass.8 Such spectatorship arises from the new global media industry, where apparently
two-thirds of international copyrights (in popular film, television, advertising, music) are owned by a mere six corporations. Drawing from French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, Burgin fears the power of such objects, for example a popular song, to create a non-reflexive, “synchronised collective state of consciousness” among viewers.9
Burning Car highlights this dangerously looped circuit of fluid media consumption, where one
image or one song, rapidly propagated through television, the Internet, film, and so forth, may lead to a simplistic mass conformity in thought. In Fast Cars, Clean Bodies, Ross unpacks the discursive richness surrounding the car in late 1950s and early 1960s France, drawing a complex picture of its emerging importance in the “life of the everyday” across varying milieu. In its protracted simplicity, Superflex’s parody of a luxury car advertisement and an accompanying, unthinking mass spectatorship calls out for such a discursive unpacking of the burning car in the 21st century. However, even as it potentially hails
an online, globally-connected youth culture, its critical move remains a gesture towards the need for greater contextualization and local specificity.
6. Ibid., 22-24. 7. Ibid., 38.
8. Victor Burgin, The Remembered Film (London: Reaktion Books, 2004), 176. 9. Ibid., 173-4.
Images 4 and 6 Thomas Hirschhorn Flamme éternelle, 2014 Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2014 Courtesy the artist and Palais de Tokyo
On the other side of the artistic spectrum, Thomas Hirschhorn’s artworks provide an overwhelming quantity of information and specificity, burdening installation spectators with a discombobulating, unsystematic flood of visual and textual data. Even within his own more formally delimited, photofilmic pieces, such as the video installation Touching Reality (2012), too much violent and seemingly disconnected imagery threatens to render spectators numbed and befuddled. Touching Reality, indeed, depicts an anonymous, detached hand touch-screening through photographs of bloodied, victimized bodies on a portable tablet. Similar to Burning Car, the piece points to the mass repetition and radical abstraction of such documentary imagery through journals, television, the Internet, propagated through ever-newer media devices. Though Superflex and Hirschhorn approach the question of visualizing information differently, one in the form of a compressed icon and one as messy, brute quantity, their temporally hybrid, photofilmic works emphasize the accrued, charged momentum in the mass media of otherwise singular, specific images. Put another way, they reveal the complicity of the global media industry in losing local information, or potentially, local knowledge and understanding of unique situations.
Image 5 Thomas Hirschhorn Flamme éternelle, 2014 Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2014 Courtesy the artist and Palais de Tokyo
Hirschhorn’s traditional sculptural pieces, however, also do not offer a better alternative to unpacking the signifier of the burning car in Europe. The car, in fact, is a sculptural form that he finds particularly compelling. In pieces such as Poor-Racer (2009) or his race car series from the exhibition Poor Tuning (2008), the artist plays with the trope of the modern, fast car with his typical DIY additionscardboard, tinfoil, packaging tape, etc. These materials lend the racing cars a certain accessibility and quirky individuality, but also evidently foil their purpose as techno-sophisticated speed machines. Hirschhorn has also attempted to recuperate the form of the car through such intellectually-inclined pieces as
Philosophical Cars and Concept Car (2007), or the Spinoza Car at the Bijlmer Spinoza Festival
(2008-9), the latter of which serves as a type of alter to the philosopher in line with Hirschhorn’s numerous altars and monuments. The Spinoza Car pays homage to the figure with innumerable, attached signs of love, and protects the form of the car, paradoxically, with rows of delicate, precarious drinking glasses. In 2002, furthermore, Hirschhorn offered a “taxi service” for Documenta visitors to the Bataille
Monument because it was located outside of Kassel in the suburb of Nordstadt, coincidentally with a
vintage Mercedes as well. A car service could create more personal encounters between local drivers and out-of-town visitors. Yet again, this element of the Bataille Monument only offered limited symbolic value in terms of interpersonal connection with banlieue residents.
