Thomas Hirschhorn
The Swiss-born artist Thomas Hirschhorn works in various media, including installation, sculpture, video and collage, as a means of critiquing consumer culture and global conflicts. Hirschhorn often employs found, everyday materials, and works in varied scale to address complex philosophical ideas around topics such as warfare. In the collage series Saddam/Schwarzenegger (2004), Hirschhorn graphically intersperses images of Saddam Hussein with images of then-California governor, actor and professional body builder Arnold Schwarzenegger, alongside images of skulls and pornography. The crudely juxtaposed compositions are further emphasized with blue scribbled lines over and around the collaged elements, with written capitalized text. Amin Alsaden, writing for Art Journal, notes: “In his comments on the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Hirschhorn repeats a statement attributed to the former American secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld: ‘Death has a tendency to encourage a depressing view of war,’ implying that it is in the interest of the architects of war to cover up the human toll of organized conflict.”[1]