Fool’s Gold, Stephen Hobbs’ debut solo exhibition at David Krut Projects, explores a somewhat pathetic space, between buildings, where special even remarkable findings set up a relationship between buildings as sculpture and ‘public’ space as treasure trove. Hobbs’ current experiments with materials including lead, copper and pyrite, set out to translate the artist’s interpretation of the fabric of the city as a vulnerable medium susceptible to radical transformation, in turn creating the potential for new forms and encounters.

The shroud of projected negativity that envelopes so many seemingly aggressive cities invariably prevents its users and visitors from seeing particular and precise beauties, hence interventionist methods are often required in the process of re-seeing such spaces. Fool’s Gold submits a number of propositions and findings on this unwelcoming city with a view to repositioning the audience’s interpretation of it.

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Creating the Ephemeral

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"Out of Order"
 

Stephen Hobbs: Creating the Ephemeral by Mary Corrigall (Sunday Independent, 9 September 2009). IN 1996 Stephen Hobbs offered a rainbow up for sale. Not a photographic, sculptural or two dimensional representation of a rainbow but the genuine multicoloured arc that sometimes spreads across the sky after a heavy downpour. Surprisingly, he had quite a few takers. But this was hardly astonishing for an artist who launched his career with an ice block (presented on a stand), attracting the attention of art dealers such as Warren Siebrits and South Africa’s one-time enfant terrible, Kendell Geers. Hobbs wasn’t just an art prankster poking fun at the art world. Well, not completely – he was fascinated with the notion of the ephemeral and how it manifested in architecture. His ice block may have found a buyer in the Belgian collector, Pierre Lombard, but ultimately it was a transient object that could never be claimed. But it wasn’t altogether motivated by his rejection of the commodification of art. “The idea was that by the time my lecturers came round to assess my artwork, it would have melted,” recalls Hobbs. He sees a kind of poetry in the transient or that which remains physically beyond one’s grasp. For him there is nothing more beguiling than that which leaves no trace. His fascination with this phenomenon ties in neatly with the conceptualist ethos that drives his practice. For the conceptual artist, ideas take precedence over the art object. Its full existence resides in the ideas that informed it. “For the artist, the power of a statement is as good as the artwork. For me, the significance of what I do resides in the texts and essays I write about my work because I think that is where the integrity of one’s work lies – not in making the art object per se, but in questioning it,” observes Hobbs. It’s an ethos that has given life to a number of cerebrally and sometimes visually startling artworks such as 54 Storeys (1999), video footage of a trip down the inside of the Ponte Towers, once a popular site for suicides, and consequently the ideal manner in which to visually explore the darkest depths of Joburg’s inner city. Hobbs’s obsession with ephemeral phenomena has also been influenced by living in Joburg, a city in a constant state of flux, and the role he has played in the regeneration of the city through managing most of its high-profile public art projects as co-director and co-founder of Trinity Sessions. Hobbs has come to resent the time and energy that the Trinity Sessions steals from his own artistic practice and how it has overshadowed his persona as an artist – he calls it “the beast” – but it has further cemented his obsession with the fleeting quality in architecture and the urban landscape. Involved in the regeneration of the city of Joburg, he has been able to closely observe the ebb and flow of this dynamic conurbation, concerns of which most recently featured in works such as State (2008), a work that captured its fluctuating nature. Architecture is not exactly associated with the ephemeral but Hobbs has managed, through his photography, to best unearth this abstract quality, particularly in the Mirage City (1997) and Auto Camoflage (2002) series of works. The former featured the mirrored facades of office buildings in Joburg’s inner city, which reflected distorted images of adjacent buildings, reducing them to abstract motifs that appeared to defy their solidity, thus challenging their seeming permanence. Hobbs’s latest project, entitled Dazzle, continues this trajectory. Here he has painted the exterior walls of the Outlet Gallery in Pretoria with the Dazzle camouflage pattern, a monochromatic one made of geometric forms that used to be painted on to warships during the two world wars. Just as was the case back then, Hobbs also intends to trick the viewer, but for him it is about