The deeper problematic behind the burning car image, with all its elided specificities, is one that has impassioned Hirschhorn in his work. For decades now, he himself has kept his studio in Aubervilliers, France, a northeastern banlieue of Paris, where one of the first incidents of the 2005 rioting occurred after a young man on a scooter was killed attempting to escape a police patrol.10 As early as 1945, filmmaker
Eli Lotar exposed underlying, trenchant issues concerning fair housing, immigrant rights, and slum-like conditions in Aubervilliers in his eponymous documentary film. Given the charged history of his chosen workspace, it is not surprising that Hirschhorn created one of his most prominent neighborhood installations there in 2004. More than his famous Bataille Monument from Documenta 11, the Musée
Précaire Albinet (Precarious Museum Albinet) exemplifies Hirschhorn’s maximalist response to the
vacuous burning car clip.
Comparable to the Bataille Monument, the summer-long, temporary “cultural center,” constructed in an impoverished, largely immigrant-populated neighborhood with state-subsidized housing, involved numerous activities and events for the public. The center included workshops, lectures, a reading space, communal meals, etc.typical of what he terms his “Presence and Production” pieces, or installations that through Hirschhorn’s own acts of being continually present and producing, hope to inspire the same in others. Yet each week also featured renowned art objects by illustrious figures such as Duchamp, Dalì, Beuys, and Warhol, distinguishing this installation from his previous neighborhood “monuments.” For the first and only time, Hirschhorn actually included quite valuable objects such as Duchamp’s Bicycle
Wheel, on loan from the Centre Pompidou, whose staffers extensively trained local youth at the Cité
Albinet in the proper handling and management of their cultural patrimoine.11 A group of twelve young
people held two-month internships at the Pompidou in different departments of art handling, framing, 10. Lapeyronnie, 23.
11. Thomas Hirschhorn, Thomas Hirschhorn Musée Précaire Albinet, Quartier du Landy, Aubervilliers, 2004 (Aubervilliers: Xavier Barral, 2005), no page numbers.
installing, security, and public outreach.12
As several art historians have noted, Hirschhorn’s adoption of the term and notion “precarious” directly refers to précarité in terms of labor, as a concept describing unstable market dynamics in a newly globalized service economy.13 The génération précarité designates young people in this matrix
with no contracts or only partial employment benefits. This precarity not only registered symbolically in the Musée Précaire’s fragile, temporary structure, but also in the arrangements that Hirschhorn brokered between major French institutions and local Aubervilliers residents, particularly the youth who interned at the Pompidou. Racism still plagues employment in France, and data show that a banlieue youth with the name Mohammed or Fatima is still far less likely to secure a job than someone with the name Jean or Marie.14 Art historian Rachel Haidu has written about the Musée Précaire’s collaboration with regional
institutions such as the Pompidou, pointing to “the full system of (very French) values that support and sustain that network” as it may be complicit with a failing, discriminatory socioeconomic system, yet her text ultimately hinges on an analysis of Musée Précaire as a broader form of art-world-based institutional critique.15
One year before the 2005 rioting, the artwork’s focus on French institutionality was prescient. It is notable that not only the national police, but also the school system was the main targets of rioting youth, many of whom were too young to be employed. Instead they were dealing with school or expulsion from school, from a system that they felt denied them access and held them responsible for their own oppressive situation, but on which they were still very much dependent.16 As Didier Lapeyronnie stresses
in his analysis, the massive scope of the rioting not only stemmed from unemployment, but also from a host of determining factors, one of them a feeling of banishment from the public arena and such broader institutional channels. Rioting enabled the youth to force entry, so-to-speak, into public discourse, even though that meant that more schools than businesses or warehouses were vandalized and torched.17 This
is not surprising when one considers that the Minister of the Interior at the time, Nicolas Sarkozy, even ordered police into schools in order to crack down on illegal immigration and to arrest and ultimately deport young sans-papiers.18 A year and a half after the Musée Précaire, and only half a year after the
riots, a reporter from Le Monde returned to Cité Albinet to assess the longer-term impact of Hirschhorn’s 12. Alfred Pacquement “The Precarious Museum,” Tate Etc., 2 (Autumn 2004), http://www.tate.org.uk/context-comment/articles/precarious-museum (accessed August 5, 2014), no page numbers.
