Walker Response
The eight panels from “Blue Serie� proved Thomas Hirschhorn’s connection with controversy and society. The selections, covered in blue pen and marker, displayed photos, headlines and advertisements from newspapers and magazines.
The pieces utilized pictures of starvation, war, beauty advertisements, death (hangings), guns and thin women. Hirschhorn called his eight selections: A-repeat, Acephale (Headless), BMI (Body Mass Index),
C, Engagement, Globalization from Below, Junior Thesis Senior Thesis, No Society, Profit Warning!, Women Against War.
Personally, these pieces were very moving. Hirschhorn drew blue marker over all the eyes with jagged lines flowing out, as if every person in each of the pieces was crying and seemingly without an identity. Looking at the blue, a color often associated with sadness, I was slightly disturbed but
not enough to think about what Hirschhorn was trying to express. All of the panels concentrated on thin women from beauty advertisements and all had pictures of violent death whether it was starved children, a hanging, or dead bodies from war. I wondered if Hirschhorn was making a connection
between beauty and death. In “BMI�, thin women looked very fraile and close to death. In engagement, a conventionally beautiful woman from a magazine sat next to pictures of guns and blood. I thought about how so many people strive for conventional beauty, buying all the beauty products and plastic
surgery in order to obtain it. It caused me to question if Hirschhorn looked at our society and saw the emptiness and unhappiness of conventional physical beauty.
Also, one of the selections read “haven’t you got something better to do?�. I thought this was very interesting. Maybe the author was referring to war and all the death that happens. Does he believe it could be stopped or helped if we cared more about each other than about our physical appearances or ourselves in general? Could things such as the war in Iraq, tragedies in other nations and holocausts that still plague our present day world be avoided if societies were less caught up in temporary pleasures? I’m not sure that’s necessarily true. I think certain issues would definitely be improved from their current state but might not be able to be completely avoided.
I really enjoyed how Hirschhorn formed a unique, artistic connection between beauty and death, despite what ideas he meant to express. It evoked many thoughts, too many to write here and reminded me of the importance of awareness about issues such as war, society, eating disorders, the
emptiness of money and beauty, and death--one of the few, universally certain things for all human beings. Those thoughts however also mirrored the hope and joy I've been blessed to know in my life and lives of others.