Video occupies a particular place in the work of Thomas Hirschhorn, complementing his use of 'lay-outs', the term he employs to designate his installations and the representation systems he has created. His videos take on meaning in relation to his use of drawing or sculpture, as with 50/50 à Belleville (50/50 in Belleville, 1992), Les monsters (Monsters, 1993) or the 1995 series composed of Robert Walser Video, Antifaschistiche Aktion, I Will Win and Thank You. Hirschhorn chooses simple, often static framing within which an action may or may not occur. He frequently appears in his videos, posing mike a bigger-than-life hero, an archetypal figure of the artist rebelling against the system. He likes to work with refuse, waste matter and any material which the history of sculpture considers as not noble. He attempts to combat the idea of the quality of an artwork, not in relation to its meaning but concerning its realisation and the materials it includes. He thus makes his works with materials such as cardboard, aluminium foil, rags, wooden boards and so on. For the same reason, his videos are preferably presented in the simplest way, on monitors rather than as projections. In the video Les Monstres (The monsters), the camera is static and fairly far away from the street. A pile of boards and cartons – what Hirschhorn himself calls scrap material – are piled up at the foot of a streetlight. After a few minutes, a refuse lorry appears and the dustmen gather up what is for them rubbish. Here, the artist is playing on the ambiguity between the virtually sculptural nature of what has been left in the street and the fact that the dustmen see it as rubbish. They gather up every element on the ground, from the largest to the smallest, but at a given point, they become aware of the camera and appear to be annoyed by its presence. The camera then films their departure, as if to record the transformation of the public space which has become empty once again. Here too, Hirschhorn singles out an ambiguity between the work of the dustmen and a performance which would stage the process of transformation present in his work. The title is a pun on the term for what it monstrous and the slang used in Paris to designate cumbersome objects left in the street and, by extension, the municipal department responsible for clearing the public space of its rubbish. With his intervention, Hirschhorn perturbs the organised social behaviour of the public space. In his own way, Boris Achour disrupts and modifies the same urban codes in his videos Actions-Peu (Little actions) made between 1995 and 1997.

Laetitia Rouiller
Translation Miriam Rosen