Thomas Hirshhorn's "Crystal of Resistance" Rocks! (Literally)

Selected passages from the 2.5 page artist statement translated from German: "With Crystal of Resistance I want to cut a window, a door, an opening or simply a hole, into reality. That is the breakthrough that leads and carries everything along."


(the entryway into the Swiss Pavilion)

"With my work Crystal of Resistance I want to give a form that creates the conditions for thinking something new.... With this form I want to create a truth, a truth that resists facts, opinions, and commentaries. It is not about 'my truth', but about truth in itself. In order to make contact with truth, to confront truth and to be in conflict with it - conflict in art means creating something - I need a motif. That motif is 'crystal' in Crystal of Resistance.



"I want to work in over-haste. I want to work in heedlessness and I want to work in panic."



"I want to work with the precarious and in the precarious."



"I'm thinking of a skin, a shell or a geode."



"I want my work Crystal of Resistance to be an indestructible and earthly dwelling of the gods - as the cave of the giant crystals of the Naica Mine in Mexico. I want to create a place that is so strange, so entirely from myself - only from myself - and so distinct that it becomes universal. I want to make a large, dense, highly charged, luminous and meaningful work. There will be many elements to see, there will be 'too much." It has to be 'too much,' not because it is important to get to see everything or spend a lot of time looking, but 'too much' so that the things do not lie."