13. See for instance Rachel Haidu, “Precarité, Autorité, Autonomie,” in Communities of Sense: Rethinking
Aesthetics and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009), 215-37; Hal Foster, “A Grammar of
Emergency,” in Thomas Hirschhorn: Establishing a Critical Corpus (Bern, Switzerland: JRP-Ringier, 2011), 162-181; or “Spinoza and Precarity in Contemporary Art,” Art & Research, 3, 1 (Winter 2009/10): no page numbers. For an analysis of the way in which Judith Butler’s concept of “precarious life” resonates with Hirschhorn’s practice, see Brianne Cohen, “Thomas Hirschhorn’s Utopia, Utopia = One World, One War, One Army, One Dress: Imagining Alternative Forms of Political Affiliation,” in Crossing the Boundaries XVI: Trading Spaces (Binghamton, NY: Binghamton University, 2008), 20-27.
14. David Rieff, “Battle Over the Banlieues,” The New York Times (April 14, 2007), http://www.nytimes. com/2007/04/15/world/europe/15iht-web-0415elections.5290550.html?pagewanted=all (accessed August 4, 2014), no page numbers.
15. Rachel Haidu, “The imaginary space of the wishful other: Thomas Hirschhorn’s Cardboard Utopias,” Vector
E-Zine, 4 (Jan 2006), http://www.virose.pt/vector/x_04/haidu.html (accessed August 4, 2014), no page numbers.
16. Lapeyronnie, 41. 17. Ibid., 38-41.
project (according to him, both “nothing and a lot” had ultimately changed).19 He spoke to one
22-year-old, Sheck Tavares, for example, who, after becoming an assistant to Hirschhorn during and after the
Musée Précaireand who had always loved drawing but who never believed a “bourgeois” art school
would be in his futurewas about to take the passing examination for the Beaux-Arts in Paris. For Tavares, art can have a special purpose in the banlieue: “we have some things to say, to stake a claim on. And to stake this claim, it’s better than burning cars, no?”20
Whereas “precarious” has become a trendy word in a subfield of participatory art in the last decade, for Hirschhorn, it is still very much tethered to issues of stigmatization and ghettoization in the banlieues. In the aftermath of the 2005 riots, he displayed documentation from the Musée Précaire
Albinet in 2006 at the International Biennial for Contemporary Art in Seville, including not only
numerous photographs from the project but also video testimony from the participating youth, who spoke reflectively about the politics of the piece. In 2010, additionally, he constructed another Presence and Production piece in Rennes, France, Theatre Précaire (Precarious Theater), which, however, was vandalized twice and destroyed by fire on May 1, prompting Hirschhorn to write an impassioned letter to the community about his continued convictions as an artist working in the public sphere.
While his gallery and museum installations instantiate a kind of cynical dystopianism, such as his installation It’s Burning Everywhere (2009), his neighborhood pieces emanate realistic idealism, despite such setbacks as the Theater Précaire’s literal burning. His numerous writings concerning his public works radiate this hope for change. In 2007, for example, Hirschhorn published a text in
Artforum entitled “Eternal Flame,” lauding philosopher Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster
as a manifesto for equality, for its declaration in the equal intelligence of all human beings.21 Hirschhorn
begins the article with an elicitation of the banlieue youth:
The young inhabitants of the banlieues in France relit the fires of equalitythe fires of equality that had been extinguished or that had died out on their own, without anyone noticing. These fires are set at homethat means there’s a big problem at home! On the outskirts of Paris, a movement of urgent anger reignited the flame of equality and gave it universal visibility.
Clearly Hirschhorn is familiar with Rancière’s engagement with cultural politics in France since the 1990sthe philosopher’s term sans-part, deliberately evocative of the sans-papiers, is at the heart of his theorization of the “world of the sensible.” The sans-part have no part in the partition of the sensible, and thus constitute the most critical element of politics, in disrupting and supplementing the perception of what is visible and audible.
A year later in 2008, after Hirschhorn completed his piece, The Bijlmer Spinoza Festival, set in a largely Surinamese-Dutch neighborhood that is also the most historically stigmatized housing development in the Netherlands, he asked Rancière to respond to the piece. In his first letter to the 19. Nathaniel Herzberg, “Quand l’art agite la cite,” Le Monde (January 11, 2006), no page numbers.
