«PROVIDE RUINS» I-VIII (2003)

The title for the series of works on paper «Provide Ruins» refers to the names given to contemporary wars, such as «Restore Hope». With this title, I want to exorcise the unavoidable contemporary logic of destruction, I want to provide destruction, I want to provide ruins. The title is just the description of the work. These works are collages. A collage is an interpretation, it’s a true, real, entire interpretation. An interpretation that wants to create something new. Doing collages means to create a new world with existing elements of this world. Doing collages 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 the capacity of non-exclusion of collages and I like the fact that collages are always suspiscious and not taken seriously. Collages still resist consumption, even if – like everything – they have to fight against glamorousness and fashionability. In doing collages 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. The images I use for doing a collage are printed matter that had another existence before I put them together : photos or advertisements – always printed – that I take from fashion and political magazines and images printed out from the internet, sometimes enlarged with photocopy. The blue scribbling (markers and ball-point pen) is the flood of tears, of sadness, the flood of the too much, it’s the overflow, it is not blood, it’s only blue color. I want to do a two-dimensional work that can be mentally deployed into a third dimension. I want to break the scale and I want to break the angles and the perspective. I want to put the whole world into my collages. I want to put everything in, the whole universum. I want to express the complexity and contradiction of the world into one single collage. The collage permits to express the fragmented world that I am living in, not the whole world as entire world but as fragmented world. I can reach the world only in its fragmentation. The collages «Provide Ruins» are a commitment to the universality of the world. I am against particularism, against information, against communication, against facts and against opinion. The question is not who is the victim ? who is guilty ? nor what is it about ? It’s about the entire History and not just some facts. With my work I want to reach, to touch History beyond the historical fact.The question is always : what is my position ? The question is about myself, today. I want to confront the chaos, the uncomprehensibility and the unclarity of the world, not by bringing peace or quietness nor by working in a chaotic way, but by working in the chaos and in the unclarity of the world. I want to do something charged that reaches beauty in its density. I want to work in emergency, I want to do too much. The images that I use in a collage are an attempt to confront the violence of the world and my own violence. I am part of the world and all the violence of the world is my own violence, all the wounds of the world are my own wounds. All the hate is my own hate. I love Dada and the collages of the Dadaists, I love the beautiful collages of Johannes Baader and his «Grand-Plasto-Dio-Dada-Drama», it is an image that I always carry with me. I love John Hartfield and his work, he said ‘use photography as a weapon !’. I love to do collages, and I love to make this kind of work.

Thomas Hirschhorn, June 7. 2006