Thomas Hirschhorn. Flamme éternelle.

Barricades of tyres

From 24 April to 23 June 2014, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris handed part of its space to the Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn. He built a work there called Flamme éternelle, eternal flame.

The main material was tyres. More than 16,000 of them, stacked into walls and barricades, dividing the space. The walls looked provisional, hastily built, as if they could fall at any moment.

Visitors knew they had arrived before they could see. A strong smell of rubber met them at the threshold. The smell of garages, scrapyards, hot roads. In a museum it was strange and unpleasant. It was also impossible to ignore.

A place to stay

Between the barricades was a working place. A library of some 600 books and DVDs. Computers for anyone to use. A sculpture workshop. A bar. And two forums around a continuously burning flame, sheltered by sheet metal.

The furniture was made of the cheapest things: plastic chairs, tables wrapped in brown tape, polystyrene sculptures. Hirschhorn has long used such materials. For him, quality as a standard is a way of building exclusion, of deciding who gets in and what counts as art.

Nothing here was made to be admired from a distance. Books to read, computers to use, a workshop to work in, a bar to sit at. Visitors did not stand outside the work. They were inside it, using it, and slowly making it. A museum usually asks for silence, slow steps, no touching. Flamme éternelle asked for the opposite: talk, stay, pick things up.

Entry was free. Hirschhorn was there every day, from noon to midnight, for two months.

Presence and production

Hirschhorn calls his working principle Presence and Production. Flamme éternelle was built on four points: being there, making, free entry, and no fixed schedule.

About 200 guests, philosophers, writers, poets, were invited to speak. No set times. The audience was whoever happened to be present. Each day a bulletin was printed on site, recording what had happened and what had been written.

His invitation went to everyone, from philosophers to passers by: to give form together to a friendship between art, philosophy, poetry and writing. The work was not the tyre walls. The work was what happened between them.

A flame that stays lit

The title recalls memorial flames on tombs and monuments, kept alight so something is not forgotten. Hirschhorn's flame commemorated no one. It burned in the forum as a meeting point, a reason to sit down nearby.

The rubber smell and the flame are two ends of the same work. One is heavy, inert, piled up. The other is always moving, always consuming, always needing to be tended. The smell travelled from the tyres through the rooms, into books, clothes, conversations. People left carrying it.

The flame is closer than it seems to Katie Paterson's incense. Both use fire and smell to make something invisible, time or thought, felt by the body.