20. “Ici, on a des choses à dire, à revendiquer. Et pour revendiquer, c’est quand meme mieux que de brûler des voitures, non?”, Ibid.
philosopher, Hirschhorn stipulates that his neighborhood pieces should in no way be conceived as “community art,” “participatory art,” “educational art,” or “relational aesthetics.”22 In his second letter,
he explains that his intention with the Bijlmer Spinoza Festival was to create a form that would implicate “the other, the unexpected, the non-interested,” and the stranger as much as the neighbor. The Festival became a matter of coexistence for him with a “non-exclusive public,” a coined term that he continually emphasizes.23 Rancière responded positively to the piece, claiming that it particularly confronted the
problem of an inequality of temporalities, or an inequality among those marginalized in society, saddled with too much available time or too little leisure time due to socioeconomic reasons. Set amidst strangers and neighbors, the piece called for an “equality among heterogeneous times.”24
Effectively, Hirschhorn’s imagining of such a multi-temporal, nonexclusive public coincides largely with cultural theorist Michael Warner’s notion of a counterpublic, or an alternative framework for circulating discourse concerning a marginalized group in the larger public domain. In general, publics are composed of strangers, similar to the national imagined community, but they do not presuppose kinship or any kind of territorial, linguistic, racial, or other positive identification. Whereas a nation or other class or group encompasses its members whatever the circumstances may be, strangers in a public are connected to each other via pure discourse, by the sheer fact that they are addressed, and this attention may be sustained and deep, or random, perfunctory, or cursory.25 Furthermore, the modern public did
not temporalize in a linear direction, as in Benedict Anderson’s theorization of the national imagined community, but rather moved in a cross-citational field of many heterogeneous actors/onlookers with different, overlapping rhythms of intervention/attention.26 In other words, the steady, punctuated rhythm
of dailies, almanacs, magazines, and books allowed the mediation of a modern public, as with the nation, but the public also developed a certain reflexivity through supplementary reviews, citations, and republications.
Similarly, Hirschhorn’s installations do not aim to unite a “people” or “community,” provide social care, or catalyze a social movement, but rather to resist and transform a simplified, stigmatized image of, and discourse concerning banlieues in the global mass media, here most reductively expressed in the example of the burning car clip. Although Hirschhorn’s privilege as a successful Swiss white male artist has arguably facilitated his being able to realize such projects, perhaps not creating counterpublics fully in the spirit that Warner intends it, these artworks only thrive with the sustained attention and organization of the local inhabitants. With Hirschhorn’s temporary cultural magnets, the inhabitants of Bijlmer, Nordstadt, Aubervilliers, or recently, the Forest Houses neighborhood in the Bronx at the Gramsci Monument, all of these residents, in their respective unique contexts, self-reflexively embodied and mediated alternative, positive public spaces for heterogeneous stranger sociability.
With Eternal Flame at the Palais de Tokyo, similar to his neighborhood installations, Hirschhorn
remained on site from noon to midnight every day, organizing lectures, readings, workshops, a library, 22. “Entretien: Thomas Hirschhorn & Jacques Rancière,” Opuscule, 4/4 (Rennes, France: Les ateliers de Rennes, 2010), 131.
23. Ibid., 133-134.. 24. Ibid., 131..
25. Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 87.. 26. Ibid., 95.
website, daily newspaper, meeting spaces for audiences, and more for a two-month duration. Whereas the compressed flickering of the YouTube burning car clip signals a reduction of information as it proliferates across different forms of mass media, potentially creating a vacuous “possessed spectatorship,” time in Hirschhorn’s mediated installations becomes much more complex through the overlapping of various forms and discursive frameworks. Unlike Burning Car, there is not only elongated time for contemplation, but differing temporal dynamics that reflect and offer a more plural, multi-functional space for public engagement. Indeed, Hirschhorn invited 180 intellectuals and artists to give presentations each day, but he also supplied more generally popular media stations for viewing films or surfing the Internet. Visitors could contribute to the exhibition’s aesthetic with images found online and then printed on standard white paper, in the end filling the space with an array of hand-drawn DIY personalizations of popular Internet memes. The same occurred with innumerable, visitor-produced sculptures made of Styrofoam, or blocks of the sort found in packaged boxes to support television screens and computer monitors. The installation, moreover, was free of charge, a loudly publicized fact that encouraged multiple visits. Overall, it was a space in which to actively take time, with mediation occurring in close, messy proximity rather than through distant cable lines.