challenging the gallery’s architectural dimensions, obscuring its hard edges and its materiality. “I have also been interested in looking at how I could go from a pure photographic source of the reflection or bounced light and really make it function, which for me is always there in the image that is a deconstruction or dematerialisation of architecture and a rematerialisation of it.” But as usual, there are layers of concepts belying these zebra-like buildings – concepts that relate to ephemera of a different kind: it is the unrealised visions embodied in drawings and models of buildings by pseudo architects that hold a grip on Hobbs’s imagination. Instead of perceiving them as failed projects, Hobbs celebrates the grand visions that they once encapsulated. Of course, they also summon the intangible: they are buildings that only truly exist in the imagination. “I have always been interested in architecture that is architecture that is never realised, that remains within the realm of the visionary, and my major frame of reference is Vladmir Tatlin’s Monument to the Third International, a constructivist tower built around 1919. Tatlin only ever made a 15m model. “It was supposed to house scientists and revolutionists who would develop propaganda for the socialist movement. Tatlin always imagined that there would be a projector mounted on the top of the tower that would project propaganda films on to the underside of the clouds. Isn’t that beautiful? “Part of the poetry of the piece for me is that, of course, it couldn’t be realised. So it remains forever symbolic as a constructivist gesture to the bigger socialist revolution. Tatlin’s creation is ultimately a statement, a manifesto – maybe it even brought about change.” In paying homage to Tatlin, Hobbs is also recognising the value in all the unrealised projects that artists are never able to execute. Usually, when artists are commissioned to create work for the Outlet gallery, they concentrate their efforts on creating objects to fill the interior, and while Hobbs has created a startling object that appears like an indefinable shining object (inspired by The Aleph, a short story by Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges), for the interior he has concentrated his energy on redefining and disrupting the spatial characteristics of the gallery. This is partly owing to his ongoing interest in architecture, which he says “is much more interesting than art because it’s the most imperialistic art form there is”, but it is also determined by his slightly anarchic tendencies. The ephemeral nature of his often site-specific interventions has meant that he has largely remained on the fringes of the commercial art market, only finding a platform for his work in museums or non-commercial venues. It’s a path he chose because he wanted “to do things my way and on my own terms. Working with a gallery means compromise. It was a compromise I didn’t want to make. I have never felt one’s art practice should be predicated on economics. In the 1990s, before there were all these galleries, we were just a whole lot of guys working in isolation and that’s how I thought that things should be.” His resistance to sign up to a commercial gallery also came about when the close relationships he shared with Siebrits and Geers came to a painful and abrupt end. Hurt and disillusioned, he gravitated towards making art on the fringes and made a name for himself as a curator, too, managing the Market Theatre Gallery in the late 1990s then setting up and running the Premises Gallery in the early noughties, where he played an integral role in launching the careers of a dozens of artists. “I never liked the politics of curators and dealers. Partly because I was always a curator and I could make things happen on my own terms.” In 1999 he was commissioned to come up with a project for Blank: Architecture, Apartheid and After, a book on architecture by Ivan Vladislavic and Judin Hilton. Hobbs proposed doing a “signless city” and eventually got permission from the City of Cape Town to realise his idea, which involved blocking off an intersection and “erasing” all the street markings. The success of the intervention gave Hobbs confidence and he began to feel that “what I was doing was far more interesting to me than what was going on in the galleries”. But he would rethink his modus operandi after a trip to New York in 2006 in which he spent time with Jeff Koons, the world-renowned American artist. Predictably, Hobbs was overwhelmed by Koons’s operation. “I saw his studio and it is amazing… there were 18 massive canvases with two people painting and two people mixing paint for each canvas. There is a whole sculpture studio. It is a highly crafted system of delivery. It was an incredible experience to see what mass production in art looks like at the highest end.” What followed was a whirlwind introduction to New York’s art scene, which included attending gallery