Thank you (1995)
By Thomas Hirschhorn
‘My videos are boring, repetitive, too long […] I want to do something so simple that it becomes boring […] I do think simplicity is boring, or rather is felt as being boring. Because it doesn’t bore me. True, I never get bored, maybe because I have no expectations’, writes Thomas Hirschhorn in one of his texts. The videos he makes are mostly included as part of his sculptures, adding further visual and sound stimuli to the artist’s overloaded arrangements; some of them, however, are separable and can exist on their own. As Hirschhorn writes, all the videos obey the same principles: ‘I decide very clearly: no cuts, original soundtrack, duration determined by some outside thing, total limit camera movement, no close-ups etc.’ In front of a plain green panel on which are inscribed the words ‘Thank you’, with a piece of rock music playing in the background, Thomas Hirschhorn, stripped to the waist and holding one of his collages on packing board up to his face, slaps himself at a rapid, steady rate. At the end of the song, Hirschhorn moves his collage to the other side of his face and, as the same music starts up again, he starts slapping himself on the other cheek. When the music…
Watch Thank you on Fast Ubu