Thomas Hirschhorn. In-Between, 2015; installation view, South London Gallery, London. Courtesy of Thomas Hirschhorn. Photo: Andy Keate.

However, due in part to the overwhelming volume of visual information to take in, the details take time to understand. And so it isn’t obvious at first glance that this is a completely constructed ruin. These collapsing structures aren’t the result of neglect or misfortune, but facades made from a lot of cardboard, tape, and paint. The tubes that cross through the space, along with the hundreds of bricks, collapsing flooring, suspended walls, and I-beams, are all constructed of cardboard, while hundreds of meters of knotted tan packing tape adorn the installation. Most of the cardboard is sprayed dark gray, but some areas have an additional white-painted brick motif. The grayness of the installation reinforces the overall bleakness of the collapsing environment, but the flatness of tone signals that this is an entirely invented space. It’s exactly the opposite of a slick Hollywood movie facade that looks real from a specific distance. It has more the light feel of a school fete in which the students have spent a week constructing a spooky funhouse out of available materials—albeit one that’s super-sized. It’s intentionally crude and still easily understood. The decay here is created, and it is clearly about facsimile.

Thomas Hirschhorn. In-Between, 2015; installation view, South London Gallery, London. Courtesy of Thomas Hirschhorn. Photo: Andy Keate.

The addition of used and discarded items such as toilets, portable oil-filled radiators, plastic deck chairs, army netting, and broken pressboard storage units give the show a postapocalyptic element. Copious amounts of silver ducting, strewn from all directions across the space in the same manner as half-hung bunting, complete the scene. Although these items make up less than fifteen percent of the installation, the used quality greatly contrasts with the painted cardboard and tape, and gives the installation the feeling that the space was once occupied. The human element pushes the coolness of the facsimile into something recognizably familiar and personal; this straddling of facsimile and the actual is the In-Between that gives the show its title. The moment in which a viewer could resolve the dichotomy between the two is the moment when the suspension of disbelief occurs and fantasy supersedes Hirschhorn’s construct. In juxtaposing the constructed facsimile with discarded items, Hirschhorn offers viewers the space to project their own specific fantasy of apocalyptic desire onto the artwork.

Thomas Hirschhorn. In-Between, 2015; installation view, South London Gallery, London. Courtesy of Thomas Hirschhorn. Photo: Mark Blower.

For all of its projected menace, the show is a lot of fun to walk through. There is a sense of playfulness in its manic construction that isn’t usually seen in a Hirschhorn exhibition. In the time it took me to view the show, three different sets of children came through, and separately each found great joy in counting the toilets. These kids immediately understood the element of play that is often lost in the grandiosity of Hirschhorn’s heavy-handed gestures. In this case, the intimate scale of the South London Gallery makes it possible to see the lighter aspects of wonder in the work. While large enough for Hirschhorn to be his maximalist self, the installation reveals the subtler detail of his practice that would be missed in a larger space. Within this scale, children and adults alike connect to the work and engage in their particular reveries. Hirschhorn’s mastery isn’t with craft or object making, but he infuses a sense of wonder and play into his installation that enables the viewer to project past the actual physicality of the work. So the facsimile is two-fold: the installation’s construction of ruin, and the viewer’s projection. Even with this realization, it’s still incredibly hard to shake one’s own projection of apocalypse and only consider what is physically present.

Thomas Hirschhorn: In-Between is on view at South London Gallery through September 13, 2015.

Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, File Under Sacred Music, 2003. Production still. Image courtesy of the Artist and Kate MacGarry, London.

British duo Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard are masterminds of re-enactment as an art form. Their current exhibition at the South London Gallery opens onto one of the best examples of this with the seminal work, File Under Sacred Music. This painstakingly detailed and dead-on remake of the infamous bootleg video of The Cramps’ live performance at the Napa State Mental Institution in California in 1978, was meticulously re-staged by Forsyth & Pollard at the ICA in 2003. With grainy, damaged images, delays, jumps, gaps and feedback, there is nothing about this footage that would distinguish it from an original, straight from the 70s, carelessly-shot home video.

Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, File under Sacred Music, 2003. Production still. Image courtesy of the Artists and Kate MacGarry, London.

Music has always permeated the work of Forsyth & Pollard, and it extends through explicitly here not only in subject matter but choice of collaborators as well. Their nod to Bruce Nauman’s Art Make-Up (1967-68) features the world’s longest running Kiss tribute band, Dressed To Kill.

Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, Kiss My Nauman, 2007. Production still. Image courtesy of the Artists and Kate MacGarry, London.

The work, cheekily titled Kiss My Nauman, is a forty-seven minute video installation that follows the members of the band as the carefully apply their stage make-up, allowing us to witness their transformation into their alter-egos. Nauman’s singular performance where he successively paints his face white, pink, green and finally black, is fractured into four screens, four bodies and four identities that are culturally specific and locatable. It is a re-enactment of Nauman’s work by a band whose have made a livelihood of nightly re-performance. Everything here has a reference in the past.

Forsyth & Pollard’s work continually re-performs history, and by doing so, attempts to transfer the past into the present, collapsing the linearity of time. The past is relocated into the present and the present indistinguishable from the past, creating a sense of displacement that runs through the work.

