Thomas Hirschhorn claims not to be a political artist, but you wouldn't know it from his current exhibition at New York's Gladstone Gallery, where photographs of mangled corpses from Iraq and from scenes of political violence around the world keep company with mannequins riddled with nails, enlarged newspaper headlines and reproductions of abstract drawings by the late, somewhat obscure Swiss visionary artist Emma Kunz.

All of this is displayed on crude wooden platforms littered with drills, and humble materials that seem at a glance like detritus. Village Voice art critic Jerry Saltz, in his recent review of the show, calls it a "walk-in manifesto" and adds that "many will find [it] revolting."

Indeed, it is difficult to tell whether Saltz is condemning the artist or simply making an observation when he writes, "These pictures repulse, mesmerize and anesthetize simultaneously; Hirschhorn steers art to shores beyond pornography."

For his last show at Gladstone, which took place four years ago and was evocatively titled “Cavemanman,” Hirschhorn transformed the gallery into a labyrinth of tunnels and grottos, all made from crude, brown packing tape. Inside were mannequins and a scattering of beer cans and other scrappy items. And yet it was hardly the lair of an uneducated troglodyte, but was envisioned as home to a kind of intellectual. Scattered inside were posters of Che Guevara and volumes of philosophy.

For the last Documenta, curated by Okwui Enwezor and widely derided as eschewing aesthetics for politics, Hirschhorn organized a sort of commune with a library and snack bar near some housing projects in Kassel, to which visitors could take a bus and simply hang out. If anything, it seemed like a latter day version of Joseph Beuys' lectures, which he similarly categorized as art.

But if not a political artist and not, as he has said in an interview in Flash Art magazine, a social worker, what on earth is Hirschhorn up to? While disputing the label of political art, Hirschhorn himself has said he is dealing in this exhibition with the interplay of war and art.

In his review, Saltz claims cogently that Hirschhorn is aestheticizing violence—and that seems about right. The interview below, conducted via email, may not provide many answers as to what precisely constitutes Hirschhorn's modus operandi, or motivations, but perhaps that is just as well. Whether you consider him a genius or a charlatan, it's clear that he revels in complexity (and in exclamation marks).

"Superficial Engagement," runs until Feb. 11 at Barbara Gladstone Gallery in New York.

What does the title of the exhibition, “Superficial Engagement,” refer to?

“Superficial Engagement” is the title for an artistic, political, ethical and aesthetical position. This title, in its wording, is an engagement and at the same time a challenge. It is an engagement because I do believe that an engagement needs superficiality, is always superficial.

Superficiality is not negative, superficiality is the condition for a real engagement because if there is no engagement on the surface there cannot be a profound engagement. To go deeply into something, I must first begin with its surface. The truth and logic of things are reflected on their own surface. Superficially engaged people are unjustly considered with suspicion; what is important is not the superficiality, but the engagement.

Superficial engagement is not non-engagement! Let’s keep things on the surface, let’s take the surface seriously! Let's take Vasarely's abstraction seriously, but also let's take the images of destroyed bodies seriously!

The mannequins shot through with nails—are these references to suicide bombings? Would it be incorrect to also a reference to St. Sebastian? Were you thinking of the idea of martyrdom?

The mannequins—when I made them—wanted to be the poor, contemporary, amoral, non-religious version of somebody or something who endures in place of another, a kind of fetish, which is in African culture an object charged with a supernatural power, either favorable or evil.

It's not an exclusive reference to a suicide bomber, but I like the connection you made with St.Sebastian, and other references are also possible. In fact, I always try to be precise and at the same time to create an opening in my work.

The graphic photographs of bloody, mangled bodies torn apart, exploded, riddled with holes—Are these bombers or victims? Where, specifically, do these images come from?

These images come from the world around us, they come from the absolute neighborhood. We live in one world, it's our world, it's my world and it's also your world. These images don't tell us the "truth,” they are not there to inform. It’s not about actuality, I am not a journalist! It's too easy to victimize and it's too easy to show the torturer.

What revolts me is the degree of destruction. These images show this degree of complete destruction—the destruction of human bodies. It's not about killing and death, it's about destruction and self-destruction. The destroyed human body reaches a degree of abstraction, beyond the imaginable.

