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:
Sad
Depressed, angry
Want to cry
Anxious. Makes me worry about people. What do their families think. What does their best friend think. What happens to lead to this.
Anti-dote to governmental propaganda.
Language, complexities hiding reality.
What kind of artist feels able to present this subject matter. What does he want. [writer didn’t use any question marks]
Mutilated, cut up, bloodied, defaced, wounded, dead, shot up bodies
Tortured, horrific scenes of bombed out cars and half naked bodies.
Images are billboard like arranged in no particular order or place.
Militant style writing, untidy and dripping with paint.
Space is as dirty and scruffy as the images themselves.
Angry bloodshed scenes.
Nothing to laugh about it is a serious matter. Should this really been shown in an art gallery?? These are someones friends, loved ones, son, daughter, mother, father
Sickness. Anger. Rage.
Before I saw the images I thought I had prepared myself. I told myself, it is up to you how you view the banner: as people with lives and loved ones and grief or as merely a group of pictures depicting particles and atoms arranged differently. Not people. I thought I could try and look past death, at the aesthetics. The colour. The patterns. But I couldn’t. Each image holds so much – loss, despair, inconsolable, grief. Mourning. Horror. Shame, the shame of us as humans.
Death is not something I am privy to see often in my life, making it seem intriguing, like a secret. In reality it is not this, it is something else, terrifying and scarily real.
