Robert Hodgins at Goodman Gallery
by Michael Smith
I had met Robert Hodgins twice before, both times at Wits University. In 1997 he came around the undergrad studios selecting works for a PG Glass charity exhibition he was curating. Looking at my work, he remarked quite acerbically that after three months of traipsing through the art colleges of SA, he was entirely sick of seeing penises in artworks. Clive van den Berg, who was accompanying him for the day, quickly offered to take over the remainder of Hodgins' duties as curator. The second meeting was at the old Gertrude Posel Gallery: standing outside some or other show, necking Overmeer, all I wanted to do was talk about art, and all he wanted to do was point out Penny Siopis to me as a living exemplar of the word 'gorgeous'.
Both times I was struck by his approachability, and the ease with which he steered the conversation away from his own work. In March this year I had the privilege of meeting Hodgins a third time, when the Goodman Gallery arranged an informal interview for me. This time, as luck would have it, he was in the mood for talking art. Seated in the air-conditioned splendour of the Goodman's viewing/meeting room, Hodgins was nonetheless typically self-deprecating despite the virtual sell-out outside in the gallery, talking more about Phillip Guston and Rembrandt than himself. But when pressed, he spoke of his own work with the kind of passion one would expect from a man who describes his 53-year-long art career as a love affair with paint.
With this 2007 show, Hodgins characteristically balances his formal investigations into the properties of paint with an interest in the follies and endeavours of humankind. Some works, like The Battle of Cascina II, III and IV detour from the satire he is so fond of, back into the kind of territory he traversed in the 80's with seminal works like A Beast Slouches(1985). Taking their cue from this legendary battle from the pages of Italian history, Hodgins' images nonetheless become very direct comments on the absurdity of contemporary war and international aggression. This is borne out by more ambiguous works like Tourists in the wrong country and Welcome to our little black site. Initially puzzling, the latter turns out to be a reference to the US practice of transporting prisoners to so-called 'black sites' in Bulgaria in order to torture them, presumably in accordance with the demands of the 'war on terror'. As he so often does, Hodgins here explores the banality and awful humour inherent in such situations, his scratchy passages of paint grounding the scene very definitely in the abject. Across the space from this, a work titled Naked in Solitary provides the perfect counterpoint, an image of unexpected intimacy, a notion reinforced by its modest scale.
Elsewhere, the world of commerce and its attendant intrigues and maneouverings become grist for Hodgins' satirical mill. Works like My Office Staff, Before the Meeting and Director's meeting: 2pm: Old boardroom are all particularly topical in light of the runaway success of British comedian and writer Ricky Gervais' mockumentary series The Office, (recently dumbed-down into American for easier consumption). Something of that very British desire to deflate power and pomposity pervades these works, an impish irreverence that nonetheless allows for empathy with both victims and the aggressors.
I've always thought that one of the best things about Hodgins' work is its propensity for mocking the very sorts of people who come to his shows and buy his art. The price tags at this show certainly attest to the financial power of Hodgins' buying audience. Yet he mercilessly satirizes the rich, in works like What news on the Rialto, Antonio? and Man in a shiny suit. One particularly extravagantly titled work, Inmates: The Marquis, the chicken lady, an ex-director, Marie-Antoinette, reads like a surreal scene of incarceration from a socialist's secret fantasy diary. Yet when asked about the titles and their relation to the works, Hodgins claims he often titles his works once they're complete or near completion.
He states that he certainly never enters the studio with a definite idea of what it is he's going to paint that day. Instead he insists that, when painting, he thinks like a surfer, bobbing up and down while waiting for a good wave. While engaged with a work, its colour, the emerging relationships between the figures and also the embryonic environments happening around them will suggest a situation, which in turn suggests a title. Hodgins believes the true excitement of painting lies in the blank canvas, the endless possibilities that it holds for him when he begins. He insists on surprising himself continuously while painting: making the paint do things he's not used to, and allowing the image to take him in any number of directions.
While one could be forgiven for mistaking this for pure formalism, it is Hodgins' fascination with the variety of specimens that make up humanity that grounds his practice. His open-ended formal process seems to be the wellspring of his conceptual creativity and relevance, and allows for the fluidity of his social observations. A group of works in the gallery's central space reveals his experiments with automotive spray paint, with all its macho associations. The standout image amongst these is Yobbo II, a figure positively oozing stupid machismo. Here, medium merges productively with content, yet the oil paint he combines with the spray seems to have the last word, much, I would imagine, to the yobbo's disgust.
Elsewhere, Hodgins' perennial exploration of the formal properties of masking tape dovetails well with his considerations of war, torture and the control of images through which we learn about these. The photographs of and by Lynndie England, one of the American officers responsible for the Abu Ghraib torture and humiliation atrocities, come swiftly to mind. These photos, their more salacious bits blurred out by newspaper photo editing rooms, unintentionally spoke eloquently of the confused morality that frequently allows images of the dead through the filter but resists details of prisoners' genitalia. By using masking tape, Hodgins seems to be toying with notions of revealing and concealing, not for titillation's sake but to hide areas of the image in a mock re-enactment of the mechanics of censorship. In this sense Hodgins' work, easily dismissed as retro (no photos, no video), reveals itself to be fully alert to the politics of contemporary image circulation.
With this show Hodgins once again cements his position in the pantheon of SA contemporary art. Yet it is not with an overwhelming sense of his authority with which one emerges from the show. Rather, I found myself considering how powerful, how meaningful a life spent painting can turn out to be.
Opened: March 17
Closes: April 14
The Goodman Gallery
163 Jan Smuts Avenue, Parkwood
Tel: (011) 788 1113
Fax: (011) 788 9887
Email: goodman@iafrica.com
www.goodman-gallery.com
Hours: Tue - Fri 9.30am - 5.30pm, Sat 9.30am - 4pm
