Thomas Hirschhorn, a leading installation artist whose work is owned and exhibited by modern art museums throughout Europe and the United States, is known for compelling, often site-specific and interactive environments tackling issues of critical theory, global politics, and consumerism. His work initially engages the viewer through sheer superabundance. Combining found images and texts, bound up in handcrafted constructions of cardboard, foil, and packing tape, the artworks reflect the intellectual scavenging and sensory overload that characterize our own attempts to grapple with the excess of information in daily life. Christina Braun, the first to compile and systematically analyze the extensive source material on this artist's theoretical principles, sheds light on the complicated yet constitutive relations between Hirschhorn's work and theory. Her study, now translated into English, makes a major contribution to the study of contemporary art.

An illustrated examination of one of Hirschhorn's “precarious” monuments, now dismantled. Part-text, part-sculpture, part-architecture, part-junk heap, Thomas Hirschhorn's often monumental but precarious works offer a commentary on the spectacle of late-capitalist consumerism and the global proliferation of commodities. Made from ephemeral materials—cardboard, foil, plastic bags, and packing tape—that the artist describes as “universal, economic, inclusive, and [without] any plus-value,” these works also engage issues of justice, power, and moral responsibility. Hirschhorn (born in Switzerland in 1957) often chooses to place his work in non-art settings, saying that he wants it to “fight for its own existence.” In this book, Anna Dezeuze offers a generously illustrated examination of Hirschhorn's Deleuze Monument (2000), the second in his series of four Monuments. Deleuze Monument—a sculpture, an altar, and a library dedicated to Gilles Deleuze—was conceived as a work open to visitors twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. Part of the exhibition “La Beauté” in Avignon, Deleuze Monument was controversial from the start, and it was dismantled two months before the end of the exhibition after being vandalized. Dezeuze describes the chronology of the project, including negotiations with local residents; the dynamic between affirmation and vulnerability in Hirschhorn's work; failure and ”scatter art” in the 1990s; participatory practices; and problems of presence, maintenance, and appearance, raised by Hirschhorn's acknowledgement of “error” in his discontinuous presence on site following the installation of Deleuze Monument.

"Published in commemoration of Gramsci Monument, a work in public space by Thomas Hirschhorn, produced by Dia Art Foundation. Forest Houses, Bronx, New York, July 1-September 15, 2013."

An illustrated examination of one of Hirschhorn's “precarious” monuments, now dismantled.

Writings by Thomas Hirschhorn, collected for the first time, trace the development of the artist's ideas and artistic strategies. For the artist Thomas Hirschhorn, writing is a crucial tool at every stage of his artistic practice. From the first sketch of an idea to appeals to potential collaborators, from detailed documentation of projects to post-disassembly analysis, Hirschhorn's writings mark the trajectories of his work. This volume collects Hirschhorn's widely scattered texts, presenting many in English for the first time. In these writings, Hirschhorn discusses the full range of his art, from works on paper to the massive Presence and Production projects in public spaces. “Statements and Letters” address broad themes of aesthetic philosophy, politics, and art historical commitments. “Projects” consider specific artworks or exhibitions. “Interviews” capture the artist in dialogue with Benjamin Buchloh, Jacques Rancière, and others. Throughout, certain continuities emerge: Hirschhorn's commitment to quotidian materials; the centrality of political and economic thinking in his work; and his commitment to art in the public sphere. Taken together, the texts serve to trace the artist's ideas and artistic strategies over the past two decades. Critical Laboratory also reproduces, in color, 33 Ausstellungen im öffentlichen Raum 1998–1989, an out-of-print catalog of Hirschhorn's earliest works in public space.

