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.
But the audience crowded into the hall to watch when Hlobo finally stood up, slowly stretched, pulled the suckers off the wall, and walked down the building’s stairs to the ground floor. As he descended, he moaned a bit and wept, and what had been dull felt for a moment like a passion play. What was upsetting him was obscure, but it seemed he could really use a hug. No one approached him. He lingered for a bit at the bottom of the stairs and then exited through a door into the museum’s back rooms.
