Hannes Olivier

by Lester Adams

AltarAlter and AltarAlter II

Hannes Olivier’s sculptural installations provoke an absolute tension between his mass produced, machine-like aesthetic and the gentle and affecting nature of his intimate touch. A close examination of Olivier’s seemingly formalistic discourse reveals a fascination with humanness, biology, and the flesh. Kathryn Smith called his productive investigations full of concern "with the possibilities of the posthuman" (Bright Young Things, Art South Africa, Autumn 2003). I’d argue his concern lies in the posthuman’s impossibilities.

As a finalist on the MTN New Contemporaries in 2003, Olivier produced AltarAlter and AltarAlter II: slick examinations on how we define the parameters of humanness, and how the human condition shifts with time and extreme circumstances. The sculpture’s various components, such as moulded wax slabs, threaded bars, glass, plastic, hair, honey, light bulbs and milk, seem to float off the floor. Light plays a vital role in Olivier’s range, limiting and expanding the visual reading of the works. Energy saving light bulbs placed between the two levels of both sculptures lend an aura of unreality to the constructions, while having a delineative effect on the merging of organic and synthetic - the hair seems to be literally growing out of the wax. The boundaries between the two, between natural and unnatural, are never clear. The visual and conceptual lines blur, and its, his, and our limits are indefinable.

Hair grows out of wax, and petri dishes of glistening honey sit on thin films of rotting, clotted milk contained, once again, within the in/organic confines of wax. AltarAlter II’s internal relationships seem to be particularly ill-defined, perhaps provocatively improbable, implying the same in our own sense of vision and touch; the smell of putrefying milk in the space leads us to investigate its content, and closer inspection reveals a biotic nature. Our expectations are confounded, as the "clean" and mechanized aesthetic is destabilized entirely. The authenticity of the honey is questionable - organic or some hard jewel-like artificial?

AltarAlter and AltarAlter II

The twinned AlterAlter piece might well be AltarAlter II’s inverse. The mat of thousands of pins stuck into plastic and floating above a halo of lights could almost seem natural by its sheer abundance. Fur-like, but hard, the need to discover its true state through touch is overtly tempting. The reference to the biblical land of milk and honey and/or the post-apartheid proposed utopia is palpable. This sculpture should do something, yet it sits - quiescent, pristine and efficient-looking on the surface, while quietly rotting away. Olivier may be judging human endeavours harshly, but he handles his question with an elegance that is as melancholic as it is nostalgic for a future past, stillborn, or perhaps not yet imagined.

There’s a patent dystopic feeling to Olivier’s work. His precedent sits in literature, with works like George Orwell’s 1984, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Alan Moore’s recent V for Vendetta. These are supposed Utopias on the surface, but deeply flawed on a very intrinsic and human level. Anthony Burgess asked, in A Clockwork Orange:

" The attempt to impose upon man, a creature of growth and capable of sweetness, to ooze, juicily at the last round the bearded lips of God, to attempt to impose, I say, laws and conditions appropriate to a mechanical creation, against this I raise my sword-pen.’ And the titular question: "Whoever heard of a clockwork orange?"

Such a fleshly look at our mechanized culture seems particularly apt when looking at Olivier’s piece Unclaimed, indefinite, commissioned for the KKNK in 2005. A mobile monument (as the artist calls it), it is a crate that unfolds to reveal an intricate structure redolent of his process. Meticulous and labour-intensive, and so the use of No-Name brand energy-saving light bulbs is no mistake.More threaded bars, nuts, Perspex, granite, lights, honey and brass strips merge to form a construction inside the crate. Again, a machinic ton that looks as if it should function, but doesn’t. At odds with Baroque curling forms of copper above, the honey drips and oozes around Perspex walls, down onto the granite, through brass nozzles and udder-like tubes, seeming to imply a wastefulness that is in counterpoint with the beauty of the sculpture itself.

Unclaimed, Indefinite

Half Orwellian fantasy and half bio-mechanic nightmare, the sculpture’s brass strips spiral into - but don’t quite shape - human bones and form. A skeleton in a sepulchre perhaps, seen through smoky Perspex. It’s reminiscent of the illusionary sarcophagus and skeleton painted below Masaccio’s altarpiece Holy Trinity, seen through Phillip K. Dick’s scanner. It scans darkly, not clearly, to paraphrase. Olivier, claiming an interest in the rituals and mechanics that mediate death in society, built the piece as a mobile monument to those who die unremarkable deaths everyday. I would perhaps call it a substitute tomb to mark those deaths.

But the famous inscription from Masaccio’s painted sarcophagus also comes to mind," What you are, I once was; what I am, you will become". Human processes such as death cannot be contained or understood in the mechanical act of synthesis, and Olivier’s sculpture asks the question Anthony Burgess once did and it posits an answer - no, "laws and conditions appropriate to mechanical creations" (obituaries, gravestones i.e. the paraphernalia of death) cannot contain the human experience. Yet the poignancy lies in the attempt.

Unclaimed, Indefinite

Whether or not Olivier explores the mechanics of death, the impossibilities of being (post) human, the grotesque impact of technology on the body, or the failures of a dreamed Utopia, he does so with a beauty and sensitivity that belies the formalism and brutalism of his aesthetic.

Currently, Olivier has taken a step back to concentrate on research into the subject matter that drives his production. I, personally, hope to see more work from him very soon.

Unclaimed, Indefinite

Next feature is 19 May : Christo Doherty writes about Outlet, Abrie Fourie’s experimental art space for emerging artists, in Pretoria.