Published on the occasion of his exhibition at the Swiss Pavilion of the 2011 Venice Biennale, Establishing a Critical Corpus is the first theoretical book to extensively examine the practice and artworks of Thomas Hirschhorn, one of today's leading international Swiss artists. Born in 1957, and living and working in Paris since 1984, Thomas Hirschhorn is the author of a large body of work (site-specific installations, films, drawings, etc), immediately recognizable for its political conscience and its formal vocabulary. His work elicits debate, analysis, and a profound discussion of artistic and social issues. Establishing a Critical Corpus is thus a charged and intense textbook, providing texts and topics 'to think about': Hirschhorn's work in general, a specific part of his work, one of his pieces, issues that extend beyond his work, and so on. These fully illustrated texts constitute the core of the book. As the artist says: 'This publication asserts and gives form to one of my goals: 'Establishing a Critical Corpus.' A 'textbook' is what people are interested in: a critical and sovereign approach to art, To an artwork of today, and-in this case-to my artwork. 'To establish this dense critical corpus, six authors from different fields and backgrounds were invited to contribute To The publication. They are Claire Bishop, Professor of Art History at CUNY Graduate Center; Sebastian Egenhofer, Professor of Art History at the University of Basel; Hal Foster, Professor of Art History and Archaeology at Princeton University; Manuel Joseph, a poet based in Paris; Yasmil Raymond, Curator at Dia Art Foundation, New York; and Marcus Steinweg, a philosopher based in Berlin. They give a remarkable insight into the uncompromising art and aesthetics that Thomas Hirschhorn has been building consistently for 25 years. The book is published with the Swiss Federal Office of Culture on the occasion of the Swiss participation at the 54th Venice Biennale 2011

Bringing together 15 maps realized between 2003 and 2016 by Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn, this volume focuses on this particular aspect of his practice that could be seen as a matrix to understand his unique position within the art world and visual culture. As the artist himself explains: With my maps, I want to make clear I have a goal, that I am also a maker, and not only a thinker, a theoretician. I want my maps to be statements and also commitments toward myself, first and foremost. Acting as an archive of Hirschhorn's projects, his maps are simultaneously tools to clarify his thinking, memorials to inspirational figures such as Foucault, Spinoza, Arendt, Nietzsche, manifestoes about topics such as Friendship Between Art and Philosophy, as well as a way to resist. Published all together they provide a remarkable insight into the uncompromising art and aesthetics that Hirschhorn has been building consistently for 30 years.

Heart of Darkness ISBN 0-935640-85-1 / 978-0-935640-85-4 Paperback, 9.25 x 11.5 in. / 96 pgs / 60 color and 24 b&w. / U.S. $27.00 CDN $32.00 October / Art

Since the 1990s, critics and curators have broadly accepted the notion that participatory art is the ultimate political art: that by encouraging an audience to take part an artist can promote new emancipatory social relations. Around the world, the champions of this form of expression are numerous, ranging from art historians such as Grant Kester, curators such as Nicolas Bourriaud and Nato Thompson, to performance theorists such as Shannon Jackson. Artificial Hells is the first historical and theoretical overview of socially engaged participatory art, known in the US as "social practice." Claire Bishop follows the trajectory of twentieth-century art and examines key moments in the development of a participatory aesthetic. This itinerary takes in Futurism and Dada; the Situationist International; Happenings in Eastern Europe, Argentina and Paris; the 1970s Community Arts Movement; and the Artists Placement Group. It concludes with a discussion of long-term educational projects by contemporary artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tania Bruguera, Pawe? Althamer and Paul Chan. Since her controversial essay in Artforum in 2006, Claire Bishop has been one of the few to challenge the political and aesthetic ambitions of participatory art. In Artificial Hells, she not only scrutinizes the emancipatory claims made for these projects, but also provides an alternative to the ethical (rather than artistic) criteria invited by such artworks. Artificial Hells calls for a less prescriptive approach to art and politics, and for more compelling, troubling and bolder forms of participatory art and criticism.

One of the world’s leading art theorists dissects a quarter century of artistic practice Bad New Days examines the evolution of art and criticism in Western Europe and North America over the last twenty-five years, exploring their dynamic relation to the general condition of emergency instilled by neoliberalism and the war on terror. Considering the work of artists such as Thomas Hirschhorn, Tacita Dean, and Isa Genzken, and the writing of thinkers like Jacques Rancière, Bruno Latour, and Giorgio Agamben, Hal Foster shows the ways in which art has anticipated this condition, at times resisting the collapse of the social contract or gesturing toward its repair; at other times burlesquing it. Against the claim that art making has become so heterogeneous as to defy historical analysis, Foster argues that the critic must still articulate a clear account of the contemporary in all its complexity. To that end, he offers several paradigms for the art of recent years, which he terms “abject,” “archival,” “mimetic,” and “precarious.”