On Tuesday 23 September I ran a workshop at Fabrica for volunteers and staff. After looking at some documentation of the Hirschhorn work that will be showing during the Photobiennial I asked people to write down their responses to the work. Each response was then sealed in an envelope, thrown into the middle of the room and then each person picked an envelope. In small groups of four we read out and discussed these reactions to the work.
These responses now follow, unedited, in the following four postings:
Hirschhorn has said that anybody should see this piece. Why should I choose to see dead bodies in blood? I wonder if I unroll the rest of the banner, would I see anything happier? I want to. I desperately want to. For me, I think it’s easy to find material to protest against all the unhappy, full of misery events that happens every day and have happened in this world. But isn’t it a bigger challenge to do art for something that really makes our heart happy and our lips smile? This is the challenge that I am given by Hirschhorn’s Incommensurable Banner.
Waste human life
Brutality
Inhumane
Unrecognisable as human.
Nazi Germany ideology that soldiers were told Jews were animals/monsters so they were ok to be killed.
Faceless victims
No consequence of the connection to others, family
Rage
Violence
All male?
Decapitation
Sickness
Evil
Non-sensical
(animalistic) I feel I have to switch off and having to write about the work is too hard as I look at gnarled bodies. I fell [sic] empty.
I feel sad and angry. I also feel very relieved to see these images. I kind of feel elated. Joyous. I don’t know that I would admit that to anyone. It reminds me of when my Dad died and I went to see his body in the morgue. I came out feeling really high and I rang my friend and told her: “They should take you to a morgue when you’re still at school so that you get to know death early on in life.”
Of course, some people, a lot of people, are forced to know death far too soon.
It seems to be images that I’ve seen a hundred times on the news that don’t have any meaning anymore.
There is only horror and nothing else.
I don’t agree with the fact that it always relates to the same people.
Messy
Bloody
Dismembered
Unrecognisable/Recognisable
Random
Caught off guard
Snapshot
Abstract/Abstracted
Exposed
Exposé
Insides-out
The ordinariness of killing somewhere else to where I live
A disconnected connectedness