Ostensibly geared towards a “universal” public in a dominant institutional context, Hirschhorn’s project, however, could not have been more politically explicit. The most arresting features of Eternal
Flame were its 16,5000 tires and two “forums” with continuously burning fire pits. Here Hirschhorn
literally dismantled the burning car image into tire swings for children and “eternal flames” to symbolically ignite thoughtful, public exchange. All too often Hirschhorn’s banlieue projects are characterized as two-party dialogues, debates, or confrontations between a local and an international, “universal” audience, between a mainstream public and a marginalized community, or disenfranchised youth and art world cosmopolites. A metaphor of two-way dialogue will never adequately convey, however, the tremendous diversity of audiences and the local specificities of his varying banlieue installations. Though Eternal
Flame clearly visualizes and once again gives heterogeneous form to the large-scale “burning car”
problematic in French national culture, as well as the need to create a forum addressing it, there has been and will be no discussion of the audience make-up of Eternal Flame at the Palais de Tokyo. There will be no questions raised of his having done “social work” there, to “educate” a diverse public through philosophical discussion and artistic inquiry. To be sure, Hirschhorn continually works to expose such social prejudices through his counterpublic installations--to disallow privileged, dominant milieus to imagine themselves as “the public” in the first place.
In many of Hirschhorn’s neighborhood pieces, however, it is true that he particularly aims to bring a disengaged youth into closer contact with dominant institutions, such as with the Musée Précaire Albinet. Most recently at the Gramsci Monument in the Bronx, for instance, an art “ambassador” from the Dia Arts Foundation took children on labor-themed excursions every week to different institutions around New York. Fostering such contact is key for him, and this comes as no surprise in revisiting the events of the 2005 rioting in France, constituted mostly by youth who torched schools instead of businesses because they felt both denied access to, and dependent on a discriminatory system at such an early age in their lives. Similar to his past pieces, Eternal Flame also particularly encourages youth to claim a space in the heart of Paris at the Palais de Tokyo, providing all types of media access and
DIY forms of expression. This was particularly evident with the innumerable Styrofoam sculptures and modified, Internet-meme printouts--a simple if striking counter-image to the homogenized youth culture and “synchronised collective state of consciousness” that Burgin evokes.
Most critically, though set within a culturally powerful institution, Eternal Flame still espoused the principles of creating a counterpublic, encouraging multifarious voicesagonistic or passive, involved or indifferent, belonging to completely different genres (i.e. a book reader, Internet surfer, or photographer) whose many speakers would perhaps never directly encounter each other but whose words and images were cited multi-directionally in different implicated discourses. The artist’s works are participatory, but not necessarily because a viewer can purchase a cup of coffee, sit on a couch, and literally talk with other visitors. Rather, they are interactive because their structure is predicated on the self-reflexive attention of the audience as a complexly mediated, temporally overlapping, and cross-generic public.
It is this discourse that may contravene the burning car clip. It is this type of public engagement that may counter a complacent understanding of banlieue youth in the global mass media. Key to Hirschhorn’s practice is not social work, community organizing, or art-world institutional critique, but rather a mode of counterpublicity deeply informed by local knowledge and structured upon embodied stranger sociability. The burning car clip signifies a shifting understanding of 21st century, precarious
socioeconomic relations on the outskirts of metropolises, particularly in contemporary Europe. Its hybrid temporality lends itself to an increasingly rapid and novel circulation in the global mass media, but unfortunately this remediated crossover through various platforms only further bundles a gossamer problematic into a vacuous icon. Hirschhorn, instead, creatively builds from this key photofilmic image and scaffolds it with layers upon layers of research, attention, artistic propositions, discursive frameworks, and so on. It is the complexly temporalized life-worlds of Hirschhorn’s installations that self-reflexively resist and recreate a more compelling counterpublic image to the burning car.
Brianne Cohen is a postdoctoral fellow for the research project, “Photofilmic Images in Contemporary
Art and Visual Culture” at the Université catholique de Louvain and Lieven Gevaert Research Centre for Photography (2012-2015). In 2012, she received her Ph.D. from the University of Pittsburgh. Her current projects include a book manuscript, Europe in Common: From Spectatorship to Collectivity in Contemporary Art, and a collection of essays co-edited with Alexander Streitberger, Photofilmic Images in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture (Leuven, University of Leuven Press, 2015).
