Concerning «Blow down» (1996)
«Blow down» is a model of a large scale space, big white walls, minimum interior, no decoration, sober floor, like a white cube exhibition space. On the walls are hanging original works of mine on paper, collages made at the same time as the «Blow down».
These ‘integrated’ works, the collages, are quite small as they are. Doing collages means creating a new world with elements of this existing world, out of printed matters from magazines for example; that’s why these collages are quite small. Doing collages in its simplest form, is ‘unprofessional’ and it’s just easy. Everyone has once in his life made a collage and everybody is included in a collage. Collages possess the power to implicate the other immediately. I like this capacity of non-exclusion of collages and I like the fact that they are always suspicious and not taken seriously. Collages still resist consumption, even if – like everything – they have to fight against glamorousness and fashionability. I want to put together what cannot be put together, I think that’s the aim of a collage and it’s my mission as an artist to give form to this.
«Blow down» is not a reduction of an art show, because the ‘integrated’ works, the collages exhibited are of original scale. The exhibition space is reduced to enlarge visually the works on the walls. To give them importance. If I refuse to physically blow up my work, I have to reduce the space to make the work seem very big. It is a simple as that! It is a critic of the attitude and tendency to blow up a work of art.
Thomas Hirschhorn