While the majority of the work on Mark Hipper’s Bad is beautiful, thought- provoking and intensely moving, a few pieces are of an uneven quality. This is not something a reviewer would normally highlight – there is so much here that is excellent, it would be stupid and churlish to risk discouraging anyone from a worthwhile, enjoyable viewing experience. In some strange way, though, you are forced to consider the weaker pieces so as to gain the full effect of the stronger.
To give an example: Punish and Discipline 3 shows a chalkboard, on which are the words ”take a cold bath”, and the outline of a young boy’s torso, with an erection showing through his underpants. This seems so obvious a concatenation of educational tools and repressed sexuality that you wonder exactly how complex the artist’s philosophy really can be. And then you see one of the frightening children’s heads on the opposite wall.
Painted in muted oils on plywood, Head 3 is alien and egg-like, exquisite and haunting. It looks squashed, cut up, slightly distorted, and horrifyingly human. This arouses a range of emotions, many of them related to violently repressed sexuality. However, without the conceptual triteness of the chalkboard piece, you might not be fully attuned to the nuances of Head 3. You have to consider that this could be a deliberate device on the artist’s part, and also an acknowledgment that somewhere in the world there are viewers who need things spelt out to them in very plain signs.
We all know who those viewers are, of course, and it is a pity we have to talk about them in this review. I’m sure the artist is groaning as he reads this, contemplating yet again his work being subsumed in the necessities of tabloid journalism.
Referring to the furore over Hipper’s Viscera show at last year’s Grahamstown Festival, Alex Dodd lamented that ”the whole nappies-in-a-knot child pornography scandal” stole the spotlight, and that ”the fundamentalists and the media [had] chosen to focus on the overtly sexual images”. The Weekend Post called it a ”kid porn outrage”, Maureen Barnes condemned it without actually seeing the show, Robert Kirby advocated censorship, and Deputy Minister of Home Affairs Lindiwe Sisulu flew in to back up her hysterical call for a banning.
Why am I regurgitating this frankly uninteresting history? Well, the reek of censorship hangs heavy at Bad. There are no works as blatant as the ones of boys fondling their penises, that so aroused the ire of the moron majority. Instead, the predominant impression is of heads, with eyes closed or hidden by a strip, and bodies conspicuously absent. The only place you’ll see naked genitalia is between the pages of a handmade book, where there are exquisite line drawings of bodies. There is a pair of white gloves provided, which you need to use to handle the book, and in a show called Bad, you have to think ironically of Michael Jackson. He gets to meet Madiba, Hipper gets to be slagged off by enraged moral watchdogs.
It seems undeniable that Hipper is reacting to threats of censorship, and this awareness invests his work with a claustrophobic power at the same time as it forces him to make simplistic work like the chalkboard described above. It’s almost as if he has to clearly state, look, I’m talking about ideology, not about actually lusting after little children.
At last year’s Histories of the Present show at Wits, he exhibited press clippings on the Viscera controversy alongside his work. Mail & Guardian critic Brenda Atkinson consequently saw his paintings ”less as challenging art than as indifferent elements of a personal victimography”.
There is very little sense of that here. Good Girl, for example, depicts three girls from the waist down, sitting in chairs. They are clad in the sensible shoes and black socks of school uniforms, legs tucked neatly under their chairs, and hands clasped anxiously in their laps. It’s a scene of muted repression, but it’s about the girls in the painting, and all oppressed children like them, not about a few bandwagon moralists picking on an artist.
The series of Heads, where the features range from recognisably complete, to a malformed composite, to almost entirely abstract, can provoke the viewer to many interpretations.
The overriding one, though, will be of a Foucauldian control, and the evils of ethically driven ideologies that mould malleable minds and bodies to their own ends.
Mark Hipper’s Bad is on at Joao Ferreira Fine Art, 80 Hout Street, Cape Town, until April 24