Are you human,
Or a dud?
Are you human,
Or d'you make it up? -- Alison Goldfrapp
by Jerome du Bois
Now, what I want are, facts:
1. Thomas Hirschhorn, 48 years old, is a Swiss artist, a self-identified leftist, with Swiss citizenship, born in Bern.
2. He has lived in Paris since 1986.
3. He objects to the political existence of Christoph Blocher, a 63-year-old Swiss politician and plastics billionaire, who lives in Switzerland.
4. Blocher opposes Switzerland's entry into the European Union.
5. Blocher, whose Swiss People's Party is the largest in the country, opposes unlimited immigration.
6. Blocher has been politically active since 1977, a dominant force since at least 1986 (to quote the BBC), but only last year received an official position as Minister for Justice and Police.
7. And it was only last year . . . Well, let Alan Riding of Monday's NYT report it, in an article called "Dissecting Democracy, Swiss Artist Stirs Debate:"
No one paid much heed last year when the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn stopped showing his work in Switzerland to protest a right-wing populist's entry into the government.
Got that? The guy doesn't live there, hasn't for eighteen years, but he objects to one politician there, so he won't exhibit there anymore. So There. But that isn't enough for Hirschhorn. In fact, this was at least the second step in his campaign against Blocher.
8. Two years ago, from Paris, he managed to finagle (the equivalent of) $200,000 from Pro Helvetia, the foundation that oversees the Swiss Cultural Center in Paris, to mount his current exhibition on "home territory," so to speak. (Michel Ritter, director of the Center, helped him get the grant. Hirschhorn is not taking any money from the project.) So There again.
9. As a result, the Swiss legislature slashed $1.1 million from Pro Helvetia's almost $40 million budget. It was later restored.
10. Mr. Hirschhorn hates democracy, a concept he doesn't even understand, and he wants it to go down.
11. Despite his reputation as a socially-sensitive artist, responding empathetically with his environment, Mr. Hirschhorn is a self-loathing European, a ripe dhimmi.
Okay, those last two need to be established, so I will.
As part of the exhibition, which Riding characterizes as a "biting critique of Swiss democracy," there's a play based on "William Tell." In the play,
an actor impersonating a dog briefly raises his leg as he passes a poster of Mr. Blocher. In another scene, a man is ordered to vote, even to thrust his head into the ballot box, before he is seen "vomiting" white foam onto a chair using a spray can.
Oh, don't worry about the chair: it's covered with duct tape, as are all the chairs, and much else in the space. It took eight people three weeks to make that fecal-colored mess. The exhibition also
questions democracy, at one point presenting the actors as inmates in a mental hospital. "I don't know why some people die of hunger and other people throw away food," one says. "I don't understand why you wage war to make peace," says another.
These are paid adult actors reciting an adult script, remember, not ten-year-olds musing around a campfire. I can't see democracy shrinking before these statements.
The exhibition's poster
shows a naked Iraqi in Abu Ghraib prison before an armed American soldier accompanied by the slogan "I [heart] Democracy!"
Just the image to use for a critique of Switzerland, right? (Are we sure this guy isn't an American artist?) But think about it: how much attention would he get if the poster showed Blocher, or a Swiss flag, or anything Swiss? Ho-hum. So he whips out the latest sensation as a shortcut for attention, then tries to twist history into parallel:
They said I was suggesting Switzerland tortured people," Mr. Hirschhorn said. "In fact, I was drawing a parallel with William Tell, who rebelled against Austrian occupiers. My point is that democracy does not start and end in Switzerland. Does it make sense to have a lot of democracy in a tiny Swiss canton and not in Africa, Asia and Latin America? Democracy only makes sense if it's universal. That's why I ask, is it legitimate to torture in the name of democracy?
If anyone can make logical connections between the last three sentences, please comment or email me.
He's right about democracy not starting and ending in his home country, though he has an amazingly distorted view of Switzerland's importance:
It's the one [democracy] I know, and it is the one held up as a model to the rest of the world.
Sure, that's the first country that springs to my mind when I hear the word "democracy." Is this a European mindset? And this is what he thinks of his country:
One of Mr. Hirschhorn's metaphors involves tiny electric trains that travel through mountains covered in duct tape. "Swiss trains link the cantons, but they go round and round," he explained. "They link Switzerland to itself, but not to the world." Another construction shows tunnels carved through mountains. "We like to think we are geniuses with tunnels, just as we are geniuses with democracy," he said. "But it's not innate. It's a matter of need."
The final scene in the play perhaps best captures Mr. Hirschhorn's concerns about Swiss democracy. At the end of this "William Tell," recalling the creation of a democratic Switzerland seven centuries ago, the six actors sit on a sofa and chant, "We are free, we are free, we are free." They then curl up under a large poster of William Tell and fall asleep.
But wake up, there's a couple of points I want to make, using facts 2, 4, and 5 above. It's all about immigration, which, in Europe, means it's all about Muslims.
Mr. Hirschhorn insists that his target is not Mr. Blocher, but what he represents. "Blocher is not a dictator," he said, "but he legitimizes Swiss xenophobia, isolationism, nationalism; he legitimizes the feeling in Switzerland that all these foreigners want to come and take their money. He is a dangerous populist.
But what he calls xenophobia could be alert self-interest. What he calls nationalism could be pride in a stable, safe, free country. As for isolationism, such a notion is as silly as his train metaphor; if any country is connected to and aware of the world, it is Switzerland.
As for "populist," here Hirschhorn betrays his elitist leftism. He would rather have a command economy because you can't trust the collective judgments -- called "voting" -- of the unwashed masses. He thinks people are too stupid to determine their own destiny, and will still follow demagogues like obedient sheep. (Think Orange, Tommy boy.) I believe he's lived in France too long; some of their elites, like the newspaper columnists, bray the same stinking thinking.
Which brings me back to fact 2 -- He's lived in Paris since 1986 -- and claim 11:
"Despite his reputation as a socially-sensitive artist, responding empathetically with his environment, Mr. Hirschhorn is a self-loathing European, a ripe dhimmi."
All around him, every day in France, he can see the daunting results of the kind of immigration he's pushing for in Switzerland. In the case of France, all those foreigners did want to come and get their 1000 euros a month. And they did, and he lives in it every day. Three days ago Robert Spencer at Dhimmi Watch posted long sections from a Chicago Tribune article about the future of Islam in Europe:
"The French are scared," said Tair Abdelkader, 38, a regular at the tented mosque whose light blue eyes and ebony beard are the legacy of a French mother and Algerian father. "In 10 years, the Muslim community will be stronger and stronger, and French political culture must accept that."
By midcentury, at least one in five Europeans will be Muslim. That change is unlike other waves of immigration because it poses a more essential challenge: defining a modern Judeo-Christian-Islamic civilization. The West must decide how its laws and values will shape and be shaped by Islam.
Thomas Hirschhorn must be cool with all this. But when the Muslims run Europe, not only will he be out of a profession, as the new culture ministers laugh in scorn at his every proposal; he will be redefined as a lower form of human.
Duct tape won't help him then.
Posted by Jerome at December 29, 2004 09:36 AM | TrackBack