Considering the ethics of this second tendency – to present directly beyond ponderability, or comprehension: where to pre-hend, or grasp in advance of feeling, would be to violate the responsibility of voiding one’s gaze, witnessing beyond witness or looking awry — it is crucial the extent to which many of Hirschhorn’s Afghani and Iraqi figures are disfigured; that is, lacking faces as portals of commandment and absolute obligation. Instead, what may remain of obligation is a transcendental lack-in-excess, the excessive (non-)presences of photographed corpses striking-out an all-too-human economy of legal-moral retribution. Not only in the images of mutilation, but in the sheer volume of blown-up headlines embodying a thick fog of media warfare, the viewer is caught in the throes of a type of negative transcendence: a failure to transcend, to sublate or synthesize, a series of messages in excess of what they would say — noisy in their contradiction, tragically enjoyable in their paratactical (non-)sense-making. Between sublimation and a transcendent negativity, “Chromatic Fire” and “Concrete Shock” (the names of two of Hirschhorn’s three rooms at Gladstone), between spiritualist “Abstraction” and an immanent “Constructivism,” there is an ambivalence which may constitute a third tendency: to choose both tendencies, and in so choosing to put them into utmost tension with each other. An oscillation pattern we may write to infinity: to heal to overwhelm to not heal…