It’s good, proficient, but doesn’t particularly distinguish itself from all the crafty stuff that’s so hot in art and culture these days (the hipster knitters of Stitch ’n’ Bitch, the on-line craft marketplace Etsy). Much of this work has feminist underpinnings (think: re-examining women’s work), and Hlobo plays with gender roles — straight and gay — with all his stitching and handcraft.
His two drawings — big abstract doodles of wandering ribbon stitched into paper, with blobs of rubber or leather here and there — are pretty but slight. He’s more interesting for his sculpture, for his way with materials, than for his drawings or his concepts. It doesn’t help that the presentation feels cold. The new ICA building has been praised for the flexibility and adaptability of its galleries, but the museum consistently defaults to standard large emptyish overcast white cube rooms.
Those familiar with Hlobo’s work (you may have seen it in the 2004 group show “A Decade of Democracy: Witnessing South Africa” at Roxbury’s National Center for Afro-American Artists) might note that sexual references are played down here. In the past, his favorite motif has been a giant penis and testicles dressed in a big, flowing organza drag-queen skirt. The cover of the catalogue from his gallery show in Cape Town this spring featured an embroidered image of a penis with a line of pink ribbon curling away from the tip.
With that in mind, you could see a pair of linked black rubber pouches in his drawing Uzifake zatshon’ iinzipho as testicles. A black nozzle for inflating a tire in the middle of the drawing could be, as Hlobo has said of a past work, “a phallus.” (Is a nozzle ever just a nozzle?) And then there is the stomach sculpture’s large black “orifice.” Hmmm, which orifices connect to stomachs? And what does it mean when Mergel says that Hlobo describes the ribbons hanging inside the stomach sack as sperm? (Hlobo declined to chat with me about such things.)
As Hlobo sat in the hall outside the gallery, it seemed that his hat’s appendages were sensors or stethoscopes, hard-wiring vibes from the room into his brain. He sat for something like a half-hour or 45 minutes. His performance was ritualistic and tedious in that now traditional academic performance-arty way.
“When I’m performing, I view myself as a sculpture,” he tells me. “The performance becomes another dimension of you the character, which is me, as being a sculpture that has some soul in it, a soul that is similar to yours, a sculpture that can walk and decide.”
Hlobo’s past works have turned the “baggage” of South Africa’s apartheid into a hump built into the back of a coat or a sack to drag. (His symbols tend to be bluntly straightforward.) Here he was dressed in a black robe with a white ruffled collar that brought to mind European church vestments or judges’ robes or the garb of colonial-era settlers or missionaries or sleek contemporary fashion. It seemed European, whereas his headdress, with its bright stripes and braided appendages, seemed indigenously African. American viewers are inclined to look for signs of racial tension. And there was an itchy dynamic between the partying, mostly white VIPs and the regally attired black African artist sitting on the floor who, it seemed, was struggling to concentrate and mostly being ignored. Maybe that was just coincidence.
