The map of friendship

Hannah Ahrendt map

Foucault map

In 2007 Thomas Hirschhorn and Marcus Steinweg worked together designing The Map of friendship between art and philosophy.
Written words and images are linked together, developing a network of practical engagement with the outside world.
Hirschhorn’s love for philosophy is not new. The Swiss artist has always declared his passion for a subject that he doesn’t really see statically in its theoretical statements, but in its material evolving commitment with a society continuously open to changes.
This materialist approach brought the artist to use for his works mostly commodities. Each one reflects the object life’s time in the everyday world. We soon realize how the commodity is everything but timeless. Its value belongs to its usability, once the object loses its function it’s not useful anymore from a capitalistic logic point of view.
Obviously Hirschhorn acts in a provocative way, he loves to stimulate his viewer’s opinion and to give him the tools -firstly cognitive ones- to change the reality he lives in. Well, like Marx suggested, let’s stop wasting our time in trying to interpret the world, and start to change it. His art is ob-scene, in the sense it shows everything.

Centre Pompidou Metz
februari 2012