Primitive Amputations

image + words: peter thomson

Occasionally I like to jump on a train and spend a day in Dundee. Yes. That's right. Dundee. By the silvery Tay.

I find Thomas Hirschorn in the process of setting up his latest installation at Dundee Contemporary Arts: It's Burning Everywhere. This work and its sisters give a commentary not on war in particular, but the world as the artist finds it; a world common to, if not witnessed by, all of us.

Part of this work is comprised of mannequins brutalised by the artist: "punctured... subjected to primitive amputations, referring to the human cost of conflict." Above, we see materials as yet unused.

Elsewhere we find common images from fashion magazines juxtaposed with those so graphic they are banished from our newspapers and televisions; pictures of blackened and bloody body parts torn from their owners by suicide bombers or NATO warplanes: heads, torsos, limbs.

But do we really deserve to be spared, shielded from these harsh realities in our official media?

Would we still be at war if we saw these things every day?