>From parallel parking to Ponte, Stephen Hobbs’s exhibition puts a new spin on living in Johannesburg, writes Chris Roper
Arriving at the opening of Stephen Hobbs’ current exhibition, Torque of the Town, normally unflappable Capetonians are confronted with a scene of disjunctive strangeness. All the road markings in Bree Street have been painted out. Even more bizarrely, workers from the city roads department are removing the street signs – industriously, and after hours.
Off to one side, a parallel parking competition is taking place. The judge is Lloyd Pollock, the enthusiastic art critic from the Sunday Independent. When the results are announced, Hobbs’s mother is the winner, with artist Terry Kurgan running a close second.
What does all this mean? Is Hobbs making fun of critics, co-opting one into his artwork in a way that makes it very clear what he thinks of us: capable of judging when all the bits line up, but not much else?
These fun bits – easy for the viewer to speculate about and enjoy – are the sign of a confident intellect, willing to risk superficial readings of a show that in fact has a considered and complex theoretical underpinning.
When I phone Hobbs early on Sunday morning to interview him, he sounds a little shabby. Who knows what these artists get up to in the dark of night? I decide to start him off on something simple, to give him time to get his bearings, so I ask him about the parallel parking competition. It’s a misplaced attempt, because Hobbs has a concise and articulate explanation for every aspect of his art, and he’s capable of expressing this under any conditions.
”When I saw my yellow car from the top of the Gasworks [in Johannesburg], I became interested in it as a self portrait, as symbolically me. I also find it amusing the way people get competitive about their experience of the city, and parallel parking happens to be one of those things. It’s so superficial, yet it’s a critical skill to possess in the city. So the competition is about superficial risk taking, and dexterity. I hate talking about it like it’s so important, because it’s actually completely fucking frivolous. But if it can be seen within the absurdity of that, then it’s really important.’
And choosing an art critic as the judge? ”That’s when it starts to play with itself and become amusing. I also thought cheekily, and quietly to myself, that obviously one has to be as strategic as one can be as an artist, and there’s nothing more strategic than to get a critic to collaborate in your project, to play the game on my terms. And on another level it’s just delightful to have someone [like Pollock], who’s quite happy to celebrate in the moment. Whereas most people would just turn away, he’s just bok, basically.
If the parking competition is a frivolous way of welcoming viewers to Hobbs’s strange city, there comes a time when they have to traverse its complicated streets. Each piece on the show constitutes an integral part of the overall effect (except for a gratuitous short story about parking, mounted on a window), so it’s a pity to have to choose exemplary pieces. The one that is perhaps most revealing is Erasing roadmarkings, cnrs Bezuidenhout and Jeppe Streets, which shows an aerial shot of the area in front of the Newtown Cultural Precinct with the road markings digitally erased.
”Yes, you could think of that as the crux. It started with the idea of a signless city, the notion of an invisible city, and I wanted to realise this as a kind of visionary architecture, but on another level as an actual intervention in a real physical city. You’d look at the road markings as a form of territory marking, a kind of canvas, and then there are these abstract gestural marks as opposed to signs of law and order. It’s about the fact that cities are already proscribed, and then you go back to where the proscription lies, and then you redefine it through that intervention and create a multiplicity of meanings. But I don’t know how successful that is yet.”
Is it at all relevant that you simulated this process in Johannesburg, but actualised it in Cape Town?
”It was important to make that intervention in Cape Town, because in Johannesburg we understand those things intrinsically, whereas there’s something very contained about the hedgerow mentality of Cape Town.”
Hobbs has an intense, complicated, and almost eroticised relationship to Johannesburg, reminiscent of James Joyce’s dalliance with Dublin. ”Basically I have a complete love/hate relationship, because on the one hand Jo’burg is a fucking hard town, and it beats you up. But in being beaten up, you are continually getting inspired by its energy. Jo’burg’s hectic, because Jo’burg’s got fuckall. It doesn’t have any history – it’s a hundred years old and it’s based on greed. There are no fictions in Jo’burg, not yet, unlike the multiple fictions in the Cape.”
A piece that comments on the fictions of tourism and landscape is the postcard panorama. Running around the walls of the Cabinet’s tiny gallery is a line of postcards that have been cut up into rectangular strips. Hobbs has alternated the strips of postcards in couples, so that a baboon snarling is mixed in with a vista of Johannesburg, or vultures feeding with a Johannesburg cityscape. Not all of the couples are so obviously metaphorical in their conjunction. Vultures and the sick feeding frenzy of Johannesburg, sure, but what to make of bits of a buffalo staring at you mixed with a side-on shot of an elephant?
”On the one hand it’s a formal solution to telling funny stories visually, and on another level it’s about disrupting the way we look at landscape. I have to deal with the bullshit people make up about Jo’burg, for their own fears and because they chose to leave the place a long time ago. For the right or wrong reasons: they can’t really be judged – although I do want to judge them, I want to say you’re a fuck. I wanted to get people to look at the predictable stuff, and leave them frustrated with the way I’ve made it look ugly. A couple of people were heard saying: ‘Why’d he cut the postcards up? They’re so nice as they are.’ You fuckknuckle, what do you think you’re looking at? You’re not looking at reality to begin with, so fuck you. All I want you to do is understand that these things are constructed.”
Another work, a continuous series of black and white shots of the inside of Ponte Tower, displayed next to an 8mm camera hanging from a parachute made out of a plastic carrier bag, is described as ”Suicide illustrated through a slinkydink of pictures, popping out of a book. I threw a camera down the centre of Ponte, to simulate the eye of a suicide. In the gallery it’s about getting people to do a bit of work between the surface of the book, which shows the high end point looking down into that space, then to look at the camera, which is a bizarre looking thing which doesn’t really make sense as an object, and then to have to look at the film still.
”It’s amazing how many people were unable to make the connections, that maybe the parachute did function. There’s no suspension of disbelief, because they don’t think its possible to do that.”
There are many more aspects to the exhibition, such as Hobbs’s tale of being inspired by the journey he had to make every month from his northern suburbs home to Ponte to pay his rent.
Overall, Torque of the Town illustrates how fruitful the intersection between observation, lived experience, and a playful nature is. It’s also a pleasure to look at art that is so driven by an informed appreciation of cultural theory.