Claudia Steinberg You have addressed destruction and ruin for a long time. In our apocalyptic present, has your sense of urgency increased?

Thomas Hirschhorn It is unfortunate that ruins, destruction, and wars are – today as yesterday – part of our world. It is something to which I have always been sensitive, because if I want to build a ruin of today, it must resolve the mysteries of tomorrow. If ruins are increasingly visible, we are even more challenged to perceive the destructive aspects of the world. As far as I’m concerned, I’ve always considered that this aspect of reality should also be integrated into my artwork – and in fact, in any artwork.

CS The ruins at Gladstone Gallery are constructed in the drab monochrome of cardboard and tape, your signature materials.

TH I’ve been working with cardboard and tape for years, and I’m paying the price for it if you consider them my “signature materials”, but these materials have gained a new significance since the rise of Amazon and all of the other 24/7 delivery services around the world. To me, these materials are not “invisible” but rather non-considered, since they are simply seen as packing materials. This interests me because that poses the question of the content they envelop.

CS You are very much influenced by Antonio Gramsci’s concept that destruction is as difficult as creation. This is true in regards to rigid societal hierarchies, or unjust economic systems. But how can this idea be applied to the physical world? When I see the ruins of Gaza it is hard to imagine what it would take to reconstruct what was there. So very much will be irretrievably lost.

TH Gramsci’s quote is absolutely just, and does make sense in regard to the ruins in Gaza, Ukraine, or everywhere else, today. The genius of this thought comes from the conviction that each action is difficult, whether creative or destructive, and each action has consequences that are difficult to confront. I think Gramsci’s quote is so important because it points out the difficulty of every human action, including thinking. It’s not a theoretical idea with a physical realisation –Gramsci’s quote is, as such, physical; it is pure philosophy.

CS A ruin is made in seconds. Your work, on the other hand, is labour-intensive, even if you work quickly without perfectionism, and with a team of collaborators. Is the effort you invest into “creating destruction” – itself a contradiction – almost like restoring a sense of time lost, or stolen, in a flash? A silent protest against the loss of not only the wholeness of a building, of a city, but also of all the time that was invested into its creation.

TH Thank you for your sensitive interpretation. It completely makes sense. But the reason is a more tactical one: my hope is that by investing a lot of work, time and energy into art, things will cease to lie. Art offers an encounter with truth. Art – as such – is truth, and art is always an experience – one to one – with truth. Méret Oppenheim’s Object from 1936, a fur tea cup, is truth. Truth as such is not the verification of a journalistic fact.

CS You like to use the word “collage” to describe your three-dimensional creations, stressing the combination of disparate and perhaps natively foreign materials. Can you explain the importance of that approach?

TH I love to collage. Making a collage means working with elements of the existing world which have nothing in common, and putting them together to create a new world. Collaging is my very own groundwork. The act of collage also means accepting that the elements glued together never completely fit. A collage always requires the viewer’s effort to be completed. I love the anarchy inherent to all collages. Fake It, Fake It – till you Fake It is a three-dimensional collage. The artistic strategy is simple: to put two-dimensional collage-thinking into three-dimensional collage-making. It is about gluing together elements in space without being preoccupied with questions of volume.

CS In 2012 you were inspired by the sinking of the Costa Concordia, a cruise ship stuck upside down: a human catastrophe and a visual absurdity. You deride the “banal, cheap, nice and cosy” interior of the overturned ship, and you also use the word “fake” – in this context, I assume people are only given a cheap version of the glamour they crave, while ending up in very real danger and chaos. Could you explain your understanding of the term fake, which seems to encompass the unreal, the inauthentic, the simulacrum, illusion, and perhaps betrayal – the whole spectrum of capitalist material excess and all its faux variations? And what would be its antithesis?

TH Concordia, Concordia is an attempt to use the spectacular vision of an upside-down environment to give form to the fact that something is wrong. My understanding of “fake” is an aesthetic one. I have no ethical problem with fakes. As an artist, I am faking things, until I can make them. I accept fake news as news, as a fact or a fake fact, but surely not as truth. The only problem I have, today or in the future, is when someone from the government, the state, the authorities or the police wants to tell me what is fake and what isn’t.

CS There have been artists, like [Filippo Tommaso] Marinetti for example, who were enchanted with destruction from a fascist perspective. Fluxus artists destroyed concert pianos to further an avant-garde, rule-breaking agenda. You, as a non-believer, have been inspired by Simone Weil. How do the construction of destruction and the notion of grace relate to each other in your work?

TH Grace, as Simone Weil beautifully says, is an ascending movement. Nevertheless, she never defines “grace” definitively, perhaps because grace is what escapes rational logic. Therefore, I can only have the hope that graceful moments will take place with my work, especially with my work in public space. There is no guarantee, no calculation, no plea for grace to happen. The only thing I can do is to work hard, to give everything, to be obsessed then truly lost in doing my work, so that – by grace alone – something unexpected happens. Grace therefore has no relation with a ruin, a destruction, or any specific theme in a work of art. I do think, indeed, there is a healing power in art – not in the sense of passive remediation, but rather in an active manner. If people are open to art and if they have experienced art, killing others will be impossible or at least, less easy.

CS Your recent exhibit at Gladstone Gallery seemed like an almost gleeful violation of the white cube, a reconstruction of the chaos of war underneath the silliness and vulgarity of the yellow smiley faces. Your “ruin room” at South London Gallery, on the other hand, was composed with a sense of beauty that triumphed over the chaos. Have the wars in Gaza, Ukraine, Sudan and the DRC influenced your view of ruins at all, or do they all feel kind of anonymous?

