Hirshhorn Museum interprets destruction

Harnessing a diverse array of new media, Damage Control, a new art exhibition at Washington, D.C.’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, explores themes of damage and destruction over the course of the last six decades.

The exhibition is installed throughout a spacious network of whitewashed galleries, each a blank canvas (or in this case, a screen) that begins to display an image, video, etc. of a point in the chronology of destruction.

The first gallery provides an extremely impactful and unsettling experience for viewers. The only sources of light in an otherwise dimly lit room come from two eerie and disturbing installations.

The first source is a vintage, color video series of the hydrogen bomb being tested over the open ocean. The second is a spotlight shining on a smashed and splintered grand piano, which is cordoned off with crime-scene-esque chalky outline. By showing the video, an image of destruction, and the piano, a cathartic act of destruction, Co-Curator Kerry Brougher explained that the pieces in this introductory area serve the thesis of the overall exhibition:

“They both serve the title, Damage Control, putting damage within the control of the artist,” he said.

In the face of such unfathomable phenomenons, such as the hydrogen bomb, the human race is made to feel powerless and vulnerable to negative ramifications of its own creation. In light of the daunting future spurred by the Nuclear Age, artists had to adapt their techniques to grapple with a changing and uncertain world:

“Making a painting or a little sculpture seemed futile in the face of destruction in the

world. How do you make a statement while the possibility of total annihilation existed every day?” Brougher asked.

This question remaining open-ended, Brougher left viewers to answer it for themselves, as each gallery space revealed new reactions to damage and artistic techniques to reign it in.

Ironically, the following series of vintage, seemingly simplistic black-and-white photographs by Swiss artist Arnold Odermatt highlights the chaos and and horrific wonder of destruction. Even though each photo was originally part of various police responses to crashed and totaled cars, they relate important juxtapositions between damage and nature.

Just as the hydrogen bomb was tested over the ocean and the beautiful piano was smashed, the mangled cars were photographed in the midst of beautiful  landscapes accented with lakes and mountains. Not only is a car crash a tragic spectacle, but it also has the ability to tarnish the pristine planet earth.

The next photographic series by John Anthony Baldessari explores personal destruction. Each photo documents a stage in the artist’s process of burning his own paintings inside a furnace. Next to the series is a jar containing small discs, which are actually “cookies” that Baldessari made out of the burned bits of his paintings.

Although the installation ends on a humorous note, the cycle of destruction and creation mirrors the life-and-death cycle of nature. Even though flora and fauna naturally die, and natural and man-made disasters occur, everything follows the principle that matter is neither created nor destroyed, only transformed.

Moving on from silent, visual images, the exhibition experiments with the effect that sound has on people’s reaction to destruction. For example, from afar, one piece looks like a random, mangled, man-handled, twisted, poked, prodded and completely nonsensical contraption of metal. It could be a simple sculpture, but as an accompanying video clarifies, when the contraption’s “on” switch is activated, it starts to violently convulse, and some of its parts start to fall off, one by one. What appears to be a school science experiment in metallurgy gone wrong actually has a much more resonant and symbolic truth.

“With a machine that’s auto-destructive and falls apart, the sound helps communicate the reality that the human race is effectively destroying itself,” Brougher said.

With a moving sculpture that does not have any historical context, such as the vintage car photos and the initial bomb video, millennials, in particular, can better relate to the umbrella theme of self-destruction, given the current events surrounding terrorism and global climate change.

Similarly, “Ever is Over All,” a 1997 short video by Swiss artist Pipilotti Rist, explores destruction in the face of the feminist movement. In the piece, a well-dressed, happy-go-lucky girl struts down a city sidewalk to dreamy background music, a giant flower slung over her shoulder. Unexpectedly, this smiling lady grabs the stem of her flower, whips it around to the side like a sledgehammer and smashes a car window, the sound of shattering glass dissonating with the other gentler, more ethereal tones.

With the flower now a tool of annihilation and the girl now effectively a criminal, the video forces the audience to rethink traditional gender roles and define women as powerful beings in control of their own actions, destructive or otherwise.

After experiencing these various, jarring and deeply moving installations by an arsenal of international artists, the curators of Damage Control faced the challenge of picking the right pieces to tell a story that defined much of the twentieth century for most of the world.

“If there’s a weakness to the show, it’s just so much. [Damage] is a huge topic. We decided right at the beginning that there were things we had to cut,” Brougher admitted.

Even though the curators whittled down the exhibition’s collection to what is currently on display, it is still a massive amount to go through. It is likely that many of the exhibition’s visitors will find it amazingly insightful, but too extensive to hold their attention throughout. The maze of gallery spaces gets a bit dizzying after a while, and towards the end, it is difficult to maintain focus.

However, Damage Control, in spite of its slight curatorial shortcomings, is a feat in new media exhibitions. It tells an decades-old and ongoing story of damage and destruction with new media that the next generation can appreciate. The exhibition thereby fully embraces the modern world in which it was born.