The Swiss-born artist Thomas Hirschhorn builds from the bad new days, not the good old ones, as Bertolt Brecht urged us all to do. Here I want only to point to a few of the concepts Hirschhorn has developed to address this condition. For a while Hirschhorn merely distinguished the precarious from the ephemeral, which, as an attribute of nature more than man, did not interest him much as a strategy.
In any case, his is not a critique of the work of art as a fixed thing, or even as a commodity; he insists, in his own ways, on such values as aesthetic autonomy and artistic universality. Soon enough, however, the precarious came to figure less as a characteristic of his work than as a predicament of many people addressed by it, with ramifications that are ethical and political alike.
It is a tricky category. What might be lost in a discursive shift from proletariat to precariat? Can the precariat be pried apart from its victim status and developed as a social movement? At least one thing is certain: it is not a unified class. Such projects take the form of makeshift centres of homage, contrived out of common materials like plywood, cardboard, foil and tape, where discussions, readings, performances and more casual encounters can occur.
Is it possible, by voluntarily crossing the border of this protected space, to establish new values, real values, the values of the precariousβuncertainty, instability and self-authorization? That is the beauty in precariousness. This definition underscores that this state of insecurity is a constructed one, engineered by a regime of power on whose favour the precariat depends and which it can only petition.
Here the political dimension of the precarious shades into the ethical. They are beautiful because they combine the language of engagement with that of sincerity. The result is pure. I find this poster beautiful, but I know what Stalin did. What to do? I need to comprehend. If we live in a culture of affect today, Hirschhorn implies, then we must use its means too. This fine word has several meanings; it refers, doubtless, to the most hackneyed of thoughts, but these thoughts had become the meeting-place of the community.
