Exhibit of the week: Concordia, Concordia

Gladstone Gallery, New York

Through Oct. 20

Thomas Hirschhorn’s latest installation “serves up a spectacle from recent headlines,” said Karen Rosenberg in The New York Times. Revisiting the tragic wreck of the Costa Concordia cruise ship off Tuscany in January, the Paris-based Swiss artist has created a version of the ship’s capsized casino room that’s surreal in its details. “It takes a minute to adjust your eyes to the installation, especially because the boat’s ‘floor’ is actually the gallery’s east wall.” Broken dishes, orange life vests, and tumbled-over furniture form a lopsided pile in front of you. Yet this is more than sensationalist diorama-making. “Much as the Titanic in 1912 encapsulated class differences just before the Great War,” the beached Concordia is here meant to serve as a metaphor for the precariousness of today’s social and economic structures.

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“There are two sociohistorical skeleton keys” to this “tour de force” of an installation, said Jerry Saltz in New York magazine. Mixed in with that pile of life preservers and chairs and the tipped-over baby grand piano lie scattered pages from Karl Marx’s Das Kapital. “Given that cruise ships are islands of bourgeois excess,” that book’s appearance feels didactic at best. But Hirschhorn gets more from his inclusion of a reproduction of Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, a 19th-century French painting that in depicting the suffering survivors of a shipwreck stirred passions against the recently restored French monarchy. By using the Géricault image, “Hirschhorn is saying, ‘We’re these people! The game’s up!’” Concordia, Concordia thus becomes “a monument or gravestone” to the fact that everything’s become too big to not fail—the global economy, the global population, even the overheated art market that pays for Hirschhorn’s massive madhouse agglomerations.

It’s a shame that a viewer can’t step inside the upturned room, said Kris Scheifele in Hyperallergic.com. Unable to feel fully the “threatening disorientation” of the piece, you instead start noticing its flaws, like the Marx book or the preponderance of chairs that appear “much too dilapidated” to have been used by diners on a luxury cruise ship. Given this evidence of “laziness in the prop-hunting department,” you get the strong impression “that Hirschhorn’s piece doesn’t come from any personal imperative” but from “simply wanting to do something big.” The more time you spend gawking at Concordia, Concordia, the more the piece feels like merely another example of a major artist “flexing his muscle by filling a hefty, blue-chip space.”