Art review: Thomas Hirschhorn, It's Burning Everywhere, Dundee Contemporary Arts

Published on Friday 25 September 2009 17:00

Thomas Hirschhorn, It's Burning Everywhere Dundee Contemporary Arts

THERE'S a giant cardboard tree felled across the main gallery space, its branches truncated like so many horrible amputated limbs. The walls and the floors are covered in cardboard, painted with wood grain. There's parcel tape everywhere. In one corner lies a pile of broken pallets, along a wall a mountain of mannequins like so many abandoned corpses.

Dancing among the ruins are some mannequin brides ready for the funeral pyre, each white wedding gown imprinted with images of flames – burning flags and effigies, forest fires, the flames of bombed-out buildings and incendiary devices.

You're in a forest, you're in a war zone, you're in the Unabomber's lonely shed, or perhaps the Unabomber's lonely head. And if you look at those empty jerry cans in the corner, you're in Iraq or Afghanistan and it seems like the whole place is about to go up.

The atmosphere at the DCA opening of Thomas Hirschhorn's first museum solo show in the UK was not that cathedral-like hush which big galleries can induce through a combination of interior dcor and intimidation, but the stunned silence of the charnel house.

It's Burning Everywhere is one of the most complex and challenging gallery experiences I've had in recent years and I can't think of a single thing that has comes close to its impact in Scotland. It has both brought out the roaring philistine in me and convinced me that in times of crisis, the arts can deliver where the news media has failed.

The artist often works outside the gallery space. Last time I was introduced to Hirschhorn, in 2001, he was wandering about the dreariest bit of Glasgow's Gorbals creating a street shrine. I remember a rather posh luncheon with the elite of Paris's Pompidou Centre where their solution to their museum's patent lack of diversity was not one of recruitment, training or opening their doors wider to their audiences but sending Hirschhorn out to work in the suburb of Aubervilliers. If he is undoubtedly the real deal, in terms of commitment and hard work, Hirschhorn's art can sometimes feel like a bit of a sticking plaster (or should that be a handy bit of parcel tape?) for some of the institutions he works with.

Recently though, his gallery work has become as ambitious as his work in the field. His installation of a cave complex in London's Hayward Gallery or a giant sinister gym in New York's Barbara Gladstone gallery play on his undoubted formal skills (he trained as a graphic designer). His characteristic rough materials now deliver rather than undercut his ideas.

At Dundee it is in the two smaller rooms that audiences will find the biggest challenges. Hirschhorn's Ur Collages each bring together two images: a smiling supermodel in a glossy ad, and an internet image of a conflict death. There are bodies charred and blackened beyond recognition, there are limbs, body parts, a single hairy finger. This is collage in the tradition of John Heartfield's campaign against Hitler or Martha Rosler's fierce critique of Vietnam, Bringing The War Home, from 1967.

In gallery one, a restaging of Hirschhorn's 2007 show The Unforgettable (Substitution 2) fuses newspaper cuttings and imagery of Guantanamo and 9/11 with pictures of the utter horror and degradation of violent death and a clear suggestion that we give unequal attention to civilian losses.

Hirschhorn, who lives in Paris, is Swiss, and his work raises immediate questions about both neutrality and culpability. As an installation, It's Burning Everywhere is already being whispered about as a kind of Guernica for our times. I think it's far too early to tell, but if I was to point to a single art show in recent years that felt necessary rather than expedient, then this would be it. In its insistence that violence and conflict is intimately connected with our daily life in the West, it suggests that "over there" is not, in fact, far away. Right now our own house is on fire.

I don't know if I can exactly recommend you see this show. If it's any help in deciding, Tony Blair would hate you to see it. I suspect Gordon Brown might too.

Since I visited I haven't had a single day when the tentacles of this exhibition didn't reach out to me in some unsuspected way. Of course, I'm culpable. The cultural experience is often full of a smug audience like me, feeling good about feeling bad. Hirschhorn's tone, though, is not one of conscience-salving, but as one writer has put it, "ambivalent disgust". It's Burning Everywhere is that rare thing, a work of art that really matters not because it's trying to reach out to you, but because its maker knew that, despite your feelings, it simply had to be made. v

Until 29 November www.dca.org.uk