openings in Chelsea in the company of Koons, and rubbing shoulders with other art world celebrities and serious collectors. When it came to an end, he hit rock bottom. “I was overcome with despair and depression. I just thought, what am I ever going to amount to?” Hobbs felt “like crap for three days” and then it dawned on him “that as an artist, all that you have to show for yourself is the work that you make. So that’s what I did – I started to make works and began to worry less about whether they were ephemeral, or whether I had (gallery) representation. I decided to find the money do what I wanted to do and just get on with it.” Determined to make tangible objects, he produced the acclaimed HighVoltage/ LowVoltage,  which showed at the Substation at Wits University in 2007. It was a hit with critics and was selected as one of the exhibitions of the year in Britain’s Frieze magazine. It was a site-specific installation and, as such, would remain intangible to those who missed the opening night that was similarly the closing night. But it reflected a new direction for the artist. “I was committed to making things. I want recognition for my work. I will be preoccupied with the ephemeral and the transient, but let’s wake up and be more strategic,” Hobbs says. He has finally acquiesced to the commercial gallery market and will now be represented by the David Krut gallery. “I am at a stage where I am growing up. To be successful, I need someone to lean on a little bit. “Am I selling out on my true vision on what I think an artist should be? Of course I am. But that was all idealistic bullshit. You can still be strategic and brilliant. I just hope the integrity of the ideas stays there.” Hobbs will continue to pursue his unconventional art projects and interventions, but now the documentation and series of prints relating to his projects will be the economic end of his initiatives. “There has got to be something you can buy.” He has also become less dogmatic about his allegiance to the conceptual art movement. “I have become less precious about whether I am a conceptual artist. If making an object is integral to the expression and the practice of the expression of articulation, then that is my job as an artist – I have to make things. “If you look at all the work of Hobbs/Neustetter such as the Dakar project, it is really a whole lot of window dressing for nothing… documentation for an experience that we had. The artwork was about walks in Dakar and in Hillbrow.” During those days, the ephemera of his interventions or pseudo-performance pieces were incidental to his practice. “I was never so precious about the things I made, I was just inspired by the spaces I interacted with, and I eventually gravitated towards objects that could reflect on the spaces that I was interacting with; that’s why I never had any representation.” Hobbs has also made peace with the visual poetics that some of his works exude. His reverence for Borges’s The Aleph, an intangible and seductive portal into an infinite world of lived experience, which is evidenced in his Dazzle exhibition, is proof of this shift. “I am going to stop apologising for aesthetics and beauty. When you come from a tradition of conceptual work and people say your work is beautiful or aesthetically pleasing, it’s like a slap in the face. “But I hope that those aesthetics will prompt an intellectual enquiry. That they present a further register for thought and not a passive experience of form, line and colour. My feeling now is that line, form and colour can  be compellingly arranged, and why should one apologise for that?” Hobbs is only beginning to recognise and accept the visual beauty in his work but he suggests that it  is the result of a new-found confidence and his less dogmatic allegiance to the tenets of the conceptual art ethos. “You are not allowed to be seduced by your own work,  according to the rules of the avant garde or the conceptual realm. But that’s a load of bullshit. If it is beautiful and conceptual let it be.” It will be interesting to see how this new approach will further impact on Hobbs’s trajectory and what sort of artworks he will produce for gallery shows. Such exhibitions might cause an initial frenzy among his long-time admirers, who have for some time hankered for a piece of his ephemeral brand of art. Hobbs may make part of his art tangible and available for consumption but it is likely that his practice will continue to not only map the untraceable but remain just beyond spectator’s grasp. “With Christo’s (the Bulgarian environmental artist) work you can buy the plans and the documentation and preliminary sketches of his work, which to me is so poetic because it means you can never own the work. Either you saw it or you didn’t. And the actual work itself is still not something that can be entirely owned.” - Mary Corrigall (2009). Stephen Hobbs will be exhibiting at David Krut Projects in August 2010.