Iain Forsyth & Jane Pollard, Silent Sound, 2006. Installation shot. Image courtesy of the Artists and Kate MacGarry, London.

Silent Sound is the only work in the exhibition that does not use video as a medium to perform re-enactment. Instead it is primarily an audio installation (although there is always a visual accompaniment of some sorts…) based on a 2006 work originally performed live in Liverpool.

As we are warned upon entry:

‘You are about to enter Silent Sound, an ambisonic installation with a subliminal message.’

The work was inspired by a public seance presented by Victorian entertainers Ira and William Davenport in 1865 and the ongoing interest of the artists in methods of silent, non-verbal communication. During the original live performance Forsyth & Pollard repeated a secret phrase into a microphone which was embedded within the ambient music that filled a concert hall and now fills a black box in the South London gallery.

In an attempt to get inside your mind, Forsyth & Pollard worked closely with a former employee of the American Ministry of Defence’s ‘non-lethal weapons’ programme which allegedly exploited the power of subconscious messaging as a military strategy. Immersion is the key here, not only in the subliminal sense, but also in a time past. While based on parapsychology, these voices are not speaking to you from beyond the grave, but they are speaking to you from the past, a inaudible message replayed here in the present. A presence that cannot be heard, or seen, but as the artists argue, will affect you and be taken forth into the future.

What is the message the artists are trying to spread? We don’t know – all we are told is the following:

‘The signal needs to be carried. The truth doesn’t matter.’

What does music meant to manipulate your mind sound like? A soothing, yet emotionally charged classical composition – calm, beautiful, haunting, electrifying….

Flooded McDonald's Still of "Flooded McDonald's" (2009), courtesy of the artists and Peter Blum Gallery, New York. Produced by the Propeller Group in cooperation with The South London Gallery, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the Oriel Mostyn Gallery and the Danish Film Institute.

Flooded McDonald’s, by art collective Superflex, is currently on view at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington D.C.  For this recent film, Superflex painstakingly created a life-sized replica of a McDonald’s fast-food restaurant.  Their deliberate choice to employ one of the most recognizable brands in the world offers a familiar point-of-departure for the viewer, while also evoking related issues of consumerism and corporate ascendancy.

As the Hirshhorn asserts, the artists ‘borrow the cinematic vocabulary of documentaries, ads, and disaster movies’.  This approach is accessible and appropriately complements the main-stream setting.  As the film begins, one instantly recognizes the yellow, red and otherwise neutral, utilitarian interior of the fast food chain.  The counter, menu, partially eaten food and Ronald McDonald figure are all to-be-expected.  Yet, the realism of the space is made strange by the absence of the typically crowded human presence.  The restaurant seems to have been abandoned – creating a sense of the uncanny and imbuing the film with visual ambiguity that engages the viewer’s curiosity.

Flooded McDonald's Still of "Flooded McDonald's" (2009), courtesy of the artists and Peter Blum Gallery, New York. Produced by the Propeller Group in cooperation with The South London Gallery, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the Oriel Mostyn Gallery and the Danish Film Institute.

Flooded McDonald’s is exhibited as a looped digital video projection, 21 minutes in length.  The film unfolds in real time and begins as it surveys the still (and empty) McDonald’s.  Water then begins to fill the space, entering from under a door.  Water, a powerful natural force, wreaks havoc without substantial visual obstruction.  It lifts and moves chairs, trays, food and drinks around the room.  It shorts the electrical circuit and becomes murky in all of the refuse.  The film concludes when the fast food restaurant is finally and completely submerged.

On the one hand a filmic quip, Flooded McDonald’s open-ended nature lends itself to deeper interpretation.  The film creates an artificial and concentrated natural disaster – an event which always points to the fragility of human existence.  (One can’t help but think of recent flooding disasters).  Furthermore, the work confronts the viewer with images of trash and destruction – highlighting over consumption and the associated waste it generates.  This waste, coupled with recognizable corporate imagery, unarguably critiques capitalist excess.  By destroying a fabricated prototype of the American way of life, the film seems to suggest a departure from the status quo.

Flooded McDonald's Still of "Flooded McDonald's" (2009), courtesy of the artists and Peter Blum Gallery, New York. Produced by the Propeller Group in cooperation with The South London Gallery, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, the Oriel Mostyn Gallery and the Danish Film Institute.

Superflex, a Danish art collective founded in 1993, exhibits internationally.  The collective engages viewers and participants in issues surrounding globalization.  They work in film and multi-media projects that are typically realized in the real world through social intervention.  Members Jakob Fenger (b. Roskilde, 1968), Rasmus Nielsen (b. Hjørring, 1969), and Bjørnstjerne Reuter Christiansen (b. Copenhagen, 1969) live and work in Copenhagen and Rio de Janeiro.

Flooded McDonald’s was on view, from January to March of this year, at Peter Blum Gallery in New York.  It has also recently shown at Oriel Mostyn gallery in Wales and South London Gallery, London, UK.

Flooded McDonald’s remains at the Hirshhorn through November 28th.  It is presented in conjunction with the fifth anniversary of the museum’s Black Box space, which is dedicated to new and recent work in film and video.