Chromatic Fire, 2005
- Medium
- Cardboard, paint, wood, tape, chains, carpet, cloth banner, screws, nails, mannequins, mannequin parts, wood figurines, electrical wire, printed materials, television monitors, fluorescent light fixtures, wooden beams with nail text, plastic compact disc
- Dimensions
- Dimensions variable: 192 × 398 × 178 in. (487.68 × 1010.92 × 452.12 cm)
- Accession Number
- 2015.52
- Credit
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
Gift of Adam Sender
Chromatic Fire’s lurid, macabre combination of tortured human forms, news headlines, and graphic photojournalism defies passive viewing. Employing a long list of inexpensive everyday materials, the installation’s maximalist approach embodies the artist’s oft-stated aphorism “Energy=Yes! Quality=No!” The pairing of bombastic headlines and images of gory deaths—some the victims of gangland murders, others of the violence in Iraq and Afghanistan—nods towards the sometimes-superficial relationship between violence and its dissemination in the mass media. Throughout the work, Hirschhorn embeds reproductions of paintings by the early-20th-century visionary artist Emma Kunz (b. 1892, Brittnau, Switzerland; d. 1963, Waldstatt, Switzerland), who believed that her art provided miraculous healing properties. Her colorful, mandala-like geometric abstractions were purported to make visible and harness patterns of therapeutic “vibrational energy.” Chromatic Fire thus juxtaposes two kinds of visceral imagery: the Kunz reproductions suggest healing through art while the gruesome photographs invoke suffering and strife. The title of Hirschhorn’s installation references the power that inflammatory imagery, and by extension art writ large, have over the human psyche.
