Make It New...Again: Thomas Hirschhorn and the Heroic Avant-Garde

In 1987, Thomas Hirschhorn produced six cahiers (notebooks), repositories of daily thoughts, formal experiments, and conceptual workings-through. Crudely bound by adhering pages one to the next, each of the cahiers is a unique object, ungainly and emphatically material. One tracks through these rough-and-ready artist’s books Hirschhorn’s overt engagement with art: the burden of its tradition (“Future+Past: Let Picasso die now”), its relation to politics (“In war art is not important. Why?” and, correspondingly, “In art war is not important. Why?”), the value of kitsch (“Kitsch for life”), the power of the image (“Simplicity, modesty, sincerity”). This paper will consider the cahiers with particular attention to Hirschhorn’s engagement with the tropes and figures of modernism and the historical avant-garde. Heroic figures are gently mocked, revolutionary attitudes are lampooned, paradigmatic forms are taken as clichés. A page opening emblazoned with the words “Neue Bilder machen aus Alten” (make new images from the old) apes the modernist mantra “Make it new!”, while offering degraded forms of the black square and the collage. These travesties are juvenile, performatively so, but they are also serious attempts to come to terms with a tradition that the artist held dear, the validity of which was in question. This paper will consider the possibility that in revelling in modernist clichés, Hirschhorn might actually, ironically, succeed in making things new.