TH The challenge and question for me as an artist is: “How can I, in my historical context, create a work of art that is ahistorical?” For Fake it, Fake it – till you Fake It, it means that I used images of destruction in Gaza, images of the war in Ukraine, and images from war video games as elements of my historical context. By using them without comment, without reference to facts or journalistic commentary, I aim to reach a universal, ahistorical dimension. I understand this as my mission: giving form. Working – as an artist – means understanding art as a tool, an instrument or a weapon. I understand art as a tool to confront reality. I use the tool “art” to encounter the world I am living in. I use the tool “art” to live within the time I am living in. I use the tool “art” because it allows me to resist the historical fact beyond the history I am living in – precisely because it allows me to make an ahistorical work within the chaos and complexity of the moment.

CS I once spent an afternoon at a house with teenage boys, and I was exhausted and depressed by the bombardment of battle scenes on the family TV that were casually consumed or simply absorbed as background entertainment. How does this presence of pseudo-war, this hyper-production and consumption of war – at least in the US – relate to your concept of the fake, and the tolerance we seem to have acquired for its omnipresence?

TH The realistic military simulations we see in video games are a preparation for real war – as confirmed every day. What appears to be a game is, in fact, training for war. There is no more pseudo-war; everything is real. The difference between a video game and a video-guided drone attack no longer exists. Only the destruction, the ruins, are real. This is the reason I wanted to use images from video games, alongside images of destruction in Gaza and Ukraine.

CS To all this war imagery you have added yellow smiley faces that dangle above scenes of devastation – their big grins seem cynically detached from it all, even mocking. You said that as the owner of a smart phone you inevitably carry these emoticons in your pocket. Does their existence, and the way we use them as elements of communication, contribute to the fakery, to a loss of reality, of truth?

TH I myself use emojis because sometimes it is more convenient to use them than words; I intend nothing cynical or mocking when I use them in my work. Even more, emojis are part of our everyday vocabulary, and therefore I wanted to integrate them into my work. Also – and I say this with a kind of irony directed at myself – it is my attempt to keep in contact with the present, following the adage: “If you want to understand the present, you have to learn its language.” In the exhibition, the huge number of emojis insist on the problems of form. They have multiple functions: to connect with what we know of the “over-use” of emojis, and the effect of hiding behind an emoji, and also to use the gallery space’s volume in its height and the existing structure of the ceiling, to bring movement in the exhibition space with the fan making some emojis dangle around.

CS You fabricate everything, so your process of investing countless hours into something very temporary and messy implies a generosity that is often associated with the term “labour of love”. What is on your mind during the construction phase of your work – what guides your three-dimensional composition?

TH Somebody wanting to become involved with my work is the greatest compliment I can receive as an artist. I need to give form. I need to give everything – it is as simple as that. To give form is essential. I think form is the most important question in art. It is essential because it asks: how can I take a position? How can I give this position a form? And how can this form create a truth? The problem is to give a form, my own form, something belonging to me only, something only I see and understand as such, and something only I can give. I want to make an artwork with exaggeration and precisions, a work which, in its charge and density, stands for a new form. To give form is to be decisive. I use the term “giving form” because it means “giving from myself”. Giving form is not making a form or “doing” a form. This is why I invented my concept of the “form- and force-field”. My form- and force-field includes the notions of love, philosophy, aesthetics and politics. I always want to embrace these four notions in my work.

CS I share your love for Joseph Beuys and his concept of the “social sculpture”. Can you elaborate how this idea has informed your work?

TH I love Joseph Beuys’ work. I admire it for the breakthrough he achieved with his entire body of work, his materiality, his presence, his teaching, and his work in public space. He opened up a completely new understanding and redefined sculpture with his social sculpture concept, which was grounded in his admiration of Wilhelm Lehmbruck’s sculpture. I have no pretensions to interpret his ideas in any way, but as a fan of Joseph Beuys, he encourages and inspires me – both through his actions and his thoughts. For example, his statement that “energy comes from the waste of energy, not from economising energy” resonates deeply with me.

CS In the press release for your exhibit at Gladstone you describe your drastic transformation of the pristine space as a “precarious sculpture” – why?

TH To create intensity is important, and to work in precariousness is important as well. I believe intensity can create a memory and in doing so, become sustained. We have to move away from the notion that sustainability can only be reached with materiality, and with a certain materiality. Precariousness is important too because its fragility and its adventurism can provoke grace and can maintain the mystery in my work. My love for non-permanency comes from my understanding of every human activity as precarious, from my belief in doing things instead of considering their unavoidable, incommensurable precarity.

CS In an essay about pixelated images that anonymise faces you spoke out against such protections, against claiming the authority of protection. In that essay you encourage readers to “link the beauty and cruelty of reality”, to give form to the recognition of beauty and atrocity, because you see the separation of those two registers as wrong. Do you object to the sanitising or censoring of the emotional spectrum?

TH I am sensitive and I want to be sensitive, and at the same time I want to be alert. I don’t want to stand aside; I don’t want to look away. Sometimes when viewers are looking at images of destroyed human bodies, I hear them saying: “I can’t bear to look at this, I’m too sensitive.” This is a way of keeping a comfortable, narcissistic and exclusive distance from today’s reality, from the world. From our world, the unique and only world. The discourse of sensitivity – which is actually hyper-sensitivity – is about retaining one’s comfort, calm and luxury. Distance is only taken by those who – with their own eyes – won’t confront the incommensurable nature of reality. Distance is never a gift; it’s something taken by a very few to keep their exclusivity intact. Hypersensitivity is the opposite of the non-exclusive public. In order to confront the world, to struggle with its chaos, its incommensurability, in order to coexist and to cooperate in this world and with the other, I need to confront reality without distance. Therefore it’s necessary to distinguish sensitivity, which means to me being awake and attentive, from hypersensitivity, which means self-enclosure and exclusion. To resist hypersensitivity, it is important to look at those images of mutilated human bodies. .