Most of these photos are mounted on a wooden board and paired with abstract drawings that seem to me to have mandala-like forms. Similar forms are also hung on the gallery wall, made of what appears to be yarn and nails. Talk about these images.

The images of destroyed bodies glued on wood planks [are paired] with images from Emma Kunz. She was a Swiss artist (1892-1963), a healer and a visionary. I am using the artwork of Emma Kunz not as an homage, but as a friendly piracy that could also turn against myself. The act of piracy consists of using her beautiful images as healing-images against war, terrorism, violence, resentment, fear and ignorance. I want to take the beauty of her work, to superficially make use of it as pictorial energy in a three-dimensional display where questions of decoration, formalism and superficiality are confronted with pictures of human violence and wounds.

The beauty, complexity and harmony of the work of Emma Kunz also allow me to connect it to the "Nail & Wire" practice—the practice of doing poorly decorative “Nail & Wire” craft. I like this pure, formalistic, time-passing craftwork. People who do this kind of craft are—without intending to—resisting the historical facts we are living in. These craftworks are also a link toward art for me. Toward the work of other abstract work. Emma Kunz did assert that her work of art would be understood in the 21st century!

You have always been a political artist, but this exhibition is quite a bit more shocking in its imagery than your previous work. Several friends and colleagues emailed me to say they were disturbed; some couldn’t take it and had to leave. Is your intention to shock?

I never thought I am a political artist! I do not want to shock and I do not want to provoke and I am sorry to disturb your friends with my work! But really I am against a comfortable and luxurious oversensitivity or hypersensibility, it's not compatible with art! Because these over- and hyper-sensitivities have to do with self-protection and with self-enclosure, perhaps with narcissism.

There are so many people in the world who don't even have the choice to be sensitive or not. I am for sensitivity but when hypersensitivity and oversensitivity become a way of excluding problems, I do not agree. I don't agree, not only about the personal reaction of oversensitivity, but also because these small personal reactions are corrupted by the political reaction [in whose interest it is] not to show these kind of images. With the will to avoid big questions, questions which concern us all, questions that could be aroused by pictures, oversensitivity and hypersensitivity turn into reactionary attitudes and incapacity to act.

The gallery’s press release describes the show as dealing with “the intersection of the destruction of war and the creation of art.” The anarchist Bakunin said “the urge to destroy is a creative urge”….

Bakunin is absolutely right.

This exhibition seems like a large collage or something akin to Kurt Schwitters’ "Merzbau"—as with a lot of your work. Do you use assistants or is this all you? You began your career as a graphic designer, but can you talk about the influence of collage/montage?

About "Superficial Engagement" I can reassure you, everything in my artwork is my work, but I cannot do it alone, so the help of assistants is necessary—of course—and thanks to them, I can do my work in much less time.

I love the "Merzbau"; it's a very important artwork to me. I love doing collages, making collages means to work out in the third-dimension my two-dimensional thinking. Doing collages is joyful, it's creating a new world with the existing world. I like the idea that everybody is making a collage in his life. I like that collages keep their universality. I like that making collages seems to be easy, I like that collages are still considered non-professional, something dilettante, something non-serious, something suspicious.

I love the work of John Heartfield who, by the way, said: "Use photography as a weapon!" I always carry with me the picture of the work The Grand-Plasto-Dio-Dada Drama made in 1920 by Johannes Baader. I admire the incredible power and the still-biting acuteness of collages in [Dadaist art]. "Dada ist politisch" is a beautiful assertion, Dada is absolute revolutionary art !

Your work is often pointed to by those who insist on drawing lines between blatantly political art, on the one hand, and art meant to be aesthetically pleasing on the other. These people tend to see things as two poles. I don’t imagine you help matters by saying things like this, which you said in an interview with Flash Art magazine two years ago: “I am interested in energy, not quality. This is why my work looks as it looks! Energy yes! Quality no! I do not want to intimidate nor to exclude by working with precious, selected, valued, specific art materials. I want to include the public with and through my work, and the materials I am working with are tools to include and not to exclude. This is what makes me choose the type of materials I use. It is a political choice. I want to work for a non-exclusive audience because art can only, as art, be open to non-art. Art can only, as art, have a real importance and political meaning.” But in other contexts you have spoken of the importance of beauty…

I do want to make a beautiful work! Beauty is important to me, but I do not accept to reduce beauty to an aesthetical taste. What is beautiful to me is what is engaged and what has its own energy. Freedom is beautiful, courage is beautiful, assertion of oneself makes people beautiful, the intensity of emergency is beautiful. Beauty makes me happy, design does not make me happy.