In recent days we've been fortunate to find online examples of the artwork of Stephen Hobbs, a South African artist from Johannesburg. Since the 1990s, he's been using photography, video and installation media to explore and to comment on various aspects of urban life, including projects that pertain directly to camouflage. The top row of the images here shows two installation photographs from an architectural installation titled Dazzle (2009), in which he dazzle-painted a small building (inside and out), employing spatial distortion techniques that were refined by artists for ship camouflage in World War I, particularly Norman Wilkinson and Everett L. Warner. There is an online link where more photographs of this can be accessed, as well as his preparatory drawings, all of which are fascinating. The remaining images in the above cluster are a sampling of his equally interesting photographs of architectural aspects of the city in which camouflage is found, not constructed. In learning more about his work, I found it especially helpful to read three published articles/interviews, available here as pdfs. One other comment: One of Hobbs' inspirations has been the work of Russian Constructivist Vladimir Tatlin. By entire coincidence, on the same day that I found Hobbs' work online, I also found online sources that claim that Tatlin designed camouflage during World War II.

This series of prints is part of a larger body of work (consisting of paintings and installations) on the idea and experience of ‘Shame’ as both a public phenomenon and a psychological condition.

Shame is part of conflict, and current global conflicts have reinserted a sense of shame onto the public stage. But, however powerfully shame is recognized and represented, it has neither a single face nor a common language. It exists rather in fragments - in the cultural detritus left over from unexpected trauma, and in the psychological spectres of fear, loathing, loss and fright which surface in our visual cultures in the wake of trauma.

Shame involves psychological nakedness, exposure, humiliation, hurt, guilt, and deep embarrassment. When shamed, we lose our dignity and integrity in full view of others - we live in a state of disgrace. But there is also another dimension of shame that is of interests: in its deepest despair shame may offer us the potential for empathy. To feel shame is perhaps a condition for recognising the shame of others. This ‘other side’ of shame is emblematised for me in the particular way the word shame is used colloquially in South Africa as an expression of sympathy for, and identification with, someone else’s pain. If you should fall in the street people, for instance, might exclaim ‘ag shame’ or cry out ‘ag sorry’, even though they are not to blame for your fall. The Afrikaans version of this crying out at hurt is siestog, tellingly translated as a mixture of disgust (sies) and pity (tog).

In the recent South African past, shame has been dramatised and confronted as a state of hurt, and complicity in the hurt of others. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) staged this hurt and complicity in public shows of shame, expressed in the languages of human suffering, apologetics, confession, protestations of good faith, and exposures of bad faith. After this historical moment all sorts of urban legends have emerged which bespeak the state of shame, legends connecting the most public of political events to the most private and intimate of individual experiences.

This series of prints images ‘shame’ as an amalgam of figural and textual forms. The seriality is less about conveying narrative than it is a way to register emotion as a set of concretised images and associations. The text is as much a trace of feeling as the marks and colours shaping the figuration. Made from ‘craft’ rubber stamps the words reflect fabricated emotion - clichés masquerading as real feeling - but this sweetness becomes bitter when these words are juxtaposed with violent figuration. Repeated and excessively over-laid, the words might lose linguistic coherence and become physical manifestations of the kind of broken speech associated with trauma. When stamped into figuration of manifest pain, they can be read as flesh and blood, bruises and scars, beatings and torture. The figuration refers to a child’s body. It would be hard in South African today not to see in this a reference to the current prevalence of child abuse in our country and the shame associated with this abuse. But imaging the child is also a way to mark shame more broadly, as a deep psychological condition manifest in the early development of ‘the self,’ and to which we, as adults, seem destined to return in our quest for identity.

Johannesburg, 2004

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On arrival, we were met with a relaxed atmosphere and a glass of bubbly in hand, or the Park Café’s delicious home made lemonade, if you prefer. The snacks that were circulating consisted of skewered basil, avo, Rosa tomato and mozzarella bites and brochette with mouth watering spicy tomato, rich mushroom and chopped olive toppings. The mixed group of art enthusiasts consisted of architects, film industry folk, artists, curators, families and old friends. What better way to spend an evening than in comfort of the Park Café, in good company, sampling great food, in the presence of a fantastic public speaker?

Although there was some concern at first as to whether this was a long table discussion or a round table discussion, and if the tables were square, how would seating be arranged? It turned out that the tables were in fact long, and just as well. This encouraged groups to sit together which added to the sociable, group dynamic of the evening. This also seemed to answer the question of whether or not everyone needed to say something - being an evening of discussion.

