Thomas Hirschhorn: Laundrette , 2001, wood,cardboard, foil, tape, plastic, stickers, plastic tubes, 16 televisions, 16 videos, tables, chairs, plastic flowers and books; courtesy Stephen Friedman Gallery

Philip Gourevitch, writing in the Guardian in 1999, reflected on a visit to Washington's Holocaust Museum. "There is every reason to believe that exposure to barbarism is not an antidote against it. After all, barbarians learn from history too: the first-ever plan for a Holocaust museum was drawn up by the Nazis." Later he states, "The horrifying quality of Holocaust material does not transform such a context ( the museum) : rather, it is transformed by the context."

My memory of Gourevitch's article was prompted while considering two extraordinary works seen in London during the past month. To a greater or lesser extent, both were concerned with the horrors of political violence, specifically in relation to the universal application of capitalist free-market values in the contemporary world. But each approached such issues from different perspectives on both art and the role of the artist in that world.

Thomas Hirschhorn is a Swiss artist with a growing international reputation who positions himself as an "activist" who makes "art politically." For his show at the Stephen Friedman Gallery he created an installation that was a crude but effective facsimile of a laundrette. The community-style noticeboard, lino floor, plastic flowers, second-hand furniture and bank of industrial-strength washing machines that lined all four walls were a rough mix of found objects and materials. His trademark cardboard was used to fashion the washing machines which also acted as frames for a number of video screens.

Images and words from a huge variety of sources and subjects proliferated on every available surface; texts on Hegel and Freud, homely stories from Country Life magazine, World Wrestling All Stars posters, images of massacres in Algeria, cookery instructions, photos of cats, news articles on the Balkan wars, and many more diverse subjects, were crudely taped to windows, walls and furniture. These rough collages were to be looked at as images, as much as actual texts. They were a sign, a reference to things outside the frame of the work. Novel and at times shocking juxtapositions abounded amongst them.

Everything in the space was covered with a skein of adhesive packing tape, a material Hirschhorn uses to suggest something living, like a fungus or an algae - something that spreads unframed over things. In fact this is one of the key characteristics of his work. He often conjoins disparate elements with organic tentacles of foil - and tape. It is the blood of his 'displays' - implying communication between images and objects: blurring boundaries while framing things at one and the same time.

But, in a sense all of this was a seductive smokescreen to draw you in to the space. On the surface it appeared benign, playful even. I watched a young couple stroll in, joking and laughing, glancing around with wide smiles. A few minutes later they left, grim faced and silent. They had finally noticed the videos, one in the place of each washing-machine-door window. Some showed recognisably artlike actions - metaphors of futility and narcissistic self-absorption. Eight others catalogued a spectacle of grotesque violence. In one, a severed head was carried, trophy like, towards the camera. In another a severely decaying body was examined by a masked official. Yet others showed executions and unidentified tortures.There was no contextualising footage or indeed any obvious information about what you were watching but, once seen, everything else in the show faded to a background wallpaper. I stepped out in to the affluent West London street questioning his stated aim not to use shock tactics when such extreme material was on view to even the most casual gallery visitor here. This was undoubtedly a powerful exhibition but I cursed the artist for showing me these things. And this is precisely where Gourevitch's thoughts are relevant. How does art approach these realities? Can such images be shown without explanation or warning to a passing public? What effect do they have?

Earlier in the month I experienced another work, by Platform, the "social practice, arts organisation." An intense day-long experience that included a five-hour talk with slides and video and a boat trip on the evening tide down the Thames, to the burgeoning towers of Canary Wharf. killing us softly is part of 90% CRUDE , an ongoing investigation by this organisation into the culture and impact of transnational corporations. Dan Gretton has been researching the project with the other members of the group during the past four or more years. He states, "the psychology and behaviour that enabled genocide to occur then [during the Holocaust] is not only still present today, but exists quite specifically in the mind set and activity of individuals working for transnational corporations."

The performance mixed new research into historical records and analyses of the workings of corporate management today with personal stories from his own and his family's history. It also included fragments of Claude Lanzmann's 1985 film epic Shoah . Crucially it included no images of bodies, tortures, or exotic other locations as sites of suffering . The horror of unspeakable events was mediated through a context that brought people together while also pointing up their essential separateness. The mood oscillated, throughout the presentation, between rigorous objective analysis and, at times, emotional story-telling. Some sections used slide and video presentation to create something close to a formal lecture. The personally invited viewer-participants each sat separately in small cubicles within which they privately watched the unfolding event. Later they shared the space of a small boat as it made its way down river. Here, between the shiny riverside apartments of the new 'Docklands' and the disco boats that noisily ply their trade on the evening tide, they were able to reflect on and discuss what they had just experienced and its relationship to the world around them. Dialogue and relationship were key qualities used to offset the possibility of disengagement from such difficult material. Platform's aim was to provide a more in-depth encounter as a spur to personal insight and cultural change.

ýhere are parallels between Hirschhorn's and Platform's work in the use of complex webs of text and image and in the desire to ground the reality of far-away political violence within the day-to-day home life of the viewer. But for Hirschhorn any aspiration to provide answers to a public is not a relevant concern. His work attempts to reach a large and diverse audience through exhibitions in galleries and museums across the (art) world. In this sense it is, in spite of claims about its radical nature, easily assimilated in to mainstream art. By contrast, the difficulty Platform faces is in the need to so severely limit the numbers of people experiencing the work. Their refusal to compromise the address to the single person/participant marginalises the impact on a wider cultural context. But what they lose of a wider audience, they perhaps gain through the intensity of experience of those who do participate.

Thomas Hirschhorn: Laundrette , Stephen Friedman Gallery, June/July 2001
Platform: killing us softly , at Platform's space, June 9 and 23, 2001 (and ongoing)

Nick Stewart is a video artist; he lives in London.