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At left: Robert Hirsch (born 1949) Beneath top photo: |
Except from the "Burchfield Penney Art Center at Buffalo State College Grand
Opening" Catalog, November 22, 2008, pp. 22,
25
by Ted Pietrzak, Director, Burchfield
Penney Art Center
|
At left: Robert Hirsch (born 1949) Beneath top photo: |
Except from the "Burchfield Penney Art Center at Buffalo State College Grand
Opening" Catalog, November 22, 2008, pp. 22,
25
by Ted Pietrzak, Director, Burchfield
Penney Art Center
As an artist, curator, educator, historian and writer, Robert Hirsch has concentrated his life's work in photography. Using images from sources such as books, newspapers and films, he melds historical documents with a contemporary context.
Like Drisch's Gateway, World in a Jar deals with memories, no longer those of childhood. As adults, many of these recognizable photographs reference time and place - a historical or fictional (constructed) event. In World in a Jar: War and Trauma, each of the 850 photographs are inserted into a jar, then stacked and arranged in a serpentine configuration, running the length of the display. Hirsch has arranged them in a specific way, allowing - or forcing - the viewer to engage with them along the path.
Hirsch states, "World in a Jar evolved out of my response to 9/11 and has allowed me to use a camera vision to personalize large themes by dislocating the specific in favor of the general. It is shaped by my visual re-examination of history, which is fueled by my collection of photography books and pictures. These sources allow me to rework and interpret images to explore life's big issues and to ponder what history and images can and cannot teach us."We are confronted by these stacks of horrific and unsettling images and, to some degree, are unable to escape as we move along the edge of table. The images trigger memories, specific and general, and as we attempt to assimilate the photographs - all the same size, all in the same size jar - we experience a sort of sensory overload. Our experience is very different from the playful desire to explore; rather, we are held captive to the bombardment of images of violence and acts against humanity.
The artist has created a portico, a gateway, to appreciating the human propensity towards aggression and instigates questions about who are we as a people, what are our patterns of social conduct, and what the relevance of historical documents are to our contemporary culture. The presentation of the photographs in jars is purposeful and suggests the containment we have for our own memories.
See also: Links to additional excerpts by Director Pietrzak from the catalog
