A Letter to Thomas Hirschhorn

Dear Thomas Hirschhorn,

I am writing to you because you are my favorite artist. I recently bought a book about an early work of yours, "Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake," which has brought your work back in to the front of my consciousness. Also recently, I saw some drawings of yours at the Hessel Museum, and from across the room said "aha! yes! that is what I would like my work to look like!". I had not seen any small collages of yours before, and so didn't identify them as yours. When I discovered that you had made them, I laughed- you are the only artist in the museum who can make me feel like I have a place there! Your work is so central to my life as an artist. You embody my aesthetic and conceptual aspirations, my fears for my work, my skepticism about the discipline we are both working within.

I stumbled in to your installation 'Cavemanman' when I was 16, and was awed. I had not seen much installation art, and certainly not anything that so transformed the space, that was so experiential. I was taken by how clever, unapologetic, earnest, urgent it was, and I still feel that way. My memory of the peice is vivid, if perhaps now glamorized. I am still inspired by this memory, still draw upon it.

When I first saw Cavemanman, I was most taken by your mantra 1 man=1 man, which I took up as a way to encapsulate the sentiment that I had the power to define my goals and practices for myself, unaffected by other's accomplishments or expectations. 1 man is all powerful. But, every person has this same ability and right I have- thus I was at once unique and indistinct, all-powerful and insignificant. 1 man, equal to only 1 man, but equal to only that, to no other limit! This is an idea that motivated and supported me through my teenage years. I doubt that this is what you intended the installation to teach, and even remember articulating that at the time. I think this is wonderful, though. Your artwork presents a lot to process, and so I found within it a lesson that affected me deeply.

Looking back at Cavemanman in my memory, I love it because of the way you fleshed out the full complexity of what seems like a simple, even obvious idea; that modern life is still primitive, old, natural, hidden, mysterious- all of the things we associate with caves. Your peice is about caves and it is also about everything. This is what I love about all your work-your ability to fill a space with what I experience as a sampling of the full complexity of today's world, grounded by a small chunk of language and imagery that is easy to hold on to, that can be grasped visually and linguistically. You do this by embracing complexity and incompleteness. I have read descriptions of you as anti-minimalist, and I think of myself as one, too. I have called myself, jokingly, a Maximalist. More=more. more stuff=more ideas=more learning for both the audience and the artist. Your work does not shy away from the fact that you are a well-read, thinking, critical person, and that you wish your viewer to be one, too. You use text in your work, you place whole books there to be read. You employ big metaphors and symbolism that asks to be explained. Your work demands time and thinking to be viewed. In your hasty executiion you connect the aesthetic of the work to your messy messages, through the employment of URGENCY, which is one of my favorite words and ideas. I may not understand what is going on around me- I can't expect myself to- but I do feel tapped in to an increasing urgency to try to know.

Your work is a precident for me: to use many materials and techniques, to make spaces rather than objects, to draw from within and outside of the tradition of fine art indescriminately, to conquer the ideas that are important to me despite the fact that they are preachy, sprawling, unresolved, to be messy both conceptually and materially, to believe that the sheer accumulation and effort put in to my work will make it worthwhile.

Discussion of your work often emphasizes your use of 'found materials', but it is obvious that you found these things at stores. The hardware store or the grocery store is no more a place to 'find' things than the art shop!!! Perhaps this misdiscription bothers you as much as it bothers me. But Thomas, why don't you re-use old materials more? more overtly? exclusively? You are both educated and compassionate, aware of the complexity of today's crisis, and if you believe in the idea of ethics, you must think that human consumption patterns today are wrong, and that you ought to try not to contribute to distruction. Even more importantly, if you believe that art can be educational, you must see that your choice of materials speaks as loudly as your content, if not more so. Perhaps you are just incrimentally more realistic than I am, since I too use many store-bought materials, knowing that in being an artist and a wealthy american I am complicit in the material systems that my art is criticizing. However, I work for my work to be self-conscious of this hypocracy. I've heard you say in an interview that you use every day materials because 'everyone knows where they come from". But this is shortsighted- the truth is that we do not know, and cannot know, where the many substances our materials come from. This is, of course, my primary pre-occupation, but I wish you would make it more one of yours. Because of my deep investment in you as your fan, your failure to address the implications of the materials of your work within your work pains me. I yearn for your work to express the hypocracy of the materials it it made of, and thus that is the center of the work I am doing right now. In this way, my negative feelings about you inspire my work as much as my positive feelings about you.

I admire the bravery you have in making work with clear messages. You do not seem worried about being called pretentiousness or preachy in your many allusions to great intellectual works and large social problems. I know the fear of this criticism keeps me from pushing my work to its extreme. You also do not apologize for your poor craftsmanship, which I admire as well. This is a constant struggle for me, as I see the argument both for and against it, have peers and mentors that feel strongly about the need to make things that are traditionally beautiful or clean, and the importance of disregarding that impulse. Again, it is the urgency of your work that pushes me towards the impulse to make work in which I pile, sort, rip, hack rather than work cleanly.

Once a teacher said to me that my earnest intentions to make art that communicates moralistic ideas poses a problem, because I am not inclined to be Hip and because I am female. I can't help agreeing that you get away with a lot of the things you do because you are male, and so you are assumed to be talented, knowledgable and autonomous; your attempts at conceptualization and your extensive references are seen as sweet, not compensatory. This makes me angry, because I know that as I young female artist, I am likely to not be given the same benefit of the doubt, my caring will be seen as commonplace rather than inventive, and so it will not be as credited. However, I know that we share our high-caliber education and our whiteness, which advantageously and unjustly affects the way in which both of our work is perceived, and so I feel an affinity with you as a

The peice I am making now, which I think is the most extensive installation I will ever make, is directly inspired by you in a number of ways. It is about waste and consumption, primarily, but in addressing that I believe I adress The Big Everhtying. Like you, it is research-based, and attempts to be emotional, daunting through the assertion of the political or academic, and through accumulation. Perhaps unlike your work, it is also highly personal. In one area, I catalogue all of my trash for one year, in another, I plan to map out most of my consumption patterns, my insecurities, my pathologies, my life history in flow-chart form. I want to acknowledge my sources, to not pretend that my work is an autonomous endeavor. The inclusion of so much personal information supports this agenda. In another section, I am planning to make altars- an idea stolen from you. When I was 16, in fact, I made an altar to you based on your altars to Raymond Carver and Piet Mondrian. Now I am doing this again- making altars to you, bell hooks, buckminster fuller, mierle laderman ukeles. perhaps others. I have a lot more work to do. As in Jumbo Spoons and Big Cake, I am following my preoccupations with particular individuals, seeing them as random but personal embodiments of ideas. You are earnesty, irrationality, urgency. Bell hooks is nurture, reflect articulate Mierle Laderman Ukeles is creative identity consciousness (race, class, gender). Andrea Zittel is all decisions are aesthetic, all objects are art and all art is utilitarian. On a much smaller level, I think I will probably also copy your technique of putting books on chains in a way that they can be read. You have to admit that this is kind of a cocky move, but the fact that you've pulled it off makes me think perhaps I can, too.

Why do I want to tell you these things? I realize that knowing your work does not in any way mean that I know you. I do not know that I would like you or that you would like me, or even my artwork. However, I continue to learn from you, and I believe that learning is all that art is good for, and that you would want to know that you are my teacher. Perhaps you agree.

Sincerely,
Rachel