In the opening lines of Wallace Stevens's poem Connoisseur of Chaos, the poet made a binary proposition. "A. A violent order is a disorder; and B. A great disorder is an order. These two things are one."
Stevens could have been inspired to write these lines by looking at the works of Thomas Hirschhorn, the Swiss-born artist whose apocalyptic installations have gained a steady ascendancy in the art world for a decade or more. This fall, the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal is displaying one of his recent creations - a sprawling anti-monument named Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake - which they have just acquired for their permanent collection, and that's a triumph.
It's classic Hirschhorn, a layered composition of clippings, found images, shards of mirror, and readings held together with tin foil, lengths of chain and masking tape (three of his favourite artistic materials) and combined with the odd video monitor set into the rubble here and there, projecting news footage and cooking shows.
Taken together, the results look a bit like a high-school history presentation run amok, a seemingly chaotic compost of information bytes and images that add up to a whole that is both terrifying (the wickedness of the world is presented in all its horrifying variousness) and emboldening (the display also demonstrates the amount of intelligent, principled critique of all this, featuring the work of major thinkers and activists in the form of books, images and photocopied excerpts from selected texts).
"I am trying to connect things that I don't understand," Hirschhorn has said. "When you work quickly, like me, you cannot control everything. I am not here to show that I am able to control things well. This is what I call working politically."
In front of an audience at the Musée a few weeks ago, Hirschhorn had the chance to elaborate on these ideas, holding the room captive with his mixture of boyish energy and passionate engagement.
"I don't want to work against the chaos of the world. I want to work with the chaos of the world," he said, and the best way to do that is through this three-dimensional collage of materials and information, "to make a new world out of the world that exists."
His installation has two components. At the centre is the cake, a multisegmented cardboard construction 12 meters high and 17 meters across, housing displays on a variety of global social ills and political crises: genocide, water shortage, civil-rights violations, hunger, gender inequity, racism, poverty. For example, a photograph of a cow in its milking stall being injected with hormones appears next to a face of a black youth whose face has been slashed (most likely a victim of atrocities in Rwanda).
Nearby, a photograph shows a huge hangar crammed with live turkeys, an image that suggests the dark side of American greed and plenty. It's a harsh universe of winners and losers.
Hirschhorn sets up these relationships with a light hand, though. It is up to us, as viewers, to connect the information according to our own beliefs about the relationship between the world's haves and have-nots. It makes you think. Mimicking the media-saturated environment we live in, the installation offers up much more than can be ingested. Here, as in our lives, we have to pick our way through the overwhelming pile of detail, absorbing what we can.
"The big cake is to share," Hirschhorn said, "but it is also to fight over. It's both," representing the resources of the planet which are allocated with such inequity. "The World State is unjust, inconvenient, confused ... Everyone has to eat. That is the reason there are Jumbo Spoons."
These he has lined up around the perimeter of the gallery space, and each one of the 12 honours or commemorates a different theme. "The idea for spoons comes from the form of the souvenir spoon," he said. "It's something really stupid and really universal. It's about eating, about a gift, about mobility and tourism, about history, and so on. Also, people who use drugs use spoons."
His themes are diverse, ranging from topics such as China (the idealism of the Great Leap Forward, and the collapse into human-rights abuses and corruption), to such visionary historical figures as Rosa Luxemburg, Friedrich Nietzsche, Mies van der Rohe and Kazimir Malevich, and even the Chicago Bulls (the installation was first made at the Art Institute of Chicago), Rolex Swiss watches, the moon (in particular, the NASA space program), the fashion industry, and U.S. weapons manufacturing.
"I like to take seriously the love that people have," he said, "about how people can spend their love on something like a weapon. How they spend their energy, their money, their will."
In terms of artistic provenance, Hirschhorn has two parents - Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol - although he is far too self-effacing to lay claim to such a lineage. "It makes me nervous when people talk about me and Warhol," he said to me. "There are artists I admire, and then there are artists that I love. When I love an artist, I love everything they do. It's total - even the things that people think of as the mistakes," like, in this case, Warhol's late society portraits, which many see as sycophantic stroking. "What I admire about Warhol," Hirschhorn said, "is he was completely in tune with the time he lived in - so much so that he disappeared into it."
In fact, Hirschhorn's decision to become an artist came about through contact with one of Warhol's paintings. "It was at the Kunsthaus Zurich," he told me, "a work called 129 Die." The painting presents the black-and-white silkscreened image of a plane crash, lifted from the front page of a tabloid newspaper. This was a direct transposition of an aspect of lived experience, transported into the realm of art, without inflection. "I saw this and I felt immediately implicated," Hirschhorn said. "There was an immediate shock. The simplicity of it."
Beuys is equally important to him, for his idea of "social sculpture," his empowering notion that everyone is an artist, for his political engagement (even when that proved problematic, like his stumbling involvement with Germany's Green Party in the eighties), and for the importance he gives to the idea of energy as a creative resource in the world.
Like Beuys, too, Hirschhorn holds to a notion of beauty that is somewhat unorthodox. "My idea of beauty, of course, has nothing to do with aesthetics," Hirschhorn told me. "Beauty happens when engagement, will and commitment to a mission find a form, or formulation in light, colour and so forth. It is the form that must transpose my engagement to the viewer."
If the world's a bloody mess, so too must be the form that reflects it. "It's one of my mottos," he added. "Quality: no. Energy: yes. Better is always less good."
Thomas Hirschhorn: Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake will remain on view at the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal until Jan. 6. (514-847-2632 or http://www.macm.org).