"I do not make political art, I make art politically" is the assertion I borrowed from Jean-Luc Godard (he said: "the question is not to make political films the question is to make films politically") which for me means to work without cynicism, without negativity and without self-satisfying criticism. "Making art politically" means to take the responsibility about everything concerning the artwork, and it means taking the responsibility for what I am not responsible for. Taking responsibility can be beautiful; impossible things can be beautiful.

Are you politically active besides your art-making activities? You have said your work is not about education or the betterment of the viewer, and have even said, "I am not a social worker.”

I am an artist. I have no other activity than "art-making activity.” It's quite a lot of work—I am not complaining—I like to do my work! Your quotation comes from the context: "I am an artist—I am not a social worker." This guideline did help me with my projects in public spaces, especially in the projects where I was trying to involve directly inhabitants as the "Deleuze Monument," the "Bataille Monument" and the "Musee Precaire Albinet.”

The faith I have is that art, because it's art, can co-operate with the reality in order to change it. To insist on art is important because art can be directly in confrontation with the other and to insist on art gives the possibility to an agreement with the other without neutralizing him and without approving of everything.

Do you think many artists these days are complacent politically? Especially young artists? There is an irony in that a lot of work these days seems to be returning to a 1960s-1970s aesthetic—or depictions of hippie types or what have you. There’s even an artist, Mike Pare, who makes drawings of protests. But the actual political engagement of the issues of today seems not to be there. Does there need to be more political art? And art specifically engaged with the war in Iraq?

I do not know what is "needed,” I do not know which art is "needed" and for whom. I cannot speak [for] the other and I do not know what other artists need to do. I can only say what I must do: To me, art is a tool, a tool to encounter the world, to confront the reality and the time I am living in.

I think the artist does not ask what is needed; he does what is necessary for him. This is the problem of the artist, the fundamental question for me: Where am I standing? What is my position? What do I want? And then the question: do I have the power, the will and the intellectual and physical qualities to work this out? I try to answer this throughout my work, also with "Superficial Engagement.”

Concerning today’s issues, the use of specific thematics in "Superfiacial Engagement" intends on creating the artistic evidency: to work out its universality in opposition (in conflict) to a particular historical fact (the Afghanistan war, the Iraq war, 9/11, London suicide bombers, etc.). This artistic evidency that I want to create means working in our historical field, the one we are living in, with the will to build, to give forms to a mega-historical view point. I want to do an artwork beyond history. Not against history.

I want to work out the evidency that art can heal the desire of revenge. I want, with my work, to touch beyond the immediate history what is my personal engagement in which I am living, without leaving aside, avoiding or correcting my own tendency and admiration for decoration, formalism, abstraction, op-art, “Nail & Wire” art, kinetics and oscillations, what is my personal superficiality.

You said this once in an interview: “I am against the inconsiderate pretentiousness of narcissistic self-fulfillment. I want to act, I want to hope, and I want to be happy!” How does this statement—which seems very idealistic and almost precious—apply to this exhibition?

Yes, I want to act because what makes sense to me as an artist is to be in front, to face the world, to face the other, to touch the other. To do art is not dreaming or being an Utopiaist, to do art is acting without control and without compromise. Art has the incredible power to establish the conditions for a one-to-one dialogue! I want to do artwork in this chaotic and unclear world. I want to work in its incomprehensibility, I do not want to bring order or clearness, but I want to struggle with this unclarity, and I want to work in this chaos. I want to give form to this and I want to confront what is strange to me and what I cannot understand because it is beyond understanding. I am interested in universality not in particularism. Art is universal to me and making art means to assert a universal form. The works in "Superficial Engagement" are an attempt to reach this, the works are a result of my action. Hope is not peace and love, hope is taking action and taking action makes me happy.