The Hitch-hiker exhibition bristles with bizarre ideas and dazzles with techno- wizardry. So what’s new? HAZELFRIEDMAN didn’t find the challenge
AT the very least, Hitch-hiker will probably go down in the annals of contemporary art as one of the most aggressive – and effective – inter-media marketing blitzes ever undertaken by the local artworld. It is the first exhibition in South Africa to actively engage with varied mass communciation technology.
It has shoved the tools of the information trade into the gallery space and simultaneously transgressed the physical borders of its normally insular galaxy by infiltrating mass-cultue constellations such as radio, print and even the post office. While its multi-media friendliness cannot be faulted, some of its messages remain facile.
The ambitious brainchild of curator Clive Kellner, Hitch-hiker was conceived “as a vehicle to explore the role of technology and information in an age of multi- culturalism”. Twenty artists, 16 based in South Africa and Eugenio Dittborn from Chile, Jimmie Durham from Belgium, Grant Lee Neuenberg from Mozambique and Olu Oguibe from Nigeria, have invaded the mindscapes of various media.
One of the wittiest works on show is an ad for an auction of The Rainbow, placed in the Mail & Guardian by Stephen Hobbs, that takes an irreverent swipe at the commodification of post- apartheid South Africa. At the auction on opening night, bidders received a certificate entitling them to a colour of the rainbow – and by implication – its illusory pot of gold.
Minette Vari produced a take-away poster advertising the exhibition. Consisting of a male-female composite of the artist, it attempts to confront issues of identity and the role of the mass media in reconstructing and perpetuating that identity.
Exploiting the principle of auditory arousal, Joachim Schonfeldt embarked on a collaborative project with 702 Talk Radio, consisting of familiar everyday sounds packaged in 10-second slots and played over the air. A barrage of art-by-airmail that must have set the postal services back months was sent individually by Willem Boshof, Eugenio Dittborn and Kim Lieberman. And Kendell Geers infiltrated cyberspace with a computer-based work, accessed through the Internet, that displays every racial and sexual expletive ever hurled, to reflect the prejudice in us all.
It is a truism to say that art no longer speaks in absolute terms nor lays claim to represent reality – particularly when the boundaries between the real and hyper- version have broken down irretrievably.
Technology rules the roost in the areas of information and ideas. And with its tarnished aura and diminshed autonomy, art seems to be able to do little more than represent itself, comment on the rest of the world and perhaps interact with it beyond the confines of its own treadmill.
In this respect Hitch-hiker serves as an appropriate metaphor for a cultural community caught in an indeterminate space, rooted in little other than a strange sense of purpose and functioning like a group of nomads in search of the next rest stop.
Hitch-hiker’s confrontation of that betwixt- and-betweenness is to be applauded, particularly through works by Schonfeldt, Siemon Allen and Robyn Orlin, who take art out of its sight-specificness and into the realm of sound.
But it has become too trendy and too easy by far to jump on to the techno-bandwagon and simply appropriate the medium to validate and replay messages that are little more than tired truisms.
Yes, we are hapless consumers of information; old boundaries break down and new ones are built; the media have murdered our minds and we are now desensitised clones in search of an identity … Tell us something we don’t know.
The dematerialisation of the art object does not imply the whittling of away ideas as well. Sadly, when that happens, art becomes about as conceptually challenging as a book illustration.
Hitch-hiker is on at the Generator Art Space in Johannesburg through to 1997