The thing about SE – and why I feel it to be one of the artist’s most important works to date, and perhaps a significant marking point for recent art at large – is that it aligns itself with two aesthetic tendencies, and in doing so goes beyond these tendencies, producing a third. The first of these tendencies is abstraction: the highly rational, beautiful, and “rested”-Classical. This tendency is embodied by a host of devotional reference points: Emma Kunz’s theosophical drawings, images from works of “color musicians,” as well as kitschy reproductions of 80’s “spiral art” and other post-“psychedelic” craft forms. Precariously, in a clash of culturally sanctioned forms (however “marginalized” or “outside”) and products of mass production, such references appeal to a power of the beautiful to calm, rest and inhere to it spiritual power – a metaphysical potential “to heal” Hirschhorn himself cites as one of the objectives of his latest work. The second tendency, a tendency arguably inverse of the first, presents through the most direct means (the artist’s signature materials: packing and other common household tapes, nails, screws, cardboard boxes, Sharpie, etc.) violent actualities — a severed head or a barely recognizable human body standing in a pool of blood; and in so doing burdens the viewer’s gaze with overwhelming images and signs of manifest violence. This phenomena Jean-François Lyotard may likely call the  “presentation of the unpresentable,” and his contemporary, Emmanuel Levinas, an instantiation of the “there is” – the anarchic night of creation itself commensurable with ethical responsibility.