Thomas Hirschhorn: From Graphic Design to Art

A groundbreaking study of the crossover relationship between art and graphic design in the work of widely acclaimed artist Thomas Hirschhorn (b. 1957).

Drawing extensively from unknown or little-known works and previously unpublished documents from the artist’s archive, Thomas Hirschhorn from Graphic Design to Art explores the formative decade of 1984 to 1994. It tells the story of Hirschhorn’s initial commitment to the print medium, with its basis in mass culture and distribution, as a vehicle for his political energies.

Lisa Lee analyzes, for the first time in Hirschhorn scholarship, his works of “self-commissioned graphic design,” which combine rudimentary collage and diagrammatic languages to assert an essential publicness. She describes Hirschhorn’s growing disenchantment with the practical and political limitations of graphic design and, simultaneously, his realization that artmaking, with its freedoms and attendant responsibilities, was the only framework in which to realize his political ambitions.

Finally, and crucially, the book offers original interpretations of Hirschhorn’s dedicated reinvention of composition, exhibition, and dissemination of artworks to better embody his utopian desire to intervene in the world. Lee shows that nearly all the artistic strategies we associate with Hirschhorn were first articulated in this formative decade: the use of quotidian materials, the appropriation of vernacular forms, the processing of mass-circulated images, an embrace of quantity, and an emphasis on urban peripheries.