kagablog

Stephen Hobbs

End of Cities represents the final exhibition in a three year trajectory of projects centered around Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town respectively. Hobbs initiated this body of work with a view to reframing his principal preoccupations with photography where consistent documentation of particular subjects, construction sites, buildings, urban debris, contradictory information in the landscape etc serve as the starting point for a series of new sculptural and architectonic expressions.

The collective body of work over this three year period has sought its particular conceptual and formal properties through a particular responsiveness to the architectural and spatial qualities of each of the exhibition venues and to varying degrees particular references to each city.

End of Cities demonstrates the most developed of these objectives through a range of works inspired by the incomplete state of the gallery itself and an even more overt incomplete highway network on the City foreshore.

End of Cities celebrates the area of the ‘unfinished’ highways as a non-place of fantasy and projection. Hobbs’ engagement with Thiresh Govender, architect and fellow city enthusiast has inspired a conversation around this study area influencing both the installation at the new Blank Projects exhibition space and the public domain.

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.”

this interview first appeared in the sunday independent of 20 september 2009

In the mid to late 1990s, around time artist Stephen Hobbs was making a name for himself with a series of gritty, low-grade video recordings of inner city Johannesburg, actor Burt Reynolds was staging a comeback.

As audiences were marvelling at PT Anderson’s wayward masterpiece, Boogie Nights (1997), which stars Reynolds playing a caddish porn director, a doubtlessly embellished story started doing the rounds. It had to do with the cruel discourse of media success: asked how it felt to be back, Reynolds replied that he had never been gone.

The same is true of Hobbs. Since making 54 Stories (1999), a short video piece recorded by parachuting a camera down the centre of Ponte Tower, he has continued to live and work in Johannesburg. Like Reynolds, however, there was a time when the former Wits graduate was said to be lost in the woods, or to abbreviate things, gone. Many blamed it on his move from video to photography.

Hobbs retort: “The definitions around photography in this country are very limited.”

Rather than defer to these conservative definitions, Hobbs has over the past few years railed against them. A finalist for the 2003 DaimlerChrysler Award, Hobbs, whose ease into fatherhood hasn’t seen him grow his perpetually clean-shaven head, used the opportunity to construct a vast camouflaged wall display. Unlike Guy Tillim, who eventually won the award, Hobbs’ photos were anti-iconic and sometimes downright hard to even see.

“Rarely will one photograph serve as an essay,” he says of his approach to making pictures.

Equally significant is Hobbs’ argument that he is not a photographer.

“Photography is just one of the modes of expression I employ as an artist. It is not the definitive language that I’m interested in – it is part of an assemblage of languages.”

In September 2007, at Wits University’s makeshift Substation art gallery, Hobbs revealed just how adroit he is at moving between media – or, as he would put it, speaking in a new language. Titled High Voltage/ Low Voltage, this strikingly mature exhibition included small sculptural models made from dowel sticks, tie-straps and various found elements. It even included a homage, in the form a toy model, to his yellow VW Golf. Sat on plinths, these models suggested speculative architectural possibilities while offering wry commentary of urban utopianism.

The standout work, however, was also the largest. Two walls of mirrors, each decorated with grid-like tape designs, were held in place by rudimentary pine frames in the main exhibition area. Spotlights created a mesmerising display of reflected light and shadow. The optical experiments of contemporary Danish artist Olafur Eliasson came to mind, as too a host of high Modernist ideas.

An elegant paean to Hobbs’ abiding muse, the city, this work also underscored a key point: “What I do in the free space of my artistic practice is to objectify, criticise, elevate, celebrate and pay homage to a city in flux.”

this review first appeared on gogol’s coat

Opening: Saturday 8 August at 2 pm

Outlet Project Room. 24 du Toit Street, building 10, projector room, Arts Faculty of the Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa.

Dazzle is a permanent installation at Outlet Project Room on the Tshwane University of Technology (TUT), Arts Faculty Campus.

The collection of modest buildings surrounding the Outlet Project Room, prompt a total reading of the configuration of basic rectangular boxes. The application of this all over dazzle pattern camouflage disrupts this box like configuration with the aim of disorientating the viewers’ perception of these buildings.

View the PDF link for more information about Hobbs’ broader conceptual concerns in this project.
http://www.onair.co.za/sh/dazzle.pdf (3MB)

With the aim of building awareness for 300 lbs of Hammer - the installation, at The Sans Souci in Kliptown, Soweto, Berlin Bar served to present a live visual and electronic sound mix of Stephen Hobbs’ Sasol Wax Award 2008 entry: State. Conceived originally as a take on the precariousness of urbanism in third world contexts, the film and previous installation projects are intended for reassembly at the Sans Souci ‘ruin’. In this sense the audience was invited to consider and imagine the function and power of aesthetic spectacle in a setting of ruination and urban decay.

Working with Dave Olivier and Joao Orecchia the editor and sound designer of State, respectively, and 2610 South Architects, this project takes on an interdisciplinary approach to the site of the ruin, and more broadly considers the range of architectural and performative studies and interventions that have been produced in response to this ruin, to date. In this sense the preview aimed to raise the audience’s awareness of the practice of cultural programming as a means of architectural expression and axis for future design.

The following project statement gives some background to the work of Lindsay Bremner and 2610 South Architects, in this regard.

Kliptown, a dilapidated township in Greater Johannesburg, is the site of this project to rebuild the Sans Souci, a community cinema that burnt down in 1995. The Sans Souci, which translates literally to ‘without a care’ in French, was born in 1948, in a building that had previously been a dance hall and a stable. It featured many of South Africa’s eminent performers, including Miriam Makeba, Kippie Moketsi and Abdullah Ibrahim (known then as Dollar Brand) and was one of the few cinemas where black people could view movies during the apartheid period. After falling into disrepair in the early 1990’s, it was scavenged and disassembled by squatters looking for corrugated metal for housing. Since then its striking ruin has featured in many music videos.

Beginning with the question, “What minimum resources does one need to turn a ruin into a cinema?”, the project does not start with a building, in fact, the infrastructure and the architecture are almost invisible on a material level. Instead, it develops and gives the ‘idea’ of cinema new meaning over time, through a number of events and incremental architectural interventions that reconstruct the memory of the Sans Souci and project it into the future.

Over 125 interviews conducted in 2002 confirmed that the Sans Souci Cinema occupied a powerful place in the memory of many Sowetans and that residents felt that its rebuilding would bring increased opportunities for employment, education, recreation and entertainment. In keeping with this, the cinema has been conceptually redeveloped as a community based heritage project, a “living archive”!

The project was driven by the Kliptown Our Town Trust, a community development organisation of Kliptown residents. The Vuyani Dance Theatre Project, ran a dance outreach programme in the area. Film screenings, film and dance festivals, audience development, dance training and film production should allow visitors and residents to actively participate in excavating and remembering/recreating/imagining the history of Kliptown and the Sans Souci and in constructing its future.

In collaboration with artists several outdoor events and film screenings were held at the ruin which brought the Sans Souci to live again. In 2009 the ruin collapsed due to heavy rains. To render the place safe surrounding residents took initiative to clear the site with “300 pounds of hammer “

The Sans Souci no longer exists.
The Sans Souci, Lindsay Bremner Architect in collaboration with 26’10 south Architects
Kliptown (Soweto), Gauteng, South Africa

STATE, (SINGLE CHANNEL VIDEO PROJECTION) 6’10”

The artist here employs the multiple states of wax - solid, smooth, sticky, soft, smudgy, liquid, hot - to talk of his experiences and interpretations of the city. Hobbs sees the African city in particular, as a malleable, transformable environment - a space of survival and reinvention, but also one of decay and suffering. His single channel projection, presents a poetic yet pathetic rendition of the erosion, decay, re-ordering and ordering of a seemingly devastated landscape which reshapes and forms itself in a bare and almost skeletal state. The viewer is prompted to imagine what type of city or modern environment this cityscape might want to be. The application of the material properties of wax metaphorically allows a visual time based depiction of destruction and growth of urban space. This is underpinned by the reality that urban decay happens within a short space of time, but urban regeneration can take decades. The city that the artist has in mind is conflicted by first world ordering and control systems and so-called third world informality. The meeting place of these tendencies has the potential for a transformation, a repurposing of the present to service the future experience and reality of cities. With the viewer in mind Hobbs aims to
create a set of visual references that link the art experience with the urban experience, to the extent that a viewer might single out details in the city that stand for his concerns around the formal and the informal.

Due to the nature of human ambition and drive, cities will always evolve and change. The flux that interests him is the result of a collision of socio, economic and political forces. Johannesburg for Hobbs is a perfect example, where the regulating Apartheid city with its planned segregated space is almost beaten down in the post apartheid era, to the extent that the ‘urban degeneration’ visible in the city becomes a visual code, an indicator of change.

STEPHEN HOBBS

Early on in his career, Stephen Hobbs recognised the need to produce and publish across the disciplines of artistic production, curatorial practice and cultural management. He graduated from Wits University with a BAFA(Hons) in 1994. He was the curator of the Market Theatre Galleries (Johannesburg) from 1994 to 2000. Since 2001, he has co-directed the artist collaborative The Trinity Session.

Living and working in Johannesburg, Hobbs views the city as “an African metropolis of perplexing contradictions and unpredictable developments in the social, urban environment.” Johannesburg was once the powerhouse of South African business, its Manhattan of glittering skyscrapers, but in recent decades corporations have moved into the suburbs to escape
high crime rates. After Apartheid laws that forbade Blacks from living in the city were scrapped, many made the inner city their home. Today, Johannesburg no longer has the feeling of a policed White capital that it once had; it is clearly an African city. It stands as a powerful index of transformation - and is a site for innumerable transformative moments. Hobbs draws on urban vocabularies of images and signs to point to cities’ transformative qualities, which are often invisible and ineffable. He has worked with video, photography, and installation to “record” such “intersticial ensembles” as human interactions, meeting points, or merely the traces of sites of transformation in city environments.

The Trinity Session is moving on! And to celebrate 7 years of The Premises Gallery at the Johannesburg Civic Theatre, The Trinity Session and the Johannesburg Civic Theatre are inviting you to the launch of The Premises Book.

Saturday 13 December @ 4pm, The Premises Gallery

Welcoming: Bernard Jay, CEO of the Johannesburg Civic Theatre.

Welcoming drinks & cash bar available

Book price: R100.00

The Trinity Session

With limited access to established contemporary art spaces, the early beginnings of The Trinity Session saw Jose Ferreira, Kathryn Smith, Marcus Neustetter and Stephen Hobbs imagining numerous possibilities for a way forward as artist-collaborators

in the Johannesburg visual art context.

They adopted a multi-disciplinary and entrepreneurial approach to artistic survival, which brought them into contact with a wide range of brands, marketers and businesspeople. The Trinity Session’s aim was to create a base in Johannesburg Central, and this was speedily aided by their meeting Bernard Jay. Not only did the subsequent lease agreement in 2004 influence directly the forming of their company, The Gallery Premises cc, but it also allowed them to foreground, as reflected in the gallery’s name, their love for combining art and administration.

Art galleries that create conditions for experimentation and the emergence of new talent generally only start to gain an audience and reputation after several years of consistent and qualitative programming. The Premises Gallery, while subject to such pressure, was born out of an interesting new force that would soon influence an entirely new trend in artistic production in Johannesburg namely urban regeneration. It was precisely from this perspective that the gallery extended its programming-logic into the public domain.

Exhibitions, projects and events at The Gallery Premises at the Johannesburg Civic Theatre were managed and curated by The Trinity Session from 2004 until 2008. The shift away from the gallery space to focus more exclusively on public space hails an important new phase in their collaborative artistic explorations. Although by no means newcomers to the environment of public space, The Trinity Session sees the move away from the traditional gallery environment as a move towards refining prior practice insofar as it would allow them to more effectively engage with the “republication” of the multi-layered fabric of life that exists in the public sphere of Johannesburg.

KZNSA GALLERY 166 BULWER ROAD GLENWOOD DURBAN +27(0)31 277 1703/5 CURATOR@KZNSAGALLERY.CO.ZA WWW.KZNSAGALLERY.CO.ZA

read more about velvet here

the whites are gong to end up pulling out of south africa altogether, leaving the natives to their primal scene, the simian condition, condemned as they are to endemic aids and mutual extermination, thanks to the weapons the west generously continues to send them.

a whole continent is being sealed off - not to make it a protected sanctuary, but a sink to be done away with.

jean baudrillard
fragments

AFTERMATH ARTEXTRA 7 MAY - 7 JUNE / www.artextra.co.za

Artists: Joni Brenner, Guto Bussab, Natasha Christopher, Adam Davies, Stephen Hobbs, Bronwyn Lace, Churchill Madikida, Sandile Zulu

In his book, Scene of the Crime (1997), curator and theorist Ralph Rugoff discusses artists from the west coast of the States, who, over a period of 35 years, produced a body of work that embraced the logic of forensics - evidentiary markers, traces, and residues that speak of an ‘aftermath’ of an event, action or happening.

In the introduction to the catalogue, Rugoff outlines his conceptualization of this aesthetic - an artistic practice that suggests a link to forensics, or addresses the art object as if it were a kind of evidence, where emphasis is placed on the viewer’s role as investigator, and where works often have a trace, or reflect a history, of prior actions and motivations. The use of such an aesthetic offers a moment where we may ‘raise reasonable doubt’ around any given narrative, or more rhetorically, around the very instability of Narrative as a concept. The word ‘aftermath’ also refers to the concept of consequence, a ‘given result’; the term may also refer to a trauma suffered, or an event endured.

This show seeks to engage with a group of contemporary practitioners who embrace this ‘aesthetic of the aftermath’, and whose works are linked by ‘”…the type of approach they demand from their audience. Taken as a whole, this art puts us in a position akin to that of the forensic anthropologist or scientist, forcing us to speculatively piece together histories that remain largely invisible to the eye.” (Rugoff, 62)

Using enormous photographic prints, horizon-forming wall paintings,
sculpture the scale of architecture, collosal scaffolding structures and gargantuan installations, Stephen Hobbs draws on the nature of the physical, psychological and social urban beast of Durban to explore how the city is in constant flux. Hobbs notes that “Modern cities are organised into grids, but within those grids there’s disorder. It’s a phenomenon of the city I try to image.”

world premiere at the floor party, johannesburg, 15 march 2008

william kentridge watching “click here to unsubscribe” during the floor party