My teenage daughter’s reaction was telling: Immediately drawn to one of Thomas Hirschhorn’s collaged “Tattoo†series, which resembled nothing so much as a high school kid’s binder cover with its repeating skull and crossbones stickers and obsessive doodles in blue and red ink over collaged bodies, she stood there contemplating the six large squares arranged in a grid; and suddenly her expression went morphed from barely interested to intensely horrified. I imagine it was about there that she noticed the headless, mutilated body twisted in a field, or perhaps she realized that she was staring at repetitive tits and ass emerging from the background as her eyes became adjusted to the onslaught of visual information. Telling too that, despite her distaste, she could not pull herself away, but had to scan the other images first. Discontent, indeed – Hirschhorn conjures the glossy ease with which pop culture distracts us from seeing disturbing atrocities happening in Iraq. This, in a group show that included paintings by Lari Pittman and ceramic work by Andrew Lord (Regen Projects, West Hollywood)