Platters of delicious food were served throughout the evening. Servings of fillet steak, with an irresistible sauce, were followed by a never-ending stream of prawns from the kitchen to our table. Towards the end of the second session of talks we were begging the waiters not to bring out anymore for fear of not being able to find place to put them. The dinner finished off with mixed fruit salad, delicious marbled chocolate brownie bites and, of course, a perfect cappuccino.

The first session of the talk consisted of Hobbs’s earlier works as well as his influences. He spoke about Tatlin’s Tower, an early 20th century monumental building design. He spoke about his admiration of 1970’s American artist Gordon Matta-Clark, best known for his “building cuts”. He sliced shapes and sections out of walls, floors and ceilings of buildings, with his own two arms, to create spaces and installations within the building space. We were wowed by a video of Richard Wilson’s "Turning the Place Over", from the 2007 Liverpool Biennial. Wilson cut an 8-metre diameter disc from the walls and windows of the building, and attached it to a motor which literally turns this section of the building inside out, in a cycle lasting just over two minutes. In the second session of the evening Stephen spoke about his current exhibition at David Krut Projects and how his influences tie in with his own ways of seeing and creating art in a city, like Johannesburg.

It was a successful evening spent enjoying humorous anecdotes, a bit of history and plenty of art. Learning something about art and getting an exclusive talk on current exhibitions straight from the artist’s mouth in these surroundings made the experience well worth it and left every one of us feeling replete and full of ideas. The dinners will be an on-going event. If you are interesting in joining future dinners, please don’t hesitate to contact Taryn at the gallery (taryn@davidkrut.com).

Stephen Hobbs' debut solo exhibition Fool's Gold  opened last night at David Krut Projects. Below are images of the installation and the opening itself.

As part of its policy in favour of contemporary art, the Louvre has invited the South African artist William Kentridge to intervene with a specific project around the theme of ancient Egypt.

Parallel to the artist's monographic exhibition - currently showing at the Jeu de Paume, Carnets d'Egypte in the Denon wing of the Louvre - consists in a new set of drawings, collages, and books by William Kentridge alongside etchings, albums and drawings (belonging to the graphic arts department of the Louvre) by artists of the XVI to the XIX century, from Dupérac to Delacroix, from Poussin to Le Brun and Crapelet - who during their travels recorded the pyramids, archaeological ruins, explorers, and different transformations from the cat to the lion.

A series of short videos with music composed by Philip Miller, are also shown in the Sully wing of Egyptian antiquities. Kentridge's videos are conceived as notebooks, and are projected on the four-poster bed of Louis XIV, as though it were the stage of some sort of a baroque theatre. Here the artist puts himself in scene with humour, adopting the position of the scribe, while he recites Percy Bysshe Shelley's famous poem Ozymandias -an ode to Ramses II. William Kentridge has been interested in Ancient Egypt and has been exploring its iconography since 2004 for the scenography of Mozart's enchanted Flute. For this exhibition he mixes different references: Shelley, but also Hegel, the Napoleonic campaigns of the end of the XVIII century, the figure of the scribe, Verdi's Aida… the constructed and deconstructed image of the Sphinx - at times sculpture or drawing, that becomes the symbol of this exhibition.

Text courtesy of the Louvre website, 2010.

Penny Siopis and William Kentridge, in different ways, introduce actual passages of
colonial representation into their Landscapes. Thus Siopis constructed the landscapes of her ‘History’ paintings, like Terra Incognita, from reproductions of colonial illustrations which, she maintains, ‘declared their prejudices – via particular pictorial conventions, generalizationsand stereotypes – covertly but nevertheless obviously (in hindsight)’.

Similarly Kentridge in the series he actually called Colonial Landscapes reproduced in his own style nineteenth-century travel illustrations that he punctuated with surveyors’ marks to demonstratethe inevitable relationship between description and
appropriation.

William Kentridge, Reeds from the Colonial Landscape series, 1996,
etching, aquatint, and drypoint on hand-painted paper.
 

Diane Victor at DKW

Safe as Houses, Drypoint, 2009

Ganemede, Drypoint, 2009

Leda and the White-Backed Vulture, Drypoint, 2009

Victor in conversation with printmaker, Niall Bingham

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