Saturday 9 November 2024 @12:00 for the artist’s final walkabout with artist Stephen Hobbs of his exhibition: Man Shouting in Distance.
Stephen Hobbs’ exhibition at WAM, showing until end November
I am always so proud of the quality of much of South African art. We have a particularly vibrant arts community with many of our visual artists being highly articulate in speaking about their own work. Stephen Hobbs is one such artist. His exhibition currently showing at WAM is impressive – beautifully curated, well-conceptualized, intelligent and very thought-provoking. But, it IS challenging and like many contemporary artists, Stephen asks his viewers “to do some work”. What does it mean to be an active and engaged viewer? In the same way we make meaning for ourselves when we read written words, visual images require a 2-step process of viewing/looking and interpreting/making meaning. Despite the seeming conceptual and often abstracted nature of the work showing on Stephen Hobbs’ latest exhibition, there are enough refrains and visual clues for the viewer, even if she knew little about Hobbs’ work, to start reading themes and connections which run through his work.
Man shouting in Distance
Close and engaged viewing of Man Shouting in Distance, the large-scale mural installation at the start of the show, offers initial access to the visual language and themes of much of the rest of the show.
Thin metal rods arranged in 3D against two walls, suggest ghost cubes, architectural structures, tectonic spaces. But their perspective is distorted; they cast dark 2D shadows; they create a broken rhythm. Which form is three-dimensional? Which is two-dimensional shadow, cast on the flat plane of the wall. Where is the light source? There is no consistency. They resemble a city scape … but there is no solidity; positive and negative spaces intersect; their lines are clinical and sharp but there is no overarching regular pattern; no coherent legible space. It is disorientating. The broken phrases of text reinforce this sense of fragmentation. The phrase “Man Shouting in Distance” gives the exhibition its title and embodies the sense of ambiguity and tension. Is the man shouting for help? Is he reaching out to connect, to say “I am here”. Clearly lighting and its contradictory effects of illumination and fracture, are an integral part of this exhibition. Here it is Gavin Olivier of Digital Fabric who performs his subtle magic throughout the show.
Survey 1994-2024 Mind-map on whiteboard
On a nearby wall is a double white board with an intricate mind-map giving a synopsis of the main events in Stephen’s life. And this combined with the main installaton of Man Shouting in Distance, help guide the viewer through this exhibition.
Joburg is in Stephen’s DNA
Crucial to this whole exhibition is the little bubble in the bottom left of the lower board: “Born Joburg 1972”. Joburg is Stephen’s subject matter, Joburg is his medium. The rest of the exhibition needs to be read with this in mind. In an interview with by Eileen G’Sell, Hobbs says: “My art isn’t invested in the city; my art is the city,” viewing himself more as an “arts provocateur and practitioner” than as a traditional visual artist.
Joburg – decay and rebirth anew, giving rise to opportunities
The video on this show of a slowly disintegrating structure, plays out against a grating sound track and evokes the constant state of change and entropy that characterizes Joburg … buildings implode, urban decay creeps, newness is ‘grafted’ onto the decay, the city moves restlessly and inexorably in an evolving cycle. For Hobbs ” dystopia indicates abundance rather than oppression, informing spatial topographies that evolve and adapt at intersections of difference, complexity, opportunism, and irony”. (Nurse 1913) His is not a negative despondency about the grittiness of the inner city but an energetic excitement about what it can offer where differences rub up against each other and discomfort surfaces, encouraging new energies.
Three “Columns” on the mindmap
Looking again closely at this mind-map we see three loosely organic columns. On the left is the chronology of the events and projects in Stephen’s life. After graduating with a Fine Arts degree from Wits, Stephen became the director of the Market gallery – photography was to remain an important medium for Hobbs. Stephen then teamed up with Marcus Neustatter to form the artist collaborative and public art consultancy: The Trinity Session, which later co-produced a range of multi-medium urban and network-focused projects under the name Hobbs/Neustatter.
The “column” of previous exhibitions
In the right hand “column” of the mind-map, Hobbs has included his various exhibitions both local and international, group and solo. Several works on this show at WAM, formed part of previous exhibitions, such as Be Careful in the Working Radius at David Krut Projects in 2013.
Hobbs’ pop up book from Be Careful in the Working Radius at David Krut Projects in 2013 also forms one of the exhibits on this show:
The limited edition artist’s pop-up book [encompasses] … Hobbs’ conceptual practice of engaging the field of architecture as a site for visionary thinking. The work itself is a form of paper architecture, concealing within its two dimensions extraordinary three-dimensional structures and mechanisms. The book was conceptualised with Ingrid Schindall, a printmaker specialising in book-binding and paper engineering, who spent some time at DKW [David Krut Print Workshop] between February and April [2013]. The work contains ten silkscreened, black and white double page spreads, six of which contain pop-ups of variable moving mechanics. The spreads include found text and handwritten mind-maps, stylised networks and city grids, scaffolding and empty billboard structures, blocked patterns and optical illusions, which team up with the imaginative wonderment of the paper engineering techniques to demand an absorptive process of looking. As a fictional urban environment between two covers, created in the visual language that emerged through the development of the prints, woodblocks and trial proof manipulations, the pop-up book is symbolic of the ‘imagined space in which we live.’
“The Column” of the Body
And in the centre of the mind-map, in blue, is a column which refers to the physical and medical challenges Stephen has faced in his life, starting with surgery to insert a shunt in his brain in 1972 at (in red) , 7/8 months old. This surgery was necessitated by pressure on the brain evident from birth.
And so started Stephen’s life of ‘watching his back’. As a young child he was required to avoid extreme physical activities and contact sport. As he grew into adulthood and visited gritty parts of town like Ponte in the ’90s he was already hard-wired with an ingrained defensiveness, a hypervigilance, a natural “muscling up”; always aware of his body in space as he moved through the dense urbanity of the inner city, a space which defied any easy static reading. More recently Hobbs has begun to use his artwork to explore the effects of his physical challenges and the way he negotiates his way through spaces.
Hobbs interest in the mechanics of the body and the skeletal structures as containers (the skull, pelvis, etc), and as architectonic elements (the rib cage, spine, etc), and their correlations in building constructions is seen in the two works on show below.
And so we see how thoughtfully Stephen has curated this important overview of the last 3 decades of his art production. And how, with some time and effort,we can begin to understand the threads that connect these works on show, and how we can begin to think about Jozi in more nuanced ways, with its urban spaces of uncertainty, contradiction and constant change.
AND: Saturday 9 November 2024 @12:00 for the artist’s final walkabout of Stephen Hobbs: Man Shouting in Distance. This is a wonderful opportunity to gain valuable insights and perspectives directly from Stephen Hobbs. Wits Art Museum is open Tuesday to Saturday 10-4pm. Man Shouting in Distance runs